Spoiler Alert (Spoiler Alert #1)(74)

He couldn’t quite decipher his mother’s tone. Was she hurt he hadn’t informed them of his proximity or visited in the past month? Aggrieved that her former colleague had been gifted an opportunity for gloating? Or was she merely stating facts?

“Call us at your earliest convenience, should you find yourself so able.”

Well, that was definitely sarcasm.

After he’d heard it all, he deleted the message, as he probably should have done when his instincts first urged him that way, and pushed the phone away a few inches. Then another few inches, more, more, until he couldn’t reach farther across the table, and April laid a light, warm hand on his forearm.

“Marcus?” So low. So sweet.

Would she still be so sweet if she knew everything?

He shook his head, shook the thought away.

Their hidden history on the Lavineas server didn’t matter, not right now. This part of himself he could show her. This story he could tell, even though it gathered and thickened in his throat in a way that made speaking difficult.

Really, the outlines of the situation were so simple. It was stupid to struggle so hard for words. “I, uh, I hadn’t told my parents I was in the area, but one of the teachers at the school where they used to work saw an article about us and informed my mom. She wants me to call her back.”

She’d want him to visit, because he always had to come to them.

From the doorway to their kitchen, he’d make himself small and watch them dance.

“Do you want to call her back?” April’s voice was absolutely neutral.

She’d taken off her glasses at some point, scooted her chair closer, and those brown eyes were soft and patient. Full of affection and trust he didn’t deserve.

“They—” He cleared his throat. “They hate the show. Did I tell you that?”

Silently, she shook her head.

“They’ve hated all my roles, I think. But especially Aeneas, because they both taught classical languages, and they feel like the show slaughtered Virgil’s story.” His hand wasn’t entirely steady when he reached for another sip of water. “Which it did, of course, but I still didn’t—”

Her knees were abutting his now, nudging softly. A reminder of her closeness.

His voice cracked. “I d-didn’t expect them to write op-ed articles about the ‘pernicious influence’ of the show, and how it ‘promotes a disastrous misunderstanding of foundational mythology.’”

That particular piece had run in the nation’s most popular newspaper, and after his computer had read the text aloud to him, he’d regretted his choice. If he’d read it himself, in print, maybe he could have pretended he’d gotten it wrong somehow. Mixed up the letters. Misunderstood, as he so often did.

In his parents’ articles, they never mentioned their son or his role on the show. Not once. But of course, the names made the connection obvious, and he could have predicted the public reaction, the tittering about how such learned parents had birthed a son like him.

“I thought it would be different. As an adult, I mean. I thought being around them would feel different someday. Once I had a career and friends and something outside them. But it never does, and April—” He turned to her, and her eyes were glassy again, for him, and he couldn’t bear it but couldn’t stop himself, either. “April, I’m so fucking angry every time I see them.”

When she took his hand, the desperate force of his grip must have hurt.

She didn’t complain. Didn’t move away.

“I hate it. Hate it,” he spat. “How they despise all my roles, and how they wrote those articles and will probably write more, and how they looked at me like I was dumb and lazy and—and worthless, even though I swear to God, I tried. I tried and tried, as hard as I could, and I was just a fucking kid, and they were teachers. How could they not have known?”

Later, he’d wondered whether their prep school discouraged kids with special needs, or whether his parents were just too stubborn to admit that their child, the product of their genes and guidance, could prove flawed in such a fundamental way. Whether the shame of it had blindfolded them, plunging them all into darkness.

It didn’t matter, though. Not really.

Either way, they’d never seen him for what he was, what he could become, what he had become, and what he would never, ever be.

They still didn’t.

His cheeks were wet, and she was blotting them with a napkin, and he was too lost to feel embarrassed. “I know they love me, and I love them, but I don’t know how to forgive them.”

A lifetime’s worth of hurt spilled over them both, and she waited patiently and held his hand securely in hers and dried his tears, and if he were a warrior like the man he’d portrayed for so long, he’d have pledged his fealty, his life, to her right then. Laid his sword at her feet, relieved.

She was easing him upward, guiding him to the couch, and tucking him into her body once they were seated. His head on her shoulder, his arms as tight around her as he could make them without hurting her, his face buried in her rose-scented neck.

“I don’t know how to forgive them,” he repeated, whispering into that soft, secret hollow.

Her fingers were combing through his hair, stroking him. He closed his eyes.

When he didn’t speak for a while, she laid her cheek on his head. “We can talk about that, if you want, or I can simply listen. Or we can stay like this, if silence would help.”