Page 53 of Locke

I shake my head.“Nope.Just me.”

Livia scribbles, forehead scrunched, and I can see she’s perplexed about him.

So am I, Livia.So am I.

She looks back up, her words hopeful, expectation on her face.“What about your mother?”

“I think she likes me even less than my father does,” I say, and Livia’s jaw drops.

“I’m… I’m sorry…” She glances at her notes, as if there’s an answer in there to the million questions I can see flitting across her expression.Her gaze comes back to me.“What’s wrong with her?”

Livia’s gone out of professional mode.I can hear it in her tone, she dislikes my mom and she doesn’t know a thing about her.

I lift a shoulder.“She was twenty-two when she married my dad.He was forty-one.She was a trophy wife, I guess you’d say.I heard them arguing once that the only reason she got pregnant with me was because he needed an heir.”

“But… you said your dad hasn’t shown any interest in you, so did he really want an heir?”

“The irony, right?”I ask and then shake my head.I huff out a breath and spread my arms wide.“My only guess is that my dad will at some point try to draw me into the business side of things.Right now, he thinks I’m pursuing my ‘hobby’ of playing ice hockey.”

Livia’s brow furrows.“Like… he does know you make millions of dollars, right?Or that there’s only like seven hundred professional hockey players in North America?It’s a pretty specialized, elite career.”

I can’t help but smile at her, and yeah… there’s fondness in it for coming to my defense.“Careful, Livia.I might think you like me.”

“I do like you,” she says simply, but so matter-of-fact, I know she’s talking about surface-level stuff.She glances at her notes, taps her pen against her chin.“Okay… let’s get back into home life.What’s your mother like?”

I don’t have to think hard.She doesn’t have many layers, and I don’t say that with any bitterness.She’s just… not very dimensional.“She likes nice things.”I say it without inflection.“Charity galas, European travel, shopping.She’s very beautiful, very aware of it and uses it the way some people use a graduate degree.”

“How did she treat you growing up?”

I consider my childhood.“She wasn’t cruel.She was just… absent.She had her own life and I wasn’t the center of it.”

“Were you close to her at all?”

“No.”

“Did you want to be?”

The question surprisingly pokes at a place in me that I had sealed up long ago when I decided to give up on a traditional family.I take a breath and let it out slowly.“I was a kid, so of course I wanted my parents to notice me.I wanted to be at the center of their world.But that’s not a big revelation.That’s just biology.”

She holds my gaze.“It’s both.”

I say nothing.

“Tell me about holidays.”I can tell she knows this is a tender spot.Not from anything I’ve said, just from the way I mentioned them at Thanksgiving dinner.

“What about them?”

“What did they look like growing up?Did you have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner like we had at my parents’ house the other night?”

I look down at my hands.“Christmas was usually Aspen or St.Barts.Thanksgiving was wherever my mother decided she wanted to be that year.Sometimes the house in Nantucket, sometimes they went to Europe.”I pause, sifting through memories.“I was usually with a nanny.”

“Usually.”

“When they stayed in Boston, there were dinners.They were formal affairs with business associates, family friends, that kind of thing.”I can see the dining room in my head if I let myself—the long table, the candles, the quiet music in the background.“I was expected to be present and well-behaved and not require anything from anyone.”

Livia writes a longer note this time.I watch her pen move and wait.

“You said you were with the nanny.Did you have anyone you were close to?”