Page 211 of The Lies We Play

He snorts. “They only invited me to events where it mattered to have the son.”

“Like?”

“Foundation photographs. Christmas cards. Bradford’s funeral.”

I look at him.

He says it without flinching.

That is how I know it hurt.

He went to Yale.

He chose Yale instead of Harvard or Princeton specifically because his mother had loved New Haven. He took two classes a semester in the art history department because his mother had taken him to the Beinecke when he was eleven.

He majored in finance because Cornelius asked him to, and minored in poli-sci and philosophy.

“After law school, I was going to leave,” he tells me.

His voice shifts.

It is no longer the mother story. It is closer to the voice he uses when he is naming a future he has not allowed himself to touch for too long.

“My plan was to take the New York bar and apply to a public interest fellowship. The one Reggie Ellsworth runs. You have not met him, but Liv has. She met him at a thing in March.”

“I remember her mentioning him.”

“He’s one of the few men in that world I trust.”

That means more from Halston than most people’s oaths.

“I was going to do two years there,” he says. “Then I was going to suggest we move to a small apartment in Brooklyn—or a townhome if I had the money.”

My eyes stay on his face.

Suggest we move.

“I was going to be a man who had grown up with too much money and left it on the table.”

He says was.

Not am.

Not still.

But, was.

I don't breathe for a second.

I had not known this.

He had planned a life away from the Saint Claires. Away from the boardrooms. Away from the silver napkin rings and family lawyers and Constance standing at meetings using his dead mother like a key.

A small apartment in Brooklyn.

Public interest work.

Liv’s books on every surface.