Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 250(@200wpm)___ 200(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 250(@200wpm)___ 200(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
He nodded and met my eyes. “Narcissists are good at that. Putting on a good face for the public, ya know. Really, she just saw the opportunity to have genuine stars as sons. They were young enough she could mold them just the way she wanted, she thought. The mistakes she’d made with me—not getting me in the biz early enough, not pushing hard enough—she could fix with them. Plus, as she told me repeatedly, they were cuter than I ever was. They had real potential.”
“Jesus,” I breathed out, putting a hand on Milo’s arm. He shrugged like it didn’t mean anything, but I could tell it had hurt him, his mother’s rejection in favor of the twins.
“I’m so sorry. I’ve met those kinds of stage moms. They’re the worst. What’d your dad say about it?”
He laughed harshly. “Dad? He divorced her and split not long after. He’d never wanted kids in the first place, much less a pair of four-year-old twins that weren’t his.”
“Jesus,” I said again.
“Yeah.” Milo looked out at the piazza, a faraway look in his eyes.
“Why are you telling me all this, Milo?”
He turned his head back to me, eyes focusing in. “’Cause it fucked both of them up in different ways when it comes to family. Being wanted, but not for themselves. Then with the kid thing…” He looked towards my stomach.
“What? What about the kid thing?”
He hesitated, then came out with it. “Leander swore he’d never have kids, ’cause he always said he’d never fuck up any kids the way we were fucked up.”
I breathed out heavily. Well, damn. “Then why the hell was he even playing around with the day-after pill? If he feels like that?”
Milo looked at me like it was obvious. “Because it was you. Before, he was always religious about using condoms with every other woman. Except for you.” He looked out again. “And then there’s Janus.”
I frowned. “What about Janus?”
Dear Lord, I wasn’t sure how much more bad news I could handle. One of the potential fathers of my unborn child didn’t want kids. Awesome. And the other?
“Well, he’s the exact opposite,” Milo said. “He always wanted family, in a major way. Since Leander and me were all he had, he stuck with us like glue. But we both knew he always wanted more. Kids, a wife, white picket fence, the whole shebang. It’s always been a hole in his life.”
I swallowed hard and blinked.
“You’re everything Janus has always wanted and Leander knows it. It’s freaking him out in addition to everything else.”
“None of that is my fault!” I said.
Milo turned to me again, compassion on his face. “I know, but it’s still the reality of the situation.”
I threw my head back again, my brain spinning with all this new information. Then I sat up straight again and looked at Milo. “What about you? What do you want in all this? You just keep talking about Leander and Janus.”
Milo looked surprised. “Oh, me? I’m fine. I just go along with whatever—”
But I shook my head and held up a hand. “That’s bullshit. You just sat here and dissected the twins’ motives. You know them better than anyone because you’ve devoted your whole life to them. Why? You said it yourself. You didn’t even like them in the beginning.”
“Well, that was then,” Milo said, brushing me off. “We had a five-year age difference. It changed as we grew up.”
I frowned. There was a lot he was still sweeping under the rug. He’d said his mom was a narcissist but had left it at that. There had to be a ton more to it.
In my business, I’d met plenty of narcissists, and avoided them whenever I came into contact with one. You started to recognize the signals after a while, though sometimes it took time because they were often so good at appearing like your best friend at first. Love-bombing, I’d learned was the technical term.
But once they had you under their spell, it all changed. They took you for granted and then the abuse started. They could cut you down and make you feel about as big as an ant in three seconds flat. Only those closest to them saw the real version of them. Everyone else got to see the lovable, charismatic side.
I should know. I’d grown up with one.
My father.
Everyone in our congregation loved him. Each Sunday of my whole life, I’d been told what a lucky girl I was to have him as a dad.
What a lucky, lucky girl.
The couple times I’d tried to tell anyone about the rages he could go into, the way he shouted verbal abuse at me and my mother, how he broke us down every day until we were nothing…
Well, they’d told my father on me, sure I was “acting out.” And for a lot of my life I thought they were right—that I was the one in the wrong. The bad girl. The one who deserved all the harsh punishments he meted out.