The Evolution of Man (The Trust Fund Duet 2)

“It’s not safe here,” he says flatly.

“Then why don’t you leave?”

He turns away from me, and for a moment I think I’m going to see the back of him. It feels momentous, that his broad shoulders might walk away from me one last time. I don’t know what my life would be like without his hard disdain. Without his censure. I long for the freedom as much as I ache for him to stay. One step. Two. He makes it six feet away before he stops.

I need him to hold me. To tell me everything will be okay.

“There’s no way I can convince you to go?” He asks the question without looking at me.

He does worry about me, in that terrible white-knight kind of way. Terrible because it’s how he keeps his distance. Like I’m someone he has to save instead of a woman he can hold. There’s no life raft in this particular ocean, though. There’s no saving me.

“Why did you come here?” I ask instead of answering.

Then he does face me. “I always come here. I can’t seem to stop. It’s the reason I bought this building, the reason why I planned to revitalize the west side.”

“If you love the carving, why did you want to tear it down?”

A slight smile. “It’s a bad habit of mine, destroying the things I love.”

The word love coming from his mouth falls on me like a ton of bricks. The library walls falling on top of me couldn’t hurt this much. My lungs burn from lack of air. Christopher Bardot has never loved anything. He’s controlled and owned and protected—but never loved. Has he? He never cared about anything beyond ambition. Beyond money.

“Please,” he murmurs, gentle as if he can sense my turmoil.

And Christopher Bardot has definitely never begged.

“I’m done for today,” I say, my voice uneven. It’s hard to breathe in the face of this new side of him, still protective, still controlling, but somehow more real. Less like a stylized carving. More like a man who hurts and feels and wants. It makes me want to wrap myself in his arms, but what if he turns back into stone?

I met Avery at Smith College, where she was the quintessential good student and I had a reputation as a wild child. It was easier to explain how I didn’t know about a universal family tradition because I had been stuck in an Austrian boarding school. Easier to act unaffected by the infamy of my dysfunctional trust fund by pretending to obsess over parties and frat boys and reckless stunts.

It would be easier to really be as self-absorbed as people thought I was, but I felt every whisper, every criticism, every cruel smile directed at me as if my skin were made of paper.

I pull my leased BMW into the wide circular drive as the electronic gates swing open. Around back there’s an eight-car garage with empty bays for Rolls-Royces and Aston Martins, the kind of cars befitting a house like this. I would have bought them, too, if Mom cared anything for cars.

Or if she could go anywhere.

“Helloooo,” I call into the wide marble-floor foyer, hearing my voice echo back to me.

There’s only silence.

I didn’t feel guilty about the incident with that statue and the campus police. Those kinds of things were hobbies. Or maybe defense mechanisms. I didn’t have the paralyzing doubt and self-recrimination I have now, when I dread coming home every evening.

Upstairs I find my mother napping even though it’s already almost bedtime. She looks peaceful on her side, her hands resting one on top of the other. There would be no sign that she was unwell to someone who didn’t know her. The main difference is her weight, something she’s fought to keep down her entire life. Now she can’t eat enough to even maintain her weight.

That’s what the cancer does, takes all the nutrients away so her own cells starve.

It’s her eyes that look the most different. There are dark shadows underneath her lashes. I can see the blue-green veins in her eyelids. They look sunken, especially when she opens them and smiles.

“There you are,” she says, her voice rusty with sleep.

I brush her hair back, the way she did when I was a little girl. “Here I am. And I brought takeout.”

She scrunches her nose. That’s another side effect of the cancer. She doesn’t even want to eat, when really her body needs even more calories. “I ate a big lunch.”

“Well, you can have a little fried rice. And some sweet and sour chicken.”

A disapproving sound. “There’s some quinoa and kale salad in the fridge.”

“I also got some fried wontons,” I say in a singsong voice because no one can resist fried wontons—not even my mother. She’s into whole grains and organic fruit, but they weren’t enough to save her. Not even the herbalist or the acupuncture made a dent in the cancer.