The Ex (The Boss 4)

“All right, Sophie.” Her voice was suddenly weary. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Wait!” I caught her before she hung up, but then, I didn’t know what to say. I settled on, “Are you okay?”

“Well, most of my things are gone. Thank god your baby stuff is in Mom’s attic. But my clothes, my makeup, my hair pieces, sewing stuff, all of it’s gone.”

I loved that my mom listed items of importance exactly as I would have. There’s a reason I went into fashion journalism.

“We can get you new stuff, Mom,” I promised. “Just come out here, please.”

“I will. Besides, your grandma will drive me nuts after two days.” Her laugh was tired and defeated. “I love you, Sophie. I’ll see you soon.”

After I hung up, I reached over Neil to turn the light off. I thought he was asleep, until he said, “Are you all right?”

I pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around them. “I think I am? I’m kind of in shock, right now.”

“Of course you are. It was your childhood home.” He rolled onto his back to gaze up at me in the darkness. “I can’t imagine what that must be like, to know it’s gone.”

“Yeah.” Now that he’d said that, and now that I thought about it, it hit me. “Oh my god. It’s just…gone.”

He sat up and leaned against the headboard, delicately preparing to comfort me for my total meltdown.

I leaned against him with my head on his chest. “You’re not being subtle, you know?”

“I cannot give you subtlety. Only hugs.” His arms wrapped around me. I never felt quite as comfortable, safe, or happy as I did in his arms. But that didn’t stop the ache in my chest.

“Home” was gone. I hadn’t lived there for eight years, but it was my home. My mom had been so proud of the trailer when we’d first moved out of my grandparents’ house. I’d thought we were rich, because we were living on our own. Now that I actually was rich, I hadn’t changed that opinion. The trailer had been worth more to me than I’d realized.

I sniffled and curled closer to Neil, and he stroked my hair against my back. Softly, he asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Just hold me,” I murmured against his skin.

“All night,” he vowed. “Or at least until my arms fall asleep.”

I wanted to cry. Really just cry my heart out. Maybe it was because I was so relieved that Mom was safe, but I couldn’t. I just lay there, tired from being woken up and exhausted by the shock, listening to Neil’s deep, slow breathing beneath my ear, and circling my fingertips along his side.

“I hope it doesn’t bother you to hear it, but I have never truly recognized how hard some people’s lives are. Look at your mother’s position. She’s just lost everything. What if she didn’t have the resources a wealthy daughter could provide?”

“Then…she would live with my grandma. Or be homeless.” Had he never thought about this stuff before? “And what do you mean, you never realized how hard people’s lives were? You give to charities and stuff for starving children and land mine victims and clean water initiatives. Did you just go, ‘oh, that sounds like a good way to get rid of some money?’ That doesn’t seem like you.”

He adjusted his position a little, and I felt his discomfort in the shift of his body. “Well, it’s far easier to conceive of the hardships of people in developing nations. Going without vaccines or proper hospit

als, clean water, things of that nature. I suppose I’ve never thought of what happens to the poor in America.”

I sat up and stared down at him through the darkness, my utter disbelief forming a knot of tears in my throat. “They keep on going, or they die, Neil.”

His indrawn breath was like a call to action. I could hear his resolve in the silence. When Neil is wrong about something, most of the time he’ll admit it. Unless it’s about something he believes I said or he never said, and we’re actively arguing about it.

“You would consider yourself as having grown up poor, then?” he asked.

“Not really. I mean, we didn’t have a lot of things. But we weren’t homeless. And we had food. Not always good food, but we had food.”

“And that’s the standard?” He reached for something on his nightstand. The soft glow of his iPad gave the air a bluish tint.

“What are you doing?” I asked, lying back down. Whatever small burst of crisis-induced adrenaline had been keeping me awake was wearing off fast. I had a feeling that the wheels in his head had just kicked into overdrive, or some other kind of car metaphor he might have used. “You’re not Googling ‘poor people’, are you?”

“Not at all.” But he set the iPad swiftly aside.

Whatever. If Neil wanted to get involved in charity closer to home, who was I to argue? Besides, if he focused on a new cause, he might stress less about Stephen’s book. It was a win-win.