“That Caroline was in the UK for oil drilling.”
He pushed his hair back on his head, and it fell forward over his eyes. “Did you tell her anything about you?”
“No.”
“Good. Keep—”
“Actually...”
“Fuck.”
“She said the senator always seemed like a good guy and I... might have implied that he wasn’t.”
He nodded, his hair brushing the side of his face. “How much did you pay her?”
I licked my lips, searching for some kind of plausible lie.
“Poppy?”
“My sister paid her,” I said. “That’s... how I got in touch with Eden. My sister knows her.”
I waited to see if he would buy my lie, and after a long minute he nodded. “All right. Can you promise me you won’t be seeing Eden Morelli again?”
“Are you really trying to keep me safe?” I asked.
“Well.” He was going to make a joke; I could hear it in his tone. “You don’t make it easy—”
“Ronan.”
He sighed and stepped back towards me like he was a magnet. My entire body was metal shavings I was drawn so hard to him.
“Why do you stay here?” he asked, brushing a damp hair off my forehead.
“In New York?”
“This house. Don’t you have any place else to go?”
I thought of the condo in Cabo. The house in the south of France. I’d never been to either of them, but I knew about them.
“This is my home,” I said. Like he would care that I’d done all these renovations. That I’d built a shower and helped tile the kitchen. That I’d put some blood and sweat and more tears than I’d ever thought possible into this place and didn’t that somehow make it mine?
My home had always been in Bishop’s Landing. I didn’t know a life off this hilltop.
“It’s a shit home,” he said.
“How would you know?” I asked. I didn’t know if I was brave or stupid. “Have you ever had a home?”
His eyes glittered, and his silence wasn’t an answer. This game we’d played tonight left me with a thousand more questions about him, while I kept stripping off pieces of myself to hand him.
“I just want a home,” I whispered, sounding pathetic to my own ears.
“Homes are for old women. You should go,” he said. “Take your sister and sit on a beach in Mexico or wherever girls like you sit on beaches.”
“Girls like me?”
“You should drink and fuck tennis coaches and sit around fulfilling your useless—”
“Why are you being cruel?”