“My brother-in-law is pissed that I took over my company,” I offered. “He’s mad that he now has to find another job, since he refuses to do anything lower than company CEO. Neither I nor my family is willing to give up our positions to give him that. So… he’s pissed. And my sister is pissed because he’s pissed and making her life miserable.”
“He sounds like a lovely person.” She paused. “Are you sure he’s not related to the Deverauxs?”
I flashed her a grin. “I’ve heard about your family. Diana has a lot to say about them, and none of it is good.”
Other than what I’d witnessed firsthand the few times she’d given me a glimpse into her world, I tried to be very understanding and stay out of her business.
That was until the bar the other night when I heard her brother accuse her of stealing her own money.
Needless to say, I’d contacted a good friend. One that had followed me down here upon learning that I would be out of jail soon. One that I had a suspicion was the same Folsom that the girls had mentioned six months ago that they may hire in the future.
I mean, how many freakin’ Folsoms were in this world? And, if there were more than a handful, how many were in the same state and city?
Likely zero.
Folsom hadn’t gotten anything back yet on the Deveraux clan, but I didn’t doubt that she’d find it. And do with it what she needed to make Matilda’s life better.
“Diana is biased since she’s my best friend,” she admitted. “I think that it’s not very fair to listen to her view of my family. She’s always going to be protective of me.”
I closed my eyes and sealed my mouth tightly shut so the words “they’re probably pieces of shit” didn’t come out of my mouth.
Instead, I counted to ten in my head.
Then started to tell her about my own family.
“Once upon a time, I was a young kid that really, really wanted to do something different with his life,” I said to her. “The only problem was, a LaFayette did not do menial, blue-collar work. They did white-collar work. They did their work from behind a desk, with their brains. They did not, ever, get their hands dirty.” I paused. “So, me wanting to start a business that had me working with my hands? That was so far out of the picture for me, at least according to my family, that it was comical.”
“But…” she said, sensing the but.
“But,” I continued. “I wanted it bad. I wanted it so bad that I branched out on my own, took a loan from one of our biggest competitors, and pissed my family off so completely that it took them years to get over it.”
“It sounds like that’s not a bad thing,” she admitted. “If they didn’t want your dream that bad that they’d take it out on you? Really, I’m not seeing the big deal.”
I smiled. “It was a big deal because my father didn’t like it when he had to save face. He had to make it look like he wanted that for me. And he despised that I went about and did it without him. He hated that I was a capable man.
“Even worse, the guy that I borrowed the money from—and paid back to him within a year, might I add, with interest—was the man that my mother once loved and left because my father had more money.”
“Wow,” she sighed. “This sounds almost as good as my family story.”
I smiled. “Yours seems to surprise me more the further I hear of it. So, though we have our share of drama, we’re all good now. I love them. They love me. They’re happy for me. But it took them a while to get back to that place. Nothing ever came of it like yours did.”
She grumbled something, which had me opening my eyes and glancing over at her.
She was staring hard down at her hands.
“All I ever wanted was to be loved,” she whispered. “My father loves me. I know it. He’ll drop anything and everything when it comes to me, which pisses my stepmother off to no end. Because she doesn’t know who he’d choose if he was made to choose. Sometimes, I can see the question burning on the tip of her tongue, just waiting to be released. But then she calls the question back, because she’s not sure of the answer. And anything my stepmom does is calculated as fuck.”
“Maybe one day you’ll get to meet my family, and I’ll get to meet yours, and we can compare notes,” I offered.
She looked over at me and smiled.
It went straight to a place inside of me that I didn’t like. One that made me feel vulnerable and question everything I thought I knew about myself.