Page 5 of Good at Being Alive
I turn back to where he still stands, staring at me with horror in his eyes. Probably wondering why I just molested him graveside, under the circumstances. I can’t explain it myself.
“My father married her mom when we were small,” I whisper, my voice breaking again.
My father, who will go into the ground beside her.
“Rebecca,” he says hoarsely. He’s suddenly pale beneath his tan. “I’m Theo Porter. Your father’s partner.”
Some bizarre noise hurls its way out of my lungs. A laugh, a sob, a gasp—some combination of the three. “Bullshit.”
The Henchman is supposed to be old.Older,anyway. Sure, I’ve never seen him but I’ve imagined him for years. He’s supposed to be smaller, slightly effeminate, uptight. Benedict Cumberbatch without the height. Hugh Grant playing someone who has a stick up his ass and never smiles. Not square jawed and slightly rugged. Not graced with the kind of broad shoulders that could hoist a girl high overhead without effort.
His voice isn’t right either. The Henchman, when we spoke,was all polite disdain, clipped and disappointed. This guy’s voice is low and a little rough, as if his words have traveled deep from the center of his chest before exiting.
“You don’t look like Hugh Grant.”
He blinks. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t look like Hugh Grant or Benedict Cumberbatch.”
He frowns. “Someone suggested I did?”
“Or Michael Caine. Or Tom Hiddleston.”
“You’re just naming British actors.”
Oh god, Bex. You kissed the Henchman. What the hell were you thinking?
I stare at my boots, now coated in frost. “You’re just not what I thought,” I tell him. “But I tried to get you to smoke, among other things, so I guess I’mexactlywhat you thought.”
I kissed him. Fuck. It’s going to make things really awkward when he marries Bronwyn. I’ll probably get drunk and make an inappropriate joke about his erection during my toast.
I cover my face and start to cry again.
His hand moves to my shoulder. “You need to get back. It’s going to be okay. Just get through the day.”
I nod and allow myself to be led to the church’s entrance in silence. For every terrible thing Theo Porter ever believed about me…I just proved myself a thousand times worse.
“For God’s sake, Rebecca,” says Jill when we reach the aunts. “Just get inside. I can’t believe you ran off like that.”
I can’t quite meet Theo’s eye as I climb the stairs alone. I’ve got the rest of my life to be ashamed of the way I just behaved with him. It can wait.
There are other things to deal with today—worse things.
Someone holds the heavy door open and I step inside the church’s musty foyer, my boots echoing against the marble floor. In the distance, three coffins wait beside the altar. I turn away, not ready, and face the family photo propped on an easel.
My dad and Jessie and Bronwyn, blond and pink-cheeked, looking as if they belong together, while I stand out like a sore thumb, entirely different from all of them. Bronwyn spent her entire life saying my looks were a curse because they made life too easy forme.
She didn’t realize I’d have given it all up to fit in, to feel like I belonged.
They’ve left me behind, but who could blame them?
Look at how I turned out.
Theo
Bloody hell.
Never, not for a single moment, did I think the woman standing beside me and asking me to try heroin was Rebecca, the wayward daughter. I knew Rick and Jessie well. I’d met Bronwyn. All three of them fair and blond and solid. So, no, it never occurred to me that the tiny, coltlike girl beside me at that grave—dark brown hair, olive skin—would turn out to be the daughter I’d never met.
