Page 97 of Ghost Ribbon

He looked down at the food, then back at me, then out at the water. His throat moved as he swallowed. “You’re really sweet.”

The words landed strangely.

I had been called many things in my life, but never sweet.

I turned the word over in my mind like an unfamiliar object.

“I can’t be sweet.”

Marco looked at me, surprised.

“Sweet is someone nice. I can’t be nice. Niceness requires emotions, and I don’t have those.”

“Why do you think you don’t have emotions?”

The information was private. I had spent years keeping it sealed because it served no purpose to share it and because sharing it would invite questions I didn’t want to answer.

But Marco was looking at me the way he always looked at me, like he actually wanted to know, not to use it against me, but simply to understand.

“Because I was diagnosed.”

Marco’s eyes widened slightly.

“What I mean,” I continued, “is that I’ve been diagnosed. With certain conditions. By professionals. When I was younger.”

“With what?” he asked quietly.

I exhaled through my nose and looked out at the water for a moment before answering.

“Antisocial personality disorder. Sociopathic traits. Emotional detachment. Difficulty forming genuine connections. They threw around a few other labels when I was younger, but that’s the main list. I don’t feel things the way most people do. I never have.”

Marco tilted his head slightly, unfazed. Like I had just told him the weather instead of listing the reasons I was fundamentally broken.

“I don’t think you don’t have emotions,” he said.

I let out a short, humorless breath. “I don’t though. I can’t even feel connections the way normal people do. My parents died when I was thirteen. Most kids would’ve been devastated. Cried for weeks. I didn’t particularly feel anything. I remember sitting in the hospital and thinking about what that meant for the family name. For the inheritance. For me. Not about them.”

“I don’t know what your relationship with your parents was like, but you do feel things for people.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I don’t, Marco.”

He held my gaze with that stubborn certainty that he sometimes had.

“I think you love and care for Ilya and Dimitri,” he said.

I nearly laughed from the sheer absurdity of the statement. The idea that I, the person I had been informed I was at age ten and re-informed of every year since, could love anyone was so fundamentally incompatible with my understanding of myself that I didn’t know how to process it as a serious suggestion.

“No. They’re duty to me.”

“Duty,” Marco repeated, like he was tasting the word.

“Yes.”

He tilted his head the other way, thinking, and then said, “When you grabbed Ilya that one time, I saw real regret flash through your eyes. You felt bad for doing it. I saw it. It was only for a second, but it was there. You let go of him faster than you grabbed him.”