Page 13 of Her Impossible Boss's Baby

But why not? She was leaving.

“Like what?”

“You’re so particular. About everything. And certain. Though, your certainty is usually founded.”

“You’ve worked with me for five years, you only now wonder?”

“I’m leaving. Maybe that’s what made me wonder.”

There was a clock ticking on this, she realized. She would never understand herself or what her life had been for the past five years if she couldn’t understand him. It suddenly felt imperative.

“I don’t know how to answer the question. I have always been myself. Have you always had your average capacity for memory?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have always been this way.”

“So have I. Though not always interested in medicine. My mother died when I was ten. That changed the course of my life.”

He said it matter-of-factly, but there was something underlying his tone. An intensity that she recognized. It came up with certain medical discoveries. Certain things.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She had never really thought about Luca’s parents. She had always thought he had sprung fully formed from the ground a full-grown man.

It was impossible to imagine him as a child.

And now she was imagining him as a child in pain.

“I decided that I wanted to find out what could be done. To prevent other people dying in the way that she did. I wanted to fix it. Of course, you cannot fix something like that. Not with all the medical discoveries in the world. I might be able to prevent other people from dying, but I cannot bring her back. It is an obvious thing. But one I did not fully think of as a child. I was driven, I think to try and restore what I’d lost.” He lifted a shoulder. “Now I’m simply driven.”

She knew many of his other employees thought of him as emotionless. But she’d always known that wasn’t true. He had a great many emotions surrounding what he wanted and needed in his environment. He could be exacting, short-tempered and ill-humored. All of which were emotions.

What she hadn’t witnessed were...softer emotions.

But now she was forced to imagine him as a small boy. Missing his mother. Believing, on some level, that he could use his incredible brain to bring her back.

“What did you...think about before then?” she asked.

“Toy cars,” he said.

“Toy cars?”

“All cars. But I had a large collection of toys.”

“Did your parents buy them for you?”

“My mother did. My father thought it was strange. To collect something so obsessively and know all of the details about it.” His lips curved upward. Almost a smile and yet somehow not. “It is strange. He was correct.”

She felt bound up by the sympathy blooming inside of her. Looking at his stark, handsome face as he recounted loss, pain.

The feeling of being different. An outsider.

She knew that all too well. She’d always felt outside. She hadn’t been able to invite friends to her house because her parents had been so volatile and unpredictable. She’d made a mask of ease that she wore with the outside world. She’d learned to fashion herself into a very nice facsimile of someone who was having a normal experience of life and growing up. She’d learned to close herself off, to protect herself from her mother’s fractious insults and her father’s explosions of verbal rage where he’d been willing to say anything, no matter how cruel, to get a response.

Like reducing the people around him to tears was the ultimate source of power.

She’d become a placid shell. Watching, always taking in information from the scene around her, never ever giving the deep, real parts of herself away because that would mean exposing herself to pain.

She’d thought it would arm her against Luca, she supposed. But the problem was, he wasn’t manipulative.

Luca could only ever be Luca.

---