Page 84 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“This is the house,” I say, pointing to a manor with a wall covered in climbing roses. “This is where you grew up.”
“I see.”
I study his face to see if he feels anything.
But this doesn’t seem to bring out strong emotion. Not the way other things have.
He takes out another photo. It’s of him. He’s a small boy but I can see it in his eyes. He doesn’t have that spark of mischief or joy you see in children’s eyes. That grimness is there already. That hard, implacable nature.
I take the photo from him, and he moves on, but I can’t. I stare at the small boy in the photograph, and I wonder how he became the man sitting beside me. The man whose body I know better than my own.
All of this has made me question what I know. About who we are, about who we can be.
I don’t know everything that happened to him; neither does he. But it doesn’t make him less real. And I wonder if that doesn’t make my love for him less real. Just because I don’t know every single thing about him.
I don’t know every brick that went into building him, but I do know the wall. It’s the wall that’s the problem, because if he could open up and give me some of himself, then the details might not matter so much. But I have to be included in the life he’s living now, complicated by the fact that he doesn’t seem to know what that life is. He did, though, before all of this.
He takes another photo out of the box. “My father,” he says, his jaw going rigid.
“You look like him,” I say.
I sense a shudder go through his body. “I suppose I do.”
“You didn’t want to grow up to be like your father.”
He shakes his head, very slowly. “I did want to be like him. I didn’t think I had a choice.”
“Are you remembering?”
“I…”
He closes his eyes, and then opens them again, staring resolutely at the photograph. “I loved my father. Very much. I… It is not normal for a parent to raise their hand to their child.”
“No,” I say softly.
“I think I know that now. I think I know that a man should not strike his wife or his children. But I didn’t. I didn’t, because I didn’t go to school. I had tutors at home. I did everything at that house.” He takes the photo of the house back from where he has said it. “Yes, I didn’t leave there. Not for a very long time. So what my father said was love, it was love. What he said was for my own good was for my own good.”
I’m sitting there with a growing sense of horror dawning inside of me. I feel a deep sense of pain. A deep sense of sadness emanating from him. Or perhaps that’s just me. My grief. My resolute sadness over where this is going. Because I already know how it ends. His father killed his mother, so of course his admiration of his father couldn’t have extended beyond that.
“Everything that my father touched turned to gold. He was a man of extraordinary control and a clear way of doing everything. Yes. I wanted to be like him. I very badly did. Because my father had everything. And he was the best father.”
“How?”
“He was strong. He was strong and I idolized him for that. Because he told me that it was what I had to be. He told me it was what I had to want. So you see, it is very easy to manipulate someone. When they are all you know. When you tell them that they are what you want to be. I didn’t know any better.”
“Surely after he killed your mother…”
He clutches his head like he has a headache. I touch him, and he pulls away.
He is quiet for a long moment, and I don’t say anything. My heart is pounding so hard.
“She deserved it,” he says. “She deserved it, he told me that she did. Anyone who defies him meets their end. He runs everything as he must to keep us safe. To keep so many people safe. The business is everything. If it collapses so do many lives. And she… She was going to ruin everything.”
He looks up at me, his ice-colored eyes haunted. “My mother deserved to die.”
I watch his face as the words leave his mouth. I watch the dawning realization that deep inside, he believed this.
I don’t know for how long. I don’t know why.
