Page 97 of Gravity of Love
“Ha, ha, ha.” She swatted his forearm. “Have you talked to her about it…whateveritis?”
He didn’t answer.
“I knew it!” she concluded with a loud clap. “Why are men so stupid?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.” She took a deep breath in through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. “Look, I don’t know what is going on, but Idoknow thatyou,my dear brother, live in your head. You are always thinking a gazillion?—”
“That’s not a number.”
“Semantics,” she waved him off.
It was inaccurate, not semantics, but he figured she wouldn’t appreciate him pointing that out.
She continued, plowing ahead, “—a gazillion steps ahead, which is great when it’s justyou. But this isn’t just you. You can’t decide things for her.”
“I didn’t I?—”
She held up her hand. “If you haven’t spoken to her, thenyes, you have. You’ve decided for her.” With that declaration, Poppy grabbed her purse from the console, opened the door, and climbed out. “Oh, and don’t worry about giving me a ride home, I’ve got that covered.”
Before he could respond, she shut the door and headed down the path, following the signs to the wedding.
Liam lingered in the car after Poppy left, her perfume hung in the cabin, a sweet-floral haze that didn’t match the tension she’d left behind. He watched her stride away, her coat flaring open like a matador’s cape, then disappear into the small, mingling crowd on the gravel path. A silver Navigator pulled into a spot behind him. Four men who looked vaguely familiar, most likely colleagues of his dad, exited laughing loudly. He waited, letting the cold from the window glass creep into his shirt sleeve, until the parking lot was nearly silent again.
With a sigh of resignation, he reached into the back seat for the jacket he’d picked up from the Gunnarson Haberdasherythat morning and climbed out. The temperature had dropped now that the sun was setting. In the distance he heard a group of kids, their laughter drifting up the path and being muffled by the vibrant, passionate violin notes.
Liam set his shoulders and walked up the incline toward the lodge where, twenty feet overhead, bulbs on a wire cast golden halos over the congregation of evening gowns and tuxedos. In his sight was the lobby, with its wall of glass facing the valley, glowing like an aquarium. He second-guessed every step—he hated staged, Instagrammable destination weddings in general, and having this be his dad’s added another level of abhorrence—but he’d promised Cora and wouldn’t forgive himself if he was a no-show. He pressed on, following the sign for “Groom’s Party Holding,” which ledto a private lounge as he’d expected. He traveled down a dirt path behind the lodge, shielded from the main event.
As he reached for the door at his destination, a shadowy figure on the back deck caught his eye. He had to do a double take before he recognized it was his father. Gone was the steely, self-satisfied surgeon—in his place was a man pacing back and forth with a death grip on his phone, the other clenching and unclenching at his side, breath coming hard enough to fog the air in front of him. The suit he wore looked too tight in the shoulders, and the collar was already wilted. For a moment, Liam wondered if maybe Cora had finally come to her senses and was a no-show but then remembered AJ sending him a text of Cora in her dress at the venue just thirty minutes earlier. Was it his dad who was considering making a break for it?
Liam stood at the corner of the lodge, watching, until the older man turned abruptly and spotted him. Their eyes met, and for a moment both stood frozen. Then his father pocketed the phone with a jerk, straightened, and tried to muster his usual expression of mild irritation, but the mask didn’t fit.Liam walked over, hands in pockets, pretending he hadn’t just witnessed his father’s existential crisis/meltdown in real time.
“Is the deck not to your taste?” Liam asked, nodding toward the panoramic view behind them. “Too much nature?”
His father huffed out a laugh, but it sounded more like a cough. “I needed a minute. Being indoors is…” He searched for the word. “Suffocating.”
They stood together, staring into the dark stretch of unlit trees below. Wind combed through the pine needles overhead, rattling the branches.
After a long pause, his dad said, “I wasn’t sure you’d be here.”
“I promised Cora,” Liam replied solemnly, implying the truth, that he was only here for Cora not for his dad.
His dad’s eyes shimmered with emotion. Not in the telegraphed, performative way of someone trying to leverage sympathy. The gloss that covered his stare was genuine, and it clearly made him uncomfortable. He immediately cast his gaze to the ground. Liam had always considered his dad’s face an impenetrable fortress, the kind that kept secrets locked in towers and threw away the key for sport. Now, for the first time, that shield had cracks. First a tightening at the corners of his eyes, then a subtle tremor in his jaw.
When his old man finally looked up, it was only to avoid his son’s eyes. He stared at a spot somewhere beyond the edge of the railing, blinking at the blur of the tree line. For a moment, Liam wondered if the world had rotated ninety degrees without him noticing and he was standing on a vertical cliff, peering down into some oblivion. Or maybe he’d stepped intoThe Twilight Zone, because he watched tears slide down his dad’s cheeks. Not a flood, but a slow, reluctant leak, the kind that eroded stone over decades. His father didn’t wipe them away. He allowed them to fall, one, two, three, splattering onto the toeof his bespoke Berluti patent leather Oxfords, leaving tiny, dark sunbursts as evidence of their existence.
Liam’s brain didn’t know how to process what he was witnessing. The list of things he’d seen in his nearly thirty-four years of life, seven spent in the trauma bays of an ER and four in war zones, was encyclopedic in its horror, but this was no less staggering. He’d observed his dad incise and peel the dura mater away from the interior of a skull and without flinching. He’d watched him eviscerate a bourbon decanter in under three minutes at a Christmas party, then drive home as if the glass were filled with tap water. But this—this was new territory. Unmapped, impossible.
He searched for something sarcastic or irreverent to say, just to shake the universe back into alignment, when his father cleared his throat and started speaking in a voice that was both raw and unfamiliar.
“You know, I never thought I’d get another shot at this. At love, family… any of it.” Edward Tristan Sterling the third’s voice cracked with pain as he glanced back down at his feet. “Cora’s a good woman. Too good for me.”
“You’re right. She is.” If he’d assumed he was going to get an argument, he greatly overestimated his son’s opinion of him as a man.
His dad didn’t seem surprised or hurt by Liam’s response. He didn’t deflect or offer a cutting remark to balance the scales once again. He just nodded along, eyes still fixed on the ground, letting the silence pool between them.
Liam searched for irony, for a trapdoor of cynicism to fall through, but there was only the faint sound of violin music in the wind and the persistent, electric tension of a moment that refused to be cheapened.
