Chapter 28: The Seat He Wouldn't Take

Ivo's POV

I caught my brother at his car.

He was trying to get his key into the lock, and his hands would not hold still.

"Hugh."

"Go away."

"Put the keys down."

"I said go away!"

He turned on me with his back against the door.

His suit jacket hung off one shoulder, and his glasses had slid crooked.

In thirty years I had never once seen my brother look untidy.

"Are you happy?" he said.

"No."

"You got everything. You got her, and the old man, and the board."

"I didn't get the board."

"He took my money for you."

"He took it from you," I said. "I never asked."

Hugh laughed, high and wet.

"You know what the funny thing is? I let you have the library."

I stood very still.

"I saw you walk down that table with your flyer. I saw her look at you. She went pink all the way to her ears."

"I know she did."

"So I made sure she said no. And you went home and cried in your mother's kitchen, and I slept like a baby."

"I didn't cry."

"You were eighteen, Ivo."

"I was twenty-three."

"You looked eighteen." He wiped his mouth. "She was mine from that day. I picked her out of a room, and you couldn't stand it."

I had thought about this moment for ten years.

In my head I hit him.

I hit him on the library steps, and in the airport, and at my mother's funeral.

Now I stood in a car park in a gray wind, and I felt only an enormous tiredness.

"She was never yours," I said. "She was a person you kept in a drawer."

"She stayed."

"She stayed because you made her think she'd be nothing without you."

"She would be!"

"She wrote nine books while you were out with Tansy. She wrote that grant. She walked into your gala in a red dress and read out your lie."

"She's a hobbyist."

"She is better at every single thing you ever pretended to do."

His face crumpled.

I did not enjoy it.

I want that on the record. I had waited a decade to see it, and it was ugly, and I looked away.

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