She bites her lip like she’s unsure. I won’t push. I know what it’s like to have shit in your life that feels worse to talk about than dealing with it in silence. Chase dragged me onto their roof half a dozen times before I said much more than, “I fucking hate him,” or some variation. But after a second, her teeth slide off her lip.

“If I tell you, can we pretend I didn’t?”

“Whatever you need, Remi.” I say it before I realize I mean it.

She takes one of her sad breaths. “My mom’s an addict. She’s used most of my life. Pills almost constantly, and then she cycles to heroin or meth or whatever else she can get her hands on. Her husband’s a complete piece of shit. He’s the chief of police, and yet he…” She trails off, and an even sadder smile appears for a second before the expression falls flat. “Everyone treats him like a king when his crown’s made of deceit.”

I clench my jaw to avoid telling her how sorry I am. I want to tell her she deserves better, like when she talked about losing her dad. Her home.

Then I remember something she said, and I push off the wall.

“My dad was an abusive prick to me when I was a kid.” I show her the baroque architecture as I start to walk, a new destination in mind. “Other than my wrist, he also fractured my orbital socket when I was ten. Those are the injuries I was treated for anyway. I got tackled playing soccer a while ago and needed X-rays. The doctor asked if I knew I’d had four healed rib fractures because I didn’t put it on the forms.”

“That’s terrible,” she says. “What about your mom?”

I laugh once. “He never touched her. He never needed to because she was subservient. My mom was perfectly happy being submissive, which means she didn’t dare intervene on my behalf.”

My screen darkens, Remi covering her lens. I’m about to complain when she reappears—her eye, gorgeous dark lashes, and part of a sculpted brow, that is. She has devastating eyes. Mossy irises, enough sorrow deepening them to make me want to take whatever hurts her away.

I am so over my head when it comes to Remi Saint. I can barely make out shapes on the surface anymore.

“We moved from Texas before he fucked up my wrist. He was a management consultant. His firm had transferred their headquarters to New York two years earlier, and he’d been bouncing between there and Texas, more frequently at the end. He still traveled every couple days but claimed it was easier staying in the tri-state area.”

“Is that why you don’t have much of an accent?” she asks.