“Oh, I’m mortal all right.” He slipped his phone into the pocket of his jeans and stepped away from the table. “And I guess we’d better get back to work.”

I nodded, but as I stood up to reach for my palette, he spoke again.

“Were your parents divorced, Morgan?” he asked.

I looked at my palette but didn’t pick it up. “No,” I said, raising my gaze to him again. He looked sincerely interested in my answer, blue eyes serious. “But they should have been.”

“That bad, huh?”

I let out a breath. “You have no idea.” I felt danger creeping in. A tightness in my throat that told me I was going to fall apart if I talked about the past. I was too tired. Too vulnerable. And yet, Oliver stood there with those kind blue eyes, and he looked so ready to listen. “My parents were alcoholics,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “You learned from the masters?”

I nodded. “Not just that. They … I was their only child and they didn’t know how to be parents. They sucked at it, frankly. They were madly, sloppily, drunkenly, disgustingly in love with each other and had nothing left over for—” Oh, shit. I was going to lose it.

“Hey,” he said, a worried expression on his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was such a touchy subject.”

I sat down again, the muscles in my legs starting to quiver. I was surprised I was telling him about my growing-up years. I rarely spoke to anyone about my family. “The only attention I ever got from them was negative attention,” I said. “’You want to be an artist? You don’t have the talent to be any good at it, and you’ll never make any money at it, and don’t come running to us when you’re broke and living on the street.’” I looked down at my hands where they were locked together in my lap, my knuckles white. “They’d forget to pick me up after school sometimes, and they’d have these screaming, crying fights with each other. When I was little, I tried to get between them. Get them to stop fighting. When I was older, I just hid in my room.” I shivered with the memory. Sometimes I thought one of them might kill the other. Sometimes I actually wished that would happen. “They’d have friends over and everyone would get puking drunk and they’d expect me to clean up after them,” I said. I remembered my mother calling to me from her bedroom, asking me in her fake sweet voice to bring her the basin. I couldn’t have been any older than Nathan. I pretended not to hear her, burying my head beneath my pillow. “My parents never told me they loved me, Oliver,” I said. “Not ever. Not once. You tell Nathan, don’t you?”

“Of course. All the time.”