Sophie had no idea what to do in the face of such strong emotion. She’d always known that Harrison’s history with his parents was a strange one—as different from her own as possible. Her parents had reacted to her illness with an overzealous desire to protect her from anything and everything this world had to throw at her. From the sound of it, his had done the exact opposite. This woman, who looked so ordinary and kind, had packed her bags and run away—leaving not just her husband, but her son too. And she’d left them both broken.

A part of Sophie hated her.

Looking at Harrison’s face right now, she felt kind of sorry for his mother too. By leaving when she had, this woman had missed out on twenty-two years of this man’s love and respect, twenty-two years of his hardships and his joys.

And the worst part was, she had no idea what a loss that was.

“You will not talk to your mother that way, young man.” Wallace stepped forward, his expression mulish. “She’s here because I asked her to be. If you can’t be respectful, then maybe Sophie should take you somewhere to cool off.”

Sophie felt as though Harrison had every right to his anger, and she was about to say as much, but Wallace made that impossible.

“Minerva and I are taking a few boxes over to the apartment, Sophie,” he said. “If you could explain to him, help him understand…”

All of Harrison’s emotion—all of it justified, all of it simmering under his parents’ watchful stares—should have exploded at once. In all honesty, Sophie wanted it to. She’d worked so hard to get him to open up, spent so much time helping him realize that it was okay to wear your feelings on the outside, rather than bury them deep inside.

For him to close off, to rebuild those walls, to isolate himself in a cocoon of razor wire and loneliness… She’d do anything to stop that from happening again.

But it was too late. He turned to Sophie with a look so full of icy, disdainful cold that the chill permeated to her soul.

“You knew?”

“Yes, but it’s not what you think,” she explained.

“You knew.” Flatter this time. Broken.

“I wanted to tell you, Harrison. I—”

He turned away from her, and that was when she knew she was lost. She was no longer talking to Harrison, the myth, the hero, the man. She was talking to the little boy who’d been left all alone at what must have been the scariest moment in his life.