“Dad…” This was ridiculous; her mother had always done that. “Mom has always been a flirt, you know that. Frankly, I thought you kinda liked it.”

She’d watched her father watch her mother work a crowd, and even at a young age, she’d understood that he enjoyed her power over a room as much as she did.

“Of course,” he said dismissively. “She is, and I do like it. But the problem is she used to also flirt with me like that, but now…we’re both traveling so much and we’re like ships passing in the night and everything feels like we’re on autopilot. We used to talk about art and music and books and life, and we used to make love for hours when she was creating because it fed the passion inside her. We might be in separate bedrooms, but she’d crawl into my bed in the wee small hours and climb on top and the sex was wild and frantic and incredible like… animals, you know?”

Her father calmly sipped his beer while Suzanne wondered if it was too late to cut her ears off and if the feed shop sold brain bleach and what kind of dose it would take to permanently erase this conversation.

Good god almighty, what was wrong with him?

“And then she’d just…” He stared into his beer. “Climb off and go back to her work.”

Oh good lord—make him stop. This was too much information.

“And now it’s like we’re just…roommates. And she’s not been happy about me representing a more diverse range of art, either. That’s creating quite a bit of friction.”

Albie had expanded his artist base the last few years to include digital artists working in a variety of different mediums. He’d even taken on a controversial graffiti artist.

He sighed. “She has such a narrow definition of art and thinks real artists will stop wanting me to represent them, which hasn’t been the case.”

Yes, her mother was a complete art snob and quite scathing of things she did not consider worthy of an artistic cannon. Suzanne cringed at the thought of her mom laying eyes on what she’d painted while she’d been here. “Does she know that’s how you feel?” Suzanne asked.

“I have tried to have conversations with her, but she’s so busy at the moment, working all the time, traveling to different exhibitions and guest lecturing, and she’s working on several pieces for a major project.”