“My ex was . . . patronizing. More interested in what others thought than what I did. I second-guessed myself a lot around Neal, and it turned me into sort of a . . . pushover.” I exhaled a long breath. There, I’d said it. “I would end up deferring to him on everything.”
“I have a hard time seeing that,” Sebastian said, studying me as he took a bite of pasta.
“That’s because, you’ve mostly only seen me as . . .”
He tilted his head as he chewed and swallowed. “George,” he finished.
Maybe I should’ve been more surprised that he’d figured it out, but the difference between George and Georgina had to be obvious. “You asked earlier why Neal and I broke up. Another woman was only half the truth. He saw me as weak, and I realized when it came to him, I was.”
“Weak how?”
“I give up my seat on the subway. I let others have the last slice of cake at a party. He’d say mean things about me while we were dating, and I’d believe him.” I traded my fork for my wineglass. “He slandered me to our mutual friends assuming I wouldn’t put up a fight. Most of them don’t even speak to me anymore.”
He swatted at a fly hovering over a meatball. “Why didn’t you put up a fight?”
I shrugged. “I have Lu, Bruno, my family, and my work. Neal, he needs people around him who make him feel important. Honestly, if our friends believed what he told them, they weren’t friends anyway.”
“Georgina, you aren’t a pushover.” Sebastian smiled gently at me. “You’re kind.”
“That’s not all,” I said, fiddling with my bracelets. “I supported him so he could go back to school. And as soon as he’d graduated, he left me.” Would Sebastian see me differently after this? As someone without a backbone? I glanced at my hands. “I didn’t realize how bad I was until he came back a couple months later and talked me into forgiving him. At least for a few hours.”
He reached out and stilled my hands. “I’m still not convinced you’re anything other than a good person.”
“People don’t respect good,” I said. “They respect bitches.”
A slow smile spread across his face. “Don’t you hear how ridiculous that sounds?”
“Saying it out loud . . . maybe I do. But it’s what Luciano always says. He opened my eyes to the fact that I lost myself in that relationship.” I paused. “I don’t want to make that mistake again.”
“Then you have to date someone who doesn’t want to lose you, either.”
I didn’t want to lose Sebastian. Not when I’d finally found him. “Are you suggesting . . .?”
His eyes gleamed in the reflection of the movie. “I regret how I spoke to you the morning I met you. I was patronizing. I should’ve just told you the truth. That you’re beautiful.”
I glanced into my drink. I’d been called cute and pretty plenty in my life but rarely beautiful. Hearing it was like trying on a hat I loved but one I couldn’t get to fit quite right.
He lifted my chin with his knuckle. “You know that, don’t you?”
I bit my lip. “Beautiful is such a big word.”
“And yet it describes you so well.”
I believed Sebastian when he said it. I wished I hadn’t come to question that over my time with Neal. “That morning, when I flew off the handle? It wasn’t directed at you. I’d already been berating myself for not sticking up for Luciano, so when you called me out for exactly that, I responded out of hurt and guilt.”
He frowned. “I overreacted, Georgina. Would you believe me if I told you I had a good reason?”
I already knew why. I nodded. “You were on the phone with Justin, and you looked angry. I can only imagine it had to do with me, even though neither of us knew it in that moment.”
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and balled it up. “It wasn’t about work. Well, not entirely. It had more to do with my mom.”
“Your . . . mom?”
“She immigrated from Mexico when she was eighteen, poor, and pregnant. Made it all the way to the east coast on her own.”
“Wow.” I moved my plate away, adjusted the blanket over my lap, and hugged my knees to my chest. “She sounds resilient.”
“She had to be. When she arrived in Boston, she worked as a cleaner.”
I tried not to show my surprise. For a while now, he’d been hinting at a past that didn’t line up with what I’d read about him. Judging by Vance’s offer, Sebastian did very well for himself, and I’d uncovered that his sister owned a successful clothing store in Chestnut Hill. “Until when?”
“That was all Mom ever did, under-the-table jobs. Cleaning for fast food restaurants when I was really young, then a higher-end department store. She eventually worked her way up to five-star hotels and rich people’s homes.”
“That’s why you ‘summered’ on Nantucket.”
“Yeah. We lived in the maids’ quarters.”
“That’s so bourgeois,” I murmured.
“Wasn’t as bad as it sounds, to be honest. At least people weren’t rude to her the way they’d been at her other jobs, sometimes right in front of me.” He paused for a bite. “At the café, when that woman disrespected Luciano, it triggered something in me. Rudeness usually does, apparently.”
His comment came rushing back to me.
“You’ll call a stranger an asshole, but you can’t even stand up for your supposed friend?”
Everything clicked. “I didn’t defend him.”
“Yeah, so I took it out on you. Especially since that day in particular was . . . tough.”
“Because I was starting the job?”
“No.” He reached out and cleared some hair from my cheek. After a few moments, he said, “You’re just the kind of woman my mom wanted me to meet. I wish I could bring you home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Gone,” he said.
One word sent chills down my spine. My response came out as a strangled whisper. “Gone?”
“The day I met you was the first anniversary of her death.” He took his hand back.
The misshapen puzzle that was Sebastian’s personality finally clicked into place. Mom was the piece I’d been missing. She was why he’d stood up for Lu in the coffee shop and had called me out for not doing the same. “I’m . . . I’m so sorry, Sebastian. What happened?”
“She . . . when we were saying goodbye . . .” He paused, swallowing. “I made her a promise to be better. She wanted me to settle down and meet a nice girl, so I’ve been trying to make some changes.”
She was behind his sudden change in lifestyle too. I’d doubted the integrity of the exposé in the first place, but now the lack of research over things like the car accident and Sebastian’s background angered me. “The exposé must’ve been a huge setback,” I said.
“I’d never felt like such a disappointment.”
His reaction to my presence, and to being maligned in the press, made more sense now. “You’ve been under pressure since the day I met you.”
“And my mom was the one I went to for anything,” he said. “Always.”
“You’re not a disappointment,” I said. “How could you be? You’re kind, smart, generous, successful. If I of all people know that, your family definitely does.”
“Was that a compliment?”
“It was four. You called me beautiful.”
His expression fell. “You should know, my mom would’ve had my hide for how I’ve treated you. She didn’t raise me that way.”
“I understand so much better now.”
“Do you?” he asked. “I need you to know I’m not Neal.”
The vehemence with which Sebastian said it told me he comprehended the damage Neal had done. And that was enough to prove they were nothing alike. I nodded. “I know that.”
“A few minutes ago,” he said, “you said you forgave him, but not for long. What happened?”