Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71110 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71110 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
“Yes. It’s an honor given to people in certain intellectual disciplines for transformative works,” MaeBe replied.
She could talk way above his head, but he’d been around supersmart people long enough to translate. Dude or chick did something cool and got an award. “She told me he died in an accident.”
He knew he should wait for her to explain all this stuff, but MaeBe was right. Big Tag would want to know everything about someone walking into his building. He was not an optimistic guy. He’d often told Boomer that the glass was half empty and poisoned. And would probably explode. There was no one in the world he trusted more than Big Tag, but he didn’t like the idea of the boss knowing more than he did when it came to Daphne.
“Yes. Car accident. He was driving home late one night in icy conditions and lost control.” MaeBe said the words with no inflection, merely conveying the information.
Boomer’s brain went immediately to how hard that must have been on Daphne. How she would have had to answer the door in the middle of the night, see the police standing there and know her life had changed forever. She was so young to be a widow. “Does she have any family?”
“Her dad died of cancer before she got married. Mom moved to Florida. From her mom’s social media posts, you couldn’t tell she has a daughter. Never mentions her. No pics of Daphne or Lou. She calls herself a free spirit, unencumbered with worry or care.” MaeBe turned his way and frowned. “It’s her social media bio. I’m not kidding. It’s next-level bullshit. I think Daphne is on her own when it comes to her family. The trouble, I believe, is his family.”
“She was talking to her mother-in-law on the balcony. I listened in,” he admitted. “That’s how I knew about the debutante thing. There’s a class or something involved. She wanted Lou to take it. Is this something you went through?”
MaeBe snorted, an oddly delicate sound. “No. I was not that kind of money either. My dad made good bank, but not like that. There’s definitely some classes involved. A lot of those kids end up taking etiquette classes and dance classes. Stuff like that. It’s like eighteenth-century stuff for a very small group of elite families. The Carltons qualify. Lou would hate that.”
He agreed. He’d spent time with Lou, and she was a great kid. Super smart and chill. She’d played with the animals and done her homework while MaeBe had sat next to her at her computer. She’d offered to help with dinner. She wanted to be useful, wanted to please the people around her.
She was quirky and weird in the best of ways.
He didn’t know a lot about the world her grandparents moved in, but he was pretty sure there wasn’t a ton of room for quirky and weird.
But quirky and weird thrived at MT. McKay-Taggart was built on weird. It was funny because most people would think a group of ex-military people would be rigid. They would be wrong. When you trusted a dude to watch your back, you tended to not care that they also couldn’t stand the volume dial on a car radio to be on a prime number. Boomer hadn’t known what a prime number was or why Hutch didn’t like them, but he set the volume on an even number that was not two. He could do that for his buddy. The kids seemed to be the same way. They shrugged off their friends’ odd tendencies and moved on.
Unlike his own family. How many times had he been told he was too dumb to understand?
Daphne had married a smart guy.
“So you’ve told me a lot about her husband. What about her?” He had a feeling he was getting in deep when he wasn’t even sure what water he was in. Or rather he did and didn’t want to acknowledge it. Daphne was the only woman to catch his attention in a long time. He’d had girlfriends, women he spent time with, but none of them were his. None of them had wanted to build something with him.
When he sat outside and drank his two beers before he went to bed, he was honest with himself.
He wanted a family. It was great to be everyone’s friend, the goofy, fun uncle to all the kids. But he wanted to be something more.
“She graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in English. His undergraduate work was done at Rice University, so I’m going to assume they met in Houston. The timing is right,” MaeBe mused. “She graduated with honors and got married and took a teaching job at a high school. The husband went straight into graduate work, though it looks like she moved here to Dallas and he went to California. His grad degree is from Stanford. I think she lived with her in-laws for those years.”