Chapter Seventeen #4
“That you need to grow. The fuck. Up.” Lloyd rolled his eyes before glaring darkly at him.
“This is ridiculous. You’re spiraling because we’re trying to hand you a real purpose on a silver platter.
This is the firm your mother and I inherited—the firm your great-grandfather built from nothing and your grandfather turned into a roaring empire. ”
“You want me to give up my art?”
“You’re not twenty anymore, Teddy,” his uncle growled. “You need to think seriously about your future.”
“It’s the only thing that makes me feel alive.” Theo’s voice shook as he spoke. “You might as well ask me to give up breathing.”
His uncle shook his head and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. The light danced off the silver threaded through the fading burnished gold of his hair, and he suddenly looked haggard.
“We’ve all got to make sacrifices in life.
Your mother has worked so hard—and so have I.
Do you know what she’s done for you? Do you know what she’s sacrificed to send you to the best schools?
To make sure you got the best of everything, the best tutors, the best trainers, the best therapists, the best—”
“This is more than a sacrifice. It’s—”
“Do you have any idea how damaging it could be for us, for our family, if anyone finds out what you actually do?” Lloyd roared. “You’ll make us a laughingstock! A joke! The Redmonds, reduced to whatever this is.” He gestured at Theo’s leather jacket.
“What’s that supposed to mean?!” Theo bellowed back. “What are you getting at? Why do I have to sit here and justify—”
“You’re a lazy, entitled fuckup, Theodore. I know how much you hate your family—and how much you hate our legacy. You could have been something. You could have been someone. And instead, you’ve chosen this.”
The ringing in Theo’s ears grew louder.
It was that word.
Legacy.
The Redmond legacy.
He’d grown up knowing all about their family’s legacy, and the expectations that came with it.
His family was old and storied, and most—if not all—of his ancestors bore the mantle of that legacy with pride.
Lawyers, politicians, public servants, the lot of them.
They wore their generational wealth like a badge of honor, carrying it with aplomb and wielding it like a weapon they used to cut through red tape.
His mother’s family was one of her greatest assets.
But it was Theo’s greatest burden.
The weight of it, the expectations the family name and money carried, their history, their past, all of it was suffocating.
He was drowning in the depths of it, swallowed by an ocean of a name that didn’t fit, that was somehow both too small and too large, that wasn’t actually his, that squeezed and restricted him until his skin smarted, until his bones cracked, until his lungs screamed and his heart stuttered.
Everything about the Redmond legacy made him want to peel his flesh off, tear it into shreds away from his sinew and his skeleton so he could step out of it and cast it aside, finally unburdened and finally free.
Suffocating.
The past was suffocating.
And the legacy it left had been slowly killing him.
It must’ve started at birth, whatever deficiency this was.
But ever since he first became aware that there was something wrong with him because of who his father was, because his mother had fallen in love with and got knocked up by her charming mechanic with the crooked smile instead of some guy from some other legacy family with too many houses strewn along the Eastern Seaboard, he’d been feeling it, that sensation in his chest.
He wasn’t sure when he realized that he was different, that he didn’t fit, that the edges of his particular puzzle piece hadn’t been made for the cutout he was being wedged into, but it was early.
He was young. Maybe it started when he cried himself to sleep at night after the divorce, screaming for a mother who was rarely there, for a father who was exiled, only to be consoled by a nanny instead—and a bunch of different ones at that.
Then he really knew it when he left Yale.
He was the first male born into the Redmond line since they’d been in America to actively reject the university and choose another instead, purposefully eschewing the legacy so many of his forebears had paved the way for previously.
He had the talent, the grades, the lineage.
It was the best law school in the country, one of the best in the world, recruiters had come after him like crazy—and he’d still ripped the silver spoon straight out of his mouth and chucked it across the room like it was nothing.
It was a slap in the face to his family.
And his uncle had taken it personally.
But Theo was the son of a mechanic. What was he supposed to do?
Keep showing up with grease stains under his nails from summers spent repairing cars in an unair-conditioned shop in Brooklyn and expect to get along with other kids who spent theirs with staff fanning them and feeding them grapes on private yachts in the Maldives?
Please.
This fucking legacy.
It was bullshit.
All of it.
Lloyd jabbed his finger into the middle of Theo’s chest. “What have you actually done with your life, huh? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He punctuated each word with another jab.
“You have all the potential in the world. You have the brains, you have the background, the ability, the tenacity, and most of all the privilege, the extreme privilege of everything your mother and my mother worked so hard to give you, and yet you have done absolutely nothing with it.”
The ringing sound turned into a rushing noise.
It was getting louder in Theo’s ears.
It grew—
—with
—each
—and
—every
—jab.
“You’ve squandered it all.” Lloyd jutted his chin up at Theo and sneered.
“You had your path laid out for you at Yale, the path for your whole entire life, and you flunked out in your first year. And here’s the thing: I talked to your professors.
They said you were absolutely brilliant in class.
Your answers were impeccable. You knew the material, you argued the cases, you did everything—and yet you somehow managed to fail every single one of your exams.”
Spit flew from his mouth and landed cold on Theo’s cheek.
“Imagine that: a prodigy, tanking his own future and throwing away his family name, just so he could give himself an out to go fuck around with colored glass instead. What a goddamn waste.”
Lloyd shoved at Theo’s shoulder, and he stumbled backward as he tried to regain his footing.
“Do you know how you’ve hurt my sister? Do you know how you’ve tarnished our name?
You’re your mother’s greatest failure. You’re the shame of the Redmond legacy, the biggest disappointment this family has seen in generations, and if you keep wasting time on your precious art, acting just as lazy as your father—”
BAM.
Theo didn’t even know he’d raised his fist.
But all of a sudden, all he saw was red.
Lightning crackled across his knuckles and through his arm.
And Lloyd fell to the ground in a heap.
“Don’t you ever talk about my dad again.”
“THEODORE!” his mom yelled as his uncle turned over and wiped blood away from his nose with a groan. As soon as he did, more gushed down his face. “What are you doing?!”
Theo stared at his hand and flexed his fingers over his palm. “Something I should have done years ago,” he muttered, almost to himself.
“You broke my nose!” Lloyd spat bitterly as he turned to look at his sister. “You see? You see what I was telling you? The boy has always been too volatile!”
“Volatile?” Theo huffed. “I always just thought I was creative.” A strange cold sensation ran through his body. All feeling had been replaced with an oddly liberating numbness—and once it spread, he had no desire to stop it.
He could see everything clearly now.
All of it.
He gazed slowly back over at his mother. “You didn’t stop him. You didn’t interrupt. You really think I’m a failure, don’t you? I’m a disappointment. I’m a mistake.”
For some reason, voicing that truth didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would.
“Because you called me all the way here to ask me to give up the one thing that makes me feel the most me, the one thing I love and I’m good at, the thing that makes me feel alive, and you were asking me to do it for you. Not for my benefit: for yours.”
Eleanor’s eyes went wide. “No, Teddy, that’s not what I was thinking. I want you with me. I was asking you to join me, to take an interest in the family bus—”
“IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT YOU!” His mother flinched. “You have never had my best interests at heart, never! I have always been your single greatest mistake!”
“That’s not true!” Eleanor’s face turned red. She stepped over and jutted her chin up at her son. “I love you! I gave you the best I could. I put you in the best schools, gave you the best education, sent you to the best therapists, hired the best tutors—”
“You don’t fucking get it! That’s not love.
None of that was for me, it was all for you!
” Theo sneered down at her. “You did that to assuage your guilt for never being home because you were a partner at your firm, and for divorcing Dad, and then you put me in therapy because you couldn’t understand why I was so fucking angry all the time and why I needed art so goddamn much. It wasn’t for me, it was for you.
“Do you have any idea what you’re asking of me?
I TRIED TO KILL MYSELF WHEN I WAS AT YALE!
” Theo screamed, all sense of propriety gone now.
He could control the words as much as he could control his volume.
“I hated every fucking second of being at that suffocating school, trying to live up to your precious legacy, trying to shove myself into a box that wasn’t made for me—trying to make myself smaller so I would actually fit in your shoes for once.
Well, guess what, Mother: I don’t fucking fit. I never have.