thrilled we agree on something,” Thor said. “I’ll send the usual email outlining our continued progress in our respective areas. Duty calls, gentlemen. Next week?”
“Next week,” Charlie said with that same smile that the longer Margot looked at it, the less she thought was all that nice. “Every fucking week.”
“Aloha, bitches,” Jason said merrily.
And then there was silence when the screen went dark.
Margot stayed where she was. She was frowning toward the windows closest to her, shifting pieces around in her head, and it took her a moment to notice when Thor came to stand behind the couch. Next to her, but separated by the back of the couch.
And yet even though he had moved closer, it was as if he was on the other end of one of those video cameras. He looked as remote as if he’d carved himself from ice.
He made her feel shivery inside in a way that had nothing to do with sex, but felt a lot more as if she might tip over into tears at any moment. That closed-down look on his face made her hurt.
“Are you okay?” she asked quietly.
He looked startled, but only for a moment. Then it was straight back to ice and stone, shuttered and forbidding.
“It is a stipulation of the contracts we signed to take over the hotels our father left us that we hold these pointless conversations.” He didn’t sound like the man who had spent a long night weaving spells around Margot with his words alone. He sounded almost stilted. The way he had while he’d talked on his call. “Weekly.”
“Does it stipulate that you have to be best friends on all those calls?” Margot pushed herself up, until she could cross her legs beneath her and sit up straight. “Either way, they didn’t sound particularly awful.”
“They are not awful. They are perfectly fine, I suppose, for full-grown men I am apparently related to and must now interact with as if we have some kind of history.” Thor shook his head, but it was more as if he was shaking something off. “I do not understand brothers.”
Margot thought that what he couldn’t understand was connection, however new and strange, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t think it was the sort of thing he could hear at the moment. And probably not from her as she sat there, still sure she could taste that napkin in her mouth. “Have you met them in person?”
“The will was read in Germany.” And once Thor said it, Margot remembered that she’d read that, too. The article had shown pictures of a law firm in Hamburg and paparazzi shots of men in dark coats and sunglasses. It was odd to think that she now knew what one of those dark-coated men tasted like. “The only thing more awkward than finding out that your father, who you never met and never wanted to meet, left you property you didn’t want after his death is discovering that he did the same to others.”
Margot wanted to touch him. She settled for her hands in fists in the duvet and a smile. “Do you think maybe he wanted all of you to band together and become some kind of family after he was gone?”
Thor laughed, though it was a far hollower sound than the laughter they’d heard from his half brothers. And it seemed to lodge between Margot’s ribs. “He would have to have been delusional to imagine such a thing. But then, I think it is fairly clear that he was exactly that or he wouldn’t have used his will to perform paternal acts in absentia. So who knows? Maybe this is what he thinks a family is.”
“Thor...”
He was still dressed in that glorious dark suit of his and she considered it for a moment. He hadn’t been wearing a suit yesterday. In her time in Iceland, come to that, she hadn’t seen very many suits at all. They didn’t go very well with the weather, for one thing. Which made her wonder why, exactly, Thor had chosen to throw one on this morning when he’d known he had to have this phone call with the half brothers he hardly knew.
She thought she could guess.
The idea that Thor, the strongest and most fascinating man she’d ever met, should feel the need to put on his armor before dealing with his family made a hot, prickling sensation threaten the backs of her eyes. Margot didn’t dare let a single drop of moisture fall, but she had to blink a little too quickly to make sure.
And she gripped her duvet tighter.
“They say that a man is not truly a man until he teaches his son the sagas,” Thor told her, after a long, taut silence. “I suppose it is another way of talking about fatherhood. But the man who taught me the sagas was my stepfather. Ragnar raised me. He taught me to read. He took care of my mother and me. He was a good man, always. In all my memories of childhood, I cannot recall a single time he drank too much or raised his voice. He was a big, kind, gentle man.”
Margot was afraid to ask the next question. She had to force it out. “Is he...?”
“He died years ago, when I was twenty-five. He got a cough that wouldn’t go away, and within three months, he was dead.”
Margot searched his face and saw nothing. Only stone and ice and something harder still in the blue depths of his gaze.
“I’m so sorry,” she said anyway.
“I am not telling you this story for your sympathy,” Thor said with a kind of quiet menace that felt a lot like a kick to the gut, but Margot refused to show him that he’d landed a hit. “I always knew who my father was and it was not Daniel St. George. It was never Daniel St. George. I knew that name. I would have given anything not to know that name, but it was unavoidable. I hated him. But I never, not once, considered him my father.”
Margot couldn’t read him. There was a voice inside her that tasted a lot like panic, and it kept urging her to stop this. To go. To retreat from the tension, take a shower, pretend she couldn’t tell that Thor was going through something.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “It makes sense to hate the man for leaving you.”
Thor’s mouth curved, cold and harsh. “You have to acknowledge a child in order to leave it, I think. Daniel St. George never condescended to do any such thing. I think I told you that my mother married Ragnar before I was born. But she never got over Daniel St. George. Never.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his suit trousers, as if he didn’t know what he meant to do with them. A kind of bitterness hung over him, like a cloud. She could see it in his eyes and in the twist of his lips. Worse, she could feel it, chilling her skin even though she still sat with the duvet wrapped around her.
“My mother is the one who drinks too much, Professor. And when she does, she cries. She becomes maudlin and bemoans all she has lost. Some might suggest that she lost nothing, but she never got over the man who left her without a second thought all those years ago. She spent the whole of her marriage to my stepfather nursing her broken heart. It was not something she bothered to hide. Her epic, eternal sadness, her inability to love Ragnar back, her grief—this was the third presence in our house. There was no point in making a child of their own because they not only had me, they had their very own ghost.”
Margot thought of her own chilly upbringing. The pressure of her father’s expectations. The way her mother had bent and contorted and still always proved that she was no match for the man she’d married. Margot’s father had long since given up pretending he had anything but contempt for his spouse.
