The Boy She Tried to Throw Out

Chapter 02 - The Woman In Cream

Marissa had imagined seeing Julian again so many times that reality felt badly staged.

In some versions, he apologized immediately. In others, he denied knowing her. Sometimes she threw the old letters at his feet. Sometimes she said nothing and let Theo’s face ask every question she had carried for eight years.

She never imagined kneeling on a ballroom floor while their son cried against her shoulder.

Julian moved through the circle slowly.

The guests stepped aside. Celeste did not.

“Julian, this woman forced her way in,” she said. “She is trying to humiliate us.”

Marissa looked up.

Us.

Celeste always spoke in ownership.

Julian’s eyes stayed fixed on Marissa. “How did you get here?”

The question hurt more than she expected.

“An invitation.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know.”

Celeste laughed sharply. “There was no invitation.”

Theo lifted his wet face from Marissa’s shoulder. He looked at Julian with the fierce concentration children use when matching reality to an old photograph.

Marissa had kept one picture hidden in a kitchen drawer: Julian at twenty-seven, laughing beside a piano, his hand resting over hers. Theo found it when he was six. Since then, he had asked about the man with the same dark eyes.

Now that man stood ten feet away.

Theo whispered, “Mom?”

Julian heard the fear in his voice.

He knelt.

Celeste reached for his arm. “Don’t.”

Julian pulled away.

He lowered himself beside Marissa and Theo, careful not to touch either of them without permission.

“What is your name?” he asked the boy.

“Theo.”

Julian swallowed.

His father’s name had been Theodore.

Marissa saw the recognition and hated herself for wanting it.