The Weight of Love

Chapter 1

Between her knees, beneath the edge of the table, Lila's phone buzzed, and then buzzed again.

She squeezed her fork, knuckles whitening, meatloaf sitting on the plate in front of her barely touched. It was a Friday night. Finals had ended that week, and prom was the coming Monday. Graduation looming, she'd gotten her first breath of freedom at the end of a hard-fought senior year. Her friends, the source of her phone's vibrations, were going on a year-end shopping spree.

She should have been with them. They'd had these plans for months.

But when her mother had sprung the "family" dinner on her a half hour before her stepdad got home from work, she hadn't had the heart to tell them she wouldn't be able to make it, knowing they'd only argue with her. They probably would've shown up on the street in Emily's Jeep, honking the horn before giving up and driving off into the night. You're 18, they would have texted. An adult. Your life, your choices.

But that wasn't really true, because they didn't know her stepfather like she did. She was eighteen, but that only made life more dangerous for her. While she lived under Robert's roof, she had to obey his rules, or risk getting kicked out. All the more so now that she wouldn't even be in school next year, but taking a gap year while trying to persuade her mother to let her go to art school. How could her friends, with their normal, stable families, understand all of that? She wasn't interested in laying it out to them for the umpteenth time, and definitely not over text.

She looked down at her plate, resisting the urge to check her phone. No matter how surreptitious she thought she was being, Robert always noticed, and he always acted quickly, confiscating the device to the lock box of shame high on a shelf in his upstairs study. She would have excused herself to the bathroom, but she'd already done that twice during the meal so far, and her mother was probably keeping count. So she choked down a bite of meatloaf instead. It was dry. Her mother's cooking was always dry, not to mention tasteless.

At least these Friday night "family" dinners had become more interesting as of late, thanks to her stepfather's most recent choice of dinner guest. He had developed a habit of inviting coworkers to the table, which made it impossible for Lila to weasel out even with the best of excuses. He seemed to want to show off the sort of men and occasional woman he rubbed shoulders with in the high-powered world of finance. It was a show of force for Lila and her mother Miranda, to dine with him and his coworkers straight from the office, still in their smart business clothing, and to hear them talk about their expensive houses and fat paychecks and trophy wives and stays in five star hotels on business trips.

Lila thought they were all bores, every last one -- except this one, this most recent catch of Robert's. Pulled back to the present, she glanced across the table at him. His name was Cameron, but he'd been introduced to her as Mr. Winthrop, and even after the four or five dinnertime encounters they'd shared, he remained Mr. Winthrop to her.

Compared to the rest of Robert's coworkers, Mr. Winthrop had a few redeeming qualities. For one, she had listened to him and her stepfather talk enough shop to determine that he was smarter than Robert and all the other bores who had graced that table, at least by her humble estimation.

It wasn't his intelligence that had originally drawn her attention, though. Inadvertent heat crept across her cheeks as his stormy eyes seemed to flick momentarily in her direction. She ducked her head, crushing a piece of meatloaf beneath the tines of her fork. It wasn't like her to nurture a secret, inappropriate infatuation for an older man. She wasn't the type of girl to swoon, despite being a hopeless romantic on the inside. She'd never even had a real crush on a boy her age. Sure, Mr. Winthrop was painfully good looking, not to mention younger than Robert and most of the others he'd invited over. But he was still much too old for her.