"You have something?—"
She flushed. "Oh. Whoops. I'm a little clumsy when I eat."
I'd heard what her family said about her over the years. Had she internalized their comments? "Is that true though?"
She shrugged. "I guess so.”
I thought about that for a few seconds and then said, "I wonder if we're a product of our family dynamics. If we don't form our personalities based on them, and then we spend our whole lives living in them."
She raised a brow. "That was kind of deep."
"You seem surprised." The point of this dinner was to get to know each other and find some common ground. I needed to reveal a bit of myself for that to happen.
She looked away. "I didn't realize you have depth."
I chuckled. "Are you saying I'm shallow?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. You don't exactly share anything about your family life."
My shoulders tightened. "There's nothing to tell."
She sucked in a breath and then asked in a rush, "Then why did you spend your childhood at our house instead of your own?"
"It was fun at your house. There were always laughter and teasing. My house was different." It was quiet and tense. We worried our dad would show up and demand our mom give him money. Money we needed for groceries. I found the Sterlings, and Emery had a group of friends, jumping from one house to another. We had our own methods of coping.
Aspen tilted her head to the side. "Your family’s a big part of who you are?"
"How would you relate that to your own family?" I heard what her family had said about her over the years. She was flighty and impulsive.
She chewed her lip. "My parents would say I'm rebelling from expectations. If they placed demands on me, I did the opposite. But I'm not sure how my birth order or my family would have caused that."
"Maybe it was a way to be seen in a large family. You had to be different to get attention."
"I guess it's possible."
At least she'd forgotten to ask more questions about my family. No one wanted to hear about that. I'd gotten through it, and that's all that mattered. Emery was living her dream life on campus, and she was safe. If my dad tried to hit her up for money, he'd have me to deal with. I'm bigger and stronger than I was back then.
"Are you’re parents happy now that you're working for Eve?" They'd always wanted her to settle on one job.
She pressed her lips together. "I don't talk to them about it."
"You don't think they'd want to know?" I set the food dishes on the table I almost never used.
"They'd have opinions I don't really want to hear." She folded napkins and set them under the silverware.
"You don't have to set the table."
She looked up at me and smiled. "I want to help. You went through the trouble of cooking dinner."
I pulled out her chair. "Sit."
She complied instead of arguing with me, and I refilled her glass of water.
She touched the petal of a yellow lily. "These flowers are lovely."
"I got them at the florist in town."
"It's a nice addition to your table. You always have flowers?"