Escaping Reality

before we are sipping more champagne and enjoying
    our pasta dishes, but I have a raw nerve still bleeding vulnerability I cannot
    seem to seal. Reflexively, I launch into my standard question-asking
    strategy meant to prevent question answering. Easy to do with Liam when I
    crave every detail I can learn about him. “Will you tell me about how you
    started apprenticing at such a young age?”
    “The real story or the one I tell the media?”
    “There are two versions?”
    He sips his champagne. “One for the press. One for me.”
    I stab a bite of pasta. “I’ll take both, please.”
    “I had a feeling you would. Alex met me at a public event and learned
    of my interest in architecture and took me under his wing.”
    “And the real story?”
    “What makes you think that isn’t it?”
    “Is it?”
    His jaw hardens. “No. The real story is that I was obsessed with
    drawing buildings and I told my mother I wanted to be a famous architect.”
    “How old were you when this started?”
    “Per my mother’s old stories, I was six. At thirteen I hadn’t stopped
    talking about it and had stepped up my interest. I was trying to self-teach
    via books. My mother heard Alex was in the city unveiling a building, and
    despite working two jobs at the time, she found the time and means to get
    me there. We were living in the Bronx. And that’s when I met Alex and he
    saw something in me.” He goes on to tell me all about going to Alex’s house
    on weekends and summers.
    Until this moment, I had not let myself connect the dots of his past to
    mine. I too, had been a child protégé to my gifted father, and I reach for my
    champagne to keep from letting the confession fall from my lips. That was
    my old life, my real life . Amy Bensen has a business degree. She didn’t have
    a famous archeologist for a father. Dead father. My father is dead.
    “Alex tortured me with hours upon hours of math equations,” he
    continues, and I set down my glass, saved from my past by my interest in
    his.
    “I hate math.” Although his tattoo could make me change my mind.
    My lips curve. “You seem rather fond of it.”
    His eyes gleam with understanding. “Alex used tell me there were
    infinite possibilities in life and architecture. The tattoo represents that to
    me.”
    Infinite possibilities in life. I am not sure I like that idea. How many
    people will I be before I die?
    “Of course,” Liam adds, “as a kid I just wanted to draw buildings. Alex
    said that’s what you call an artist, not an architect. I fought the math, and
    ended up doing the whole wax on, wax off thing like in Karate Kid .”
    I laugh. “ Karate Kid ? But that was to learn karate. What did that have
    to do with math?”
    “It’s hard work. My punishment for not getting the math right and
    complaining about having to try.” He laughs, but it’s laced with a hollow
    sadness. “And he liked the movie.” He smiles, shifting out of the past to the
    present. “I don’t like the movie. I do, however, like math now. Funny how
    mastering something makes you change your tune about it. By the time I
    was in college I was a whiz.”
    The waitress takes my plate and I am shocked to realize it is all but
    empty. A few minutes later, we are enjoying coffee and I sigh in
    contentment, more relaxed than I have been in a very long time. “What did
    your parents think about Alex?” I ask, not ready for this dinner to end.
    “My mother adored him.”
    “And your father?”
    His expression turns somber. “He wasn’t around to have an opinion.”
    “I want to ask. I’m not sure I should.”
    He gives me a wry smile. “And that’s about as honest as it gets.”
    He’s right. It is and it feels good, but what I sense in him does not.
    “Do you want to tell me?”
    “He ran out on us when I was eight,” he says easily. Almost too
    easily. “Told me he was going to the store and never came back.”
    “You grew up poor.” There is so much more to this man than
    billionaire architect. “That’s why your mother worked two jobs.”
    “Yes. Until Alex came along. He took care of my mother.”
    “Did they date?”
    He gives a quick shake of his head. “No. They were just close friends
    and when she came down with cancer, Alex paid for her treatment.”
    I blink. “What? Cancer?”
    “Cervical. She didn’t have the money for regular checkups so it was
    caught late, but she beat it twice.”
    My throat thickens at the obvious. She didn’t beat it three