Ben looked up at her, honestly a little surprised. Obviously they had never had a typical relationship, but they had been living in the same house for years. How had this never come up before? Ben didn't tend to talk about his childhood because he didn't like to talk about his parents, which inevitably led to talking about how they'd died, but he assumed someone would have mentioned something about it to her sooner or later. The fact that she didn't know anything about his life prior to eighteen was wild, but that probably wasn't the worst of it. Did she know about anything prior to when he'd met her, and perhaps the six to eight months earlier? Why would he ever have bothered to tell her?

"It's where I grew up," he said simply. "We lived there until my parents died."

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