Chapter 34 #2
"Very." Beck glances at his notes. "From what I can piece together, she's well-liked by the people who actually know her. Quietly charitable. The type who writes checks without needing her name on a building. Several sources used the same word: kind." He pauses. "Also sad."
I turn that over. A kind, sad woman married to a man who collects mistresses and pits his children against each other for sport.
"What about her marriage?"
"Still married to Harrison, technically. They haven't divorced, but they've lived largely separate lives for at least a decade. She spends most of her time at the family's Connecticut estate. He stays in the city." Beck shrugs. "It's an arrangement. Common enough in those circles."
I stare at the page bearing her name, but there's no photograph. Just dry facts. Date of birth, current residence, board memberships, philanthropic affiliations. Nothing that tells me who this woman actually is, or what she knew about her sister's life after Elizabeth left Boston.
"Does she know about me?"
Beck shakes his head. "I couldn't find anything to suggest one way or the other.
She's kept herself out of the spotlight for decades.
No scandals, no public statements, nothing that would generate a paper trail.
" He meets my eyes. "Whatever her story is, she's guarded it carefully.
If she knows you exist, she's never given any public indication of it. "
Which tells me nothing. Nothing about whether she knew my mother—her sister—was dying in a hospital in the Keys.
Nothing about whether she tried to reach out and was rebuffed, or never tried at all.
Nothing about what the Xavier family told her, or forbade her from doing, after they cast Elizabeth out.
I don't know this woman. I don't know what choices she made or what choices were made for her.
But I know one thing.
"She's the only living person who could tell me anything about my mother before she met my father," I say. "What Elizabeth was like as a girl. Before everything changed."
"That's true," Beck says quietly.
I have photographs. I have memories—a decade's worth before the cancer took her. But I don't have her before. The girl she was at nineteen, before she chose love over legacy. The sister, the daughter, the young woman who looked at everything the Xaviers offered and decided it wasn't worth the cost.
Madeline has that. Madeline is that living link to a version of my mother I'll never know.
Whether she'd be willing to share any of it with me is a question I'm not ready to ask.
Beck pauses. Something shifts in his posture as he retrieves the final document. "And then there's this," he says quietly. "I did some further digging on your mother's side."
I don't move. Don't speak. Just wait.
"Constance Xavier." Beck's voice is careful now, aware of the ground he's walking. "Your maternal grandmother. As Sebastian told you, she's still alive, Nick. In her late eighties. Living in Boston—the family estate, possibly with in-home care. My source wasn't certain."
The woman who, with her husband, cast my mother out is living just hours away from me.
The news hit me hard when Sebastian told me at the gala, but that was in a public place, where I refused to permit myself to react.
Hearing Beck confirm the details to me now, in the privacy of my office, takes some of the breath from my lungs.
And there's a photo too. I reach for it, my gaze locking on to the weathered, but still lovely, face of the woman who birthed my mother.
I see similarities in the eyes, in the soft jaw line and mouth that had always been ready with a warm smile whenever my mother looked at me.
This other woman is unsmiling, her lips slack at the corners, a vacant sort of dullness in her blue eyes.
"She's been struggling with health issues for several years," Beck continues. "Her husband Philip—your grandfather—died about twelve years back. Before any of this could have..."
He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.
Before any of this could have mattered. Before I could have stood in front of the people who decided their daughter wasn't worth keeping because she fell in love with a poor man whom they deemed beneath her.
Before I could have shown them what their abandoned grandson built from the nothing they left us with.
Constance Xavier will likely die without ever knowing my name.
Without knowing that her daughter's son commands an empire.
Without meeting my extraordinary Avery, who is so much like my mother in all the best ways.
Constance won't know that Elizabeth's grandchild will be born in the spring.
A great-grandchild she'll never hold, never see, never understand she lost.
Maybe she deserves to lose all of those moments. She made her bed, after all. Someone that cold should be left to rot in it. Though even as I think it, my chest tightens.
I tell myself it doesn't matter. This pile of dossiers are just names in a file folder, people who meant nothing to me until the night before last. They should have no impact on me moving forward.
Except… they do.
Deep down, in a place I've kept locked since I was old enough to understand that the family who should have helped us never came, they impact me.
If I'd known about this when I was younger, when I was alone and desperate and surviving on rage because it was all I had, would it have mattered? Would knowing there was family somewhere, even family that had rejected my mother, have given me something to hold onto?
Who the fuck knows?
Now I have my own family. Avery. Our child. The legacy we're building together. Neither the Roths nor the Xaviers need to have any place in it.
But the curiosity Sebastian ignited at the gala hasn't gone out. It burns low beneath my ribs, asking questions I don't have answers to.
I glance at the clock on my desk. Late morning now.
Avery should be finishing up the rest of her errands before long.
She'll be here soon, and that knowledge loosens the tension in me that this morning's conversation has wound tight.
I want her close. Want the weight of her leaning into me, the way she fits against my side like the space was always hers.
Beck gathers the papers, placing them back in the folder with the quiet understanding I've come to rely on over fifteen years of friendship and professional partnership. He's giving me space to process. He always knows when to push and when to wait.
"One more thing," he says, pulling a second file from his briefcase. "Better news."
He sets it in front of me, the letterhead bearing the yacht broker Julian Whitmore's name.
"Your honeymoon vessel is ready," Beck says. "The Elysium is docked at the port in Genova, fully provisioned, the Mediterranean crew assembled and standing by. Everything is in place for you and Avery."
"That is good news." I imagine Avery's face when she sees it.
The way her green eyes will widen, the sound she'll make when she takes her first look at the incredible antique sailing yacht named for our private, perfect paradise.
I imagine us on the water together, sailing into whatever comes next with our child growing inside her and the rest of our lives stretching out like an ocean we haven't charted yet.
I sign off on the final delivery confirmation, slide it back across the desk. "Thanks, Beck. I don't just mean thanks for the intel today."
"I know." He collects his files and rises. "These rich assholes may be your blood relatives, but you'll always have family in me too."
I nod, walking around to the other side of my desk where he stands. "Thanks, brother. I mean that. There's no one else I'd want standing next to me as my best man on Saturday."
"Honored," he says. Smiling, he holds out his hand to me.
I glance down at it, then step forward and pull him into a brief hug instead. He pats me on the back before we separate.
"Do you want me to reach out to anyone for you?" His voice is careful. "Feel out Sebastian's intentions, maybe open a channel?" He rubs his dark-bearded jaw. "Or to Madeline Roth instead? You know I'll be discreet."
The offer hangs in the air.
I consider it. Sebastian cracked the door open at the gala. I could push through it, start building something with the family my mother left behind. My child could have cousins. An aunt. Connections to the Xavier name and whatever that might mean.
Or I could keep that door closed. Honor the choice my mother made. Let the silence that's lasted my entire life continue for another generation.
I don't know what I want the outcome to be. And I won't make a move until I do—and until I've talked about all of this with Avery. After all, this decision will impact her as much as it does me.
"Not yet," I say. "This is enough for now. Let me sit with it."
Beck nods. Doesn't push. He's known me long enough to understand that I'll come to him when I'm ready, and pressing will only drive me deeper into my own analysis.
The door closes behind him.
Silence fills the office.
I reach for my phone, checking for messages.
Still nothing from Avery. Part of me wishes I hadn't scaled back her security detail.
But that's not what she wants. It's not what I want for her or our child either, growing up with armed guards shadowing every move.
Trusting that she can move through the world without me controlling every variable is part of what this marriage means—to both of us, I admit, albeit reluctantly.
I tell myself it's fine, no need to be concerned that she hasn't been in touch yet.
She's probably caught up in whatever last-minute wedding details are consuming her day.
The venue coordinator, the florist, the thousand small decisions that still need answering before Saturday. She'll be here soon.
The dossier folder still sits on my desk where Beck left it. I rest my hand on it, feeling the weight of all those names and numbers and fractured histories gathered into a single manila file.
The Roths were born into empire. The Xaviers discarded my mother for wanting something different—something less—than what they'd planned. Does honoring her mean respecting that choice? Keeping her family out of my life the way they thrust her out of theirs?
Or does honoring her mean giving her grandchild something she never had—family that shows up, that reaches across the silence, that tries?
What would my mother want?
I don't know. I'm not sure I'll ever know.
The woman who painted sunsets and taught me to cook and loved me fiercely until the cancer stole her away never told me about the Xaviers.
Never mentioned a sister, parents in Boston, the world she'd left behind.
Maybe she wanted to protect me from the rejection.
Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she simply wanted to forget.
I'll never be able to ask her now.
But when my child asks me one day where they come from, I want to have an answer that isn't silence. I want to give them more than I was given.
Whatever I do about the Roths and the Xaviers, I'll decide it with that in mind.