Chapter 40
I’m at the gallery on a sunny day. It’s the kind of summer weather that makes work, even work you love, feel like the worst chore in the world. I only want to be outside. Turn my face toward the sun and feel the grass beneath my feet.
The energy at Sterling is restless. Half of the staff are on summer holidays, including Eitan. Everyone but me, Aadhya, Sean from IT, Deana in sales, and Mike the security guard. Vacations are right around the corner.
The apartments I viewed yesterday were pretty good. Two were out of the question, but the third was a definite upgrade from where I lived before Nate’s. I gave the landlady—a woman in her sixties, with a spare bedroom and en suite bathroom in her townhouse not too far from here—a tentative yes. She loved it when I told her where I worked.
I need to provide her with a firm response before noon tomorrow.
My mind is spinning with incoherent thoughts as I’m flipping through the catalog in front of me. It lists various art pieces from the Heeler Gallery in Seattle in meticulous order. I’m supposed to search through them for a few up-and-coming artists that Eitan’s interested in. See what the comp prices are. But I can’t focus. The names bleed together, one into the other.
I truly thought I would see Nate that day.
Connie was lovely. Surprising, even, with how chatty and open she was. A few of the things she said had stayed with me. I’ve never seen Nate care for anyone the way he cares about you.
He showed it. With every action. Each day when he chose to leave work early to come home. By every trip or excursion he planned for us. He showed it. He hinted at it. Said things that implied it.
But the other important issue is also understanding me, and he didn’t. Not that time. Not concerning my debt to Dean. I’m not sure if I can get over that.
The fear is knotting my stomach. It’s the fear of ending up back in the situation I have only so recently gotten out of.
But it’s also the anxiety that I’ll never feel how I did with Nate. With anyone.
There was such freedom in being with him. The easy conversations and the laughs. How he listened to me. How he opened up to me.
I miss him.
It’s only been a few days. Five, in total, and I hate that I’m counting. Three since I heard the sound of his voice. He hasn’t called since we spoke on the phone, hasn’t texted, and more than anything else, that makes me want to sink through the ground.
I had been the one to storm out.
But still…
I flip another page in the catalog and struggle against the pounding headache in my temples. Sleep was hard to come by last night. I called my mom, poured out everything I was feeling and then some, and she listened to all of it. When I told her about Dean and the cancellation fees… she was horrified.
And was furious that she allowed him to call her, had let him make her feel sorry for him.
Why didn’t you tell me?
So I told her the painful truth. I was embarrassed.
I was embarrassed about how much I let Dean get away with. By how much I let him pay for, and then he used that to control me. And by understanding too late how he manipulated me, my life, my choices. Our relationship turned unbalanced quickly, and I had no voice, and lost my agency.
But the worst part—I was too blinded to see it because I cared for him. And he used that against me.
Since I moved away to live with Dean in the big city, my mom wasn’t around to see all of this unfolding around me. And being a wonderful and constantly busy professor, I didn’t want her to worry. But as a mom, she still did, and I told her everything was fine. I was fine. Everything was perfectly, amazingly, fine. Until that fine became a cage I couldn’t get out of. Because how could I even begin saying that things aren’t fine at all?
Mom cried a bit. I cried, too. And she promptly booked a trip to visit me in late July, during her summer break. Greg could come, she’d said, but then suggested that it may be more fun for the two of us to drive through the countryside and pretend to be Jane Austen and Charlotte Bront?.
A clearing of the throat a few feet away draws my attention. I look up from staring at a blurry page to see Aadhya standing in the office. She gestures back toward the front of the gallery.
“Your client is here. Nate Connovan?”
I close the catalog with a hollow thud. “He’s here?”
“Yes. But he made a strange request…” She frowns. “He said to ask if you’d like to join him for lunch, to discuss a few paintings he’s interested in buying, unless you have other lunch plans, that is.”
“Unless I have other lunch plans,” I murmur. It’s hard to think straight. Nate’s here. At my work. Unless I have… His way of giving me an out? It has to be. Telling me he’s here but he’ll leave if I don’t want to see him.
I rise so fast that my chair wobbles. “I don’t have plans.”
Aadhya puts her hands on her hips. “Right? That’s what I was thinking. When a big client walks in, we’re always available.”
“He was just being polite.”
Her eyes narrow a bit. “You okay? You seem…”
“Yeah. I’m fine. I…” It’s a split-second decision to tell Aadhya the truth. But I go for it, jump off the ledge and hope there’s a parachute. “He’s actually the friend I’ve been staying with.”
Her mouth opens.
“Yeah. I’m sorry I’ve been coy about it. It’s just… with him being a client, too…”
“No, no, I get it.” She shakes her head. “It makes sense. For what it’s worth, I think that’s brilliant.”
That makes me smile. “You do?”
“Of course. Marry him, and his art collection is yours!” She winks at me, all Aadhya, calculation and poise and smiles. “Go have fun. I’ll finish the Seattle research.”
“Thanks, I owe you one.”
I cross the gallery in quick steps. Anticipation floods through me, hurrying my pace. And there he is. Standing as he was the first time I saw him in this gallery, months ago, on my second day here.
With his back to me, he’s facing a small painting picturing a vibrant blue pattern. Its size is the teeniest we’ve had in a while, barely larger than a single sheet of paper.
I stop beside him. “The painter was inspired by the broken pottery. The pattern doesn’t line up… because the shapes represent jagged shards. But it’s pretty.”
“It is,” Nate says. He’s not in a suit despite it being Monday and midday. Instead, he’s dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a white linen shirt, sleeves rolled up. But he is carrying a laptop under his arm.
He glances at me, and we stand there, side by side, in front of the tiny painting. “I want to talk to you.” His voice lowers, turning intimate. “At the café across the square where we had a drink back in the spring. There are things I want to say, apologies… but only if you’re okay with it. I know I showed up here unannounced. One word and I’ll leave.”
My gaze swims, growing unfocused, and the shards of pottery disappear. “No, don’t leave.”
“So, you’ll have lunch with me?”
“Yes,” I say. “I have an hour. Maybe an hour fifteen, if I push it.”
“Let’s cap it at an hour,” he says with a smile in his voice. It makes my chest warm. “Wouldn’t want you to get in trouble.”
We walk across the square, busy as ever with the summer season. People from all surrounding areas come here to eat their lunch. The restaurants and cafés open up their terraces.
“Are you okay? You found a safe place to stay?” he asks.
“Yes, at a small hotel nearby. Is your family still here?”
He smiles a bit. “Yes. They fly home tomorrow. Connie mentioned… speaking with you?”
“She was really nice. I like her.”
“She is. I’m sorry if she said anything that seemed like… pressure.”
“No, she didn’t. She was just looking out for you.”
He opens his mouth to say something, but we’re interrupted by a waiter before Nate can get the words out. Our table is in the corner, overlooking the square and the gallery across the way. My second home here in London.
Nate, being the first.
The thought nearly brings tears to my eyes. I swallow hard to chase the emotions away.
“I’ve missed you,” Nate says. “I know it’s only been a few days, but…”
I look down at my menu and blink rapidly. “I know. Me, too.”
“Yeah?” he asks, and there’s such intimacy in his voice that I want to forget about what happened. But it’s difficult. It’s so burned into me, the fear, the idea that I’ll end up in the way I was before. When I had no sense of agency over my life.
“Yeah. I miss the house, our dinners, our life together…” I shake my head. “Moving out was a big step. I know that. But I just needed some time to think.”
“I get that.” He sets his laptop down on the table between us, like it’s some kind of peace offering. Pushes his hair back. “Harp, I’ve realized I have so many things to apologize for. But let me start with this first… You’re right. I shouldn’t have paid Dean. What’s more, I should have asked you about it, offered my help. And respected whatever answer you gave me.”
I dig my teeth into my lower lip. “I know you were just trying to help. Trust me, I do. But it’s the last thing I wanted you to do in that situation.”
He nods. “I understand that now.”
“I want to stand on my own two feet. That’s what all of this, this,was about.” I nod my head across the square, at Sterling. “Dean was my problem to handle.”
“Yes. He was. Even if it would have been hard for me to accept and to stand by doing nothing,” he says, and leans in closer. His jaw looks tense. “I hate seeing you upset or hurt. It’s the worst thing I can imagine. And I absolutely hated seeing Dean speak to you the way he did, hearing how he’s… It made my blood boil.”
“Because you care for me,” I say. The words come out softer than I intended, but they come out nevertheless, spoken in the space between us. “And it hurt me because… I care for you, too. And it hurt that you didn’t tell me about it.”
“Care,” he repeats and shakes his head softly. “Yes. That’s one way to put it. But I’ll say it far more bluntly than that. Remember when you described the kind of woman you thought I would want?”
“Yes,” I say. Weeks ago, at a bar right in this area.
“You were wrong. Because the only woman I want is you. I love you, Harper. I’ve loved you for years.”
I blink a few times. “You love me?”
“Yes,” he says, that small crooked smile on his face. “I love you, Harper Elliot. And it’s been so fucking inconvenient from the start, but that hasn’t stopped me. My love for you has only grown. Ever since I saw you at that bar four years ago, I’ve felt like you’ve held my heart in your hands.”
I can’t breathe. “You’ve… all these years?”
“Yes. Even when I knew I shouldn’t. That it was hopeless. You didn’t care about me or even noticed me. I knew you were in love with Dean, living with him. And not even seeing his engagement ring on your finger, knowing you were going to marry him, made it possible for me to stop loving you.”
His eyes are determined, and there’s a pained sheen to them that cuts me to the core. “Every stolen moment I could get, I took. Dinners at Dean’s, always hoping you’d be there. His stupid summer parties. The bar hangouts.”
“That must have been so hard,” I whisper.
“Yeah, I felt like I was dying each time. But I couldn’t stop, and the more I got to know you, the more I wanted you. It reached a point where…”
“Where what?”
“I moved to London.”
I shake my head slowly. “You couldn’t have moved here because of me.”
“Dean told me that he was planning to propose to you. I knew, right then and there, that I needed to bury these emotions. That you were going to say yes to him and start a life together—something I couldn’t bring myself to stand by and watch. So I pitched the idea of having a Connovan in our European office to my brother. I visited London plenty of times. It made sense.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
He smiles, but it’s humorless. “Don’t be. My emotions were mine to suffer. And as much as it hurt, I’ve never regretted meeting you.”
“I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have… I didn’t know.” It feels like my chest is too tight, too small to fit all the feelings rushing through me. I can’t name them all. Can’t parse through the maelstrom.
“When I found out that you and Dean had broken up…” His deep voice sounds hoarse now, and almost shaky around the edges. “I felt like an asshole for feeling relieved. For thinking that at least, at least, I wouldn’t have to see him with you in the upcoming decades. Wouldn’t have to know that, even being so unworthy of you, he was still allowed to be at your side… And then, suddenly, you were in London.
“And I just wanted to see that you were all right. That was what I told myself, that I needed to make sure you were okay. To help in any possible way. Help you settle in. Be your friend. And we did become good friends.”
“I valued that so much,” I whisper. “All the trips we did, the crazy nights, the experiences.”
His lips soften into a smile. “So did I. It reminded me what it was like to have fun. I stopped having fun, somehow, over the last five years or so. Put that away like it was a summer jacket in the winter months. But you brought it all back. And then… we became more than friends.”
I nod. “We did. It wasn’t planned on my part. It was just so easy, and felt so right, and…” My voice breaks, and I have to clear my throat. “I started falling for you.”
Nate’s eyes are devastating. There’s pain there, and such want that it makes my tight chest flush with heat. “I know you were. Until I ruined it.”
“You didn’t ruin it.” The damn inside of me breaks. A tear rolls down my cheek. “You couldn’t ruin it. I want this. I want you, and I forgave you days ago.”
“You did?” he breathes.
I nod shakily. “Yes. Of course. It’s just, this feels terrifying, Nate. All of this. Despite it being everything I want.”
This seems like a terrible confession.
His large hand covers mine on the table. “I know it does. Your last relationship was stifling.”
“I can’t live like that again,” I say. “What if I want to… after London… What if I want to move to Paris for six months? Or to Tokyo? What if I want to get a dog or go back to school or not get married for ten years? I might want those things.”
Nate’s smile widens. “Then that’s exactly what you’ll do.”
“But what about us? If there’s an us. I never want to hurt you, either, and?—”
“Harper,” he interrupts, his voice serious. “I never want to hold you back. If you want to move to Paris, I’ll come with you. To Tokyo, too. If you want to get a dog, we’ll get a dog. If you never want to get married at all, we’ll never get married. Our relationship doesn’t have to be like your last.”
The picture he’s painting seems too beautiful to be real. Could it be? I thought he’d be on a set timeline, have expectations. A man like him…
But he’s never once made me feel like that.
Never once hinted at having suffocating demands.
“We can make our own rules,” I say.
“We can make our own rules,” he repeats. “And then, we can break them. There’s no right way to be together. I certainly don’t know of one. We can figure it out, build it. Together.”
I turn my hand around and grip his fingers with mine. They’re warm, holding me steady amid the emotional storm raging inside of me.
“Want to know a secret?” he says. “I’m terrified of this, too.”
I look up into his eyes. “You are?”
He nods. “I’ve wanted this for so long. Want it still, more than ever, and I love you, Harper. But I never want to hurt you again. Never want to let you down, or be less than what you deserve.”
Something inside of me aches, and I tighten my hand around his. “You could never let me down,” I say. “And as for hurting me… you weather the hurts when you care about one another. That’s a relationship. All the good, and a little bit of the challenging.”
The corners of his lips tip up into a half smile. “I suppose. But I’m going to try my damnedest to never have it happen again.”
I smile at him and steel myself to say the next part. It needs to be said. “The money to Dean, my debt… I don’t want to be beholden to you for something that happened before us, before this. Can I pay you back?”
“You’re not beholden to me.”
I forge ahead as if he hasn’t spoken. “While I can’t pay it all back right away, maybe in a few months? Now that I have a full-time position.”
He starts to shake his head, but then he stops. Makes himself nod once. “Yes, if you’d like. It’s your choice. But it’s not necessary. I used the weekend to run some numbers. You actually don’t owe me any money at all. And, if you want it, you’re well on your way to never needing a man again. Independence. Right?”
He squeezes my hand, releases it, and opens up the laptop. There’s a spreadsheet primed on the screen.
I recognize the names in the right column. Artists. Some of them are my favorites. It’s a list of purchases… The prices are in another column. It’s his entire art collection, listed out in a neat ledger.
“I purchased forty-two pieces in the last four years, all on your recommendation,” he says.
My mouth drops open. I’d known there were a few. But not this much. The numbers on this sheet… I knew, of course. Had lived in that townhouse for months amid all the beauty.
But still.
“I had them all appraised over the weekend. Consulted two independent art experts. I also got an estimate of what I would have paid to you as an art adviser had you been under contract.” He scrolls down, to where a sum is highlighted in red.
A pretty large sum.
“That’s your commission fee. A fee I never paid you. I used your services without giving you a dime.”
“I wasn’t consulting officially,” I protest. “I was just talking about my favorite artists! Giving you advice and a few recommendations when you mentioned being interested in starting a collection.”
“Exactly. Giving advice. My collection has appreciated significantly since I purchased the works. You’ve made me money, in effect, and gained nothing from it yourself. Not even professional credit.”
“Nate, I?—”
“I’m not wrong here,” he says. “I understand if this isn’t your cup of tea, but it’s an undeniable fact that you should have been paid. Let me deduct what I paid Dean from this amount… and put it into an investment account in your name.”
I press my hands to my cheeks. It’s all too much, and yet it makes sense. Of course, it does. That’s the hardest part. I want to protest, but I understand where he’s coming from. And the logic is sound.
“I’ll help you long-term with investing and financial planning, if you’d like,” he says. “Or I can recommend where to start if you want to do it yourself. Point being, you can build real independence with this. You wouldn’t ever need to stay at someone’s house. Although I desperately want you to live in mine. But it’s your choice, Harper. I want you to be happy and independent. And then, I want you to choose me, too.”
“This is incredible.”
“I was hoping you’d think that,” he says, smiling crookedly. “I’m sorry I waited a few days to come tell you this. I wanted to make sure I got the numbers right. But I love you, Harp. And I want you in my life.”
I reach for his hand again and grip it between both of mine. “There’s something I need to tell you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you, too, Nate.”
He blinks once. “You do?”
“Yes. It crept up on me slowly, and then faster and faster, until it’s all I could feel. These last few days… they’ve been awful. Terrible.”
“The worst,” he murmurs. “You love me?”
“Yes. You’re everything I never knew I needed. I think that’s why I got so scared with the whole money thing. If I’d cared less, it wouldn’t have hurt this much.”
“I understand.” There’s light in his eyes that I can’t look away from. Happiness. It glows from within and sets off my own until I can’t help but smile at him.
He smiles back.
“Are we gonna do this, then?” I ask.
His smile breaks into a chuckle. “Yes, baby. We’re going to do this.”
He leans over the table to kiss me, and it feels like distilled sunshine, like coming home. Like taking a leap into the void but knowing you’ll be caught before you ever hit the ground.
Like new beginnings and adventures yet to come.