17. Nick
— ? —
Nick
For most of my life, I would have.
I don’t tell Jo where I’m going. She has the custody hearing bearing down on her, lawyers and depositions and the low constant dread of wondering when the next blow lands. Whatever my parents have built this morning, I would rather walk into it alone.
The estate looks the way it always has. Twelve acres of trimmed hedges, a Georgian mansion that could be a photograph in a magazine about people who inherited their money.
Inside, it has the hush of a museum nobody visits.
The same furniture no one sits on. The same cold that has nothing to do with temperature.
Mother waits on the settee with a tea service laid out, cream cashmere, every hair in place.
“Nicholas. Thank you for coming.”
“What do you want.”
“Sit. Please.”
I don’t pour the tea. She does, and lets it go cold between us.
“Your father and I made a mistake,” she says. “We acted hastily. That isn’t us.”
“You threatened a woman and her child. You had someone try to take Rory out of his school.”
A flicker crosses her face, gone before it finishes. “Whatever happened at that school was never sanctioned. Not by me.”
“With forged documents on your lawyer’s letterhead.”
She doesn’t answer. She sets the cup down instead.
“We’ve reconsidered. If you insist on this relationship, we won’t stand in your way. We’ll even call off the custody suit.”
I wait. With this family there’s always a second half to the sentence.
“In exchange, we need you to step in and take your brother’s place.
Matthias has made a mess. The kind that ends families like ours if the wrong people ever hear about it.
Money gone where it shouldn’t have gone.
People owed who don’t ask twice.” She folds her hands.
“It has to disappear. Quietly. Out of the papers. You’re the only one we trust to make it go away. ”
So that’s what I’m to them. Not a son. A broom.
“You want me to clean up after Matthias,” I say. “And in return you’ll let me keep Jo.”
“We’ll withdraw support for the suit. We’ll keep Brittany away from the boy. We’ll acknowledge them publicly, if that’s the price.”
My father comes in then, older than the last time I saw him, the authority gone soft at the edges. He takes the chair beside her and lowers himself into it slowly.
“I assume she’s told you,” he says.
“Enough of it.”
“Then you understand what’s at stake. Everything your grandfather built. Everything I built. One scandal and it’s gone.”
For a long moment I look at the two of them. The polish. The fear underneath it they have spent my whole life pretending they don’t feel. And I wait for the old pull, the need to fix it, to be the son who finally earns the look they never gave me.
It doesn’t come.
“No,” I say.
“Nicholas...”
“I won’t cover for him. Whatever he’s done, he answers for it. The authorities, the press, all of it.”
“You would destroy your own brother.”
“He destroyed himself. You just kept writing the checks.” I stand.
“You made him. Every time he failed you cleaned it up. Every time he hurt someone you paid them to disappear. And now you want me to do the same thing while you throw an innocent woman and a seven-year-old on the fire to keep your name out of the paper.”
“She isn’t innocent...”
“She is the most innocent person any of us has ever stood near.” My voice is flat and certain and it doesn’t shake.
“She raised a child alone after your son walked out. She built a life from nothing. She came through everything you threw at her and got stronger. You wouldn’t recognize that kind of strength if it shook your hand. ”
Mother rises, reaching for me. “We’re trying to give you what you’ve always wanted.”
“What I want is for you to leave them alone.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then every paper in the country learns exactly what Matthias has been doing.” I take out my phone and let them see it in my hand. “I’ve been keeping a file. For a while now.”
My father’s face goes a dangerous color. “You would burn down your own family.”
The question stops me at the door. I turn back and look at the two people I spent my whole life trying to please.
“You burned it down a long time ago,” I say. “The day you chose him over me. Every day after that. The day you threatened the woman I love.” I let it sit. “Call off the suit. Leave them alone. Or watch me set the whole thing on fire.”
The door closes on whatever she says next. The marble foyer throws my footsteps back at me, and then I’m outside and the air is clean and the house that was never a home shrinks behind me and keeps shrinking.
In the car I sit a moment with the engine off and my phone in my hand.
Jo’s photo is on the screen, a candid Grace took of her mid-laugh at something Rory said, her head tipped back, happy in a way that still undoes me.
My whole life I have been gathering my parents’ approval, sure it was the thing that would finally make me real.
It was never going to be them. It was always going to be this. A woman laughing in a small warm kitchen and a kid who’s convinced I do the best dinosaur voices in the world.
I call her. She picks up on the second ring.
“Hey.” Warm, easy. “Everything okay?”
“I need to see you tonight. There’s something you need to know.”
The warmth tips into worry. “Nick? What happened?”
Everything happened. For once in my entire life, I stood in that house and I chose, and it wasn’t them.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her, and I have said those words to a hundred clients and never once meant them the way I mean them now. “I’ll explain when I get there.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Don’t be scared.” I start the car. The estate slides away in the mirror. “We’re going to be okay. All three of us.”
“All three of us?”
“You. Me. Rory.” The words settle into my chest and stay there, the truest thing I know. “That’s my family. The only one that counts.”
Her breath stutters. When she speaks her voice has gone thick. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Give me an hour.”
I drive away from the only world I was ever supposed to want, and I have never felt lighter in my life.