Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nathalie
The cab pulls up outside the house and I sit in it for a moment with my hand on the door handle and I breathe.
Then I get out, the front door opens before I reach it, and a maid is holding it.
I walk into the entrance hall and I feel the eyes immediately, the security man by the staircase, and the maid hovering.
The house is on alert. They all look at me with blankness, they have been told to watch and report.
I keep my face appropriately miserable.
My father's office door is closed but I can hear him through it. He must have been containing himself for hours and was running out of patience for the exercise. I push the door open.
He sees me and the decorative statue on the edge of his desk almost hits me. I duck and it hits the doorframe beside my head and shatters.
He shouts, "So you still remember where you live!"
Gerald is standing to the right of the desk. His eyes move over me.
I look at my father's face and I let my chin wobble.
Then I run to him and I drop to my knees and I grab his legs with both hands, I press my face against them and I sob. I cry between gasps, "What did I do? What did I do wrong, I was so scared to come home, I didn't know what to do, I was so scared—"
My father looks down at me.
I feel Gerald's eyes on the back of my head.
"Your cousin," my father says, his voice dropping from a shout to a colder tone, "told me you left with a man.
He pauses. "Luca Di Meglio."
I pull back from his legs and I look up at him with my eyes streaming and my mouth open and I make my face do the thing it needs to do, the shock, the hurt, the bewilderment of someone who has been wrongly accused of something terrible, and I say, "My cousin said what?"
"So you didn't leave with him? Don't lie!"
I stand up, sniffing and I reach into my bag with shaking hands. I pull out my phone and I pull up the video of Alana and James kissing. It never left my phone, I just needed Alana to stop searching. I hold it out to him with trembling fingers and I let out a fresh sob as he takes it.
"I didn't want to show you this," I cry, pressing my hand against my mouth. "I knew how important this marriage was to you, I knew what it meant for the family and for the campaign and I wanted to protect that, I wanted to protect you, so I kept it to myself and I—"
My father is watching the screen. Gerald has moved closer and is watching it too.
"My cousin and him," I say, and I let my voice crack on it beautifully.
"I have seen them together so many times and I wanted to let it go, I begged her, I told her I knew she liked him and I said please, please just let me have this one thing, just let me do this one thing for our family, but she wouldn't—" I stop and press my hand to my eyes. "She just wouldn't."
Gerald is looking at me in disbelief but I keep my eyes on my father.
"Last night," I continue, dropping my voice to something smaller and more frightened, "I went to the bathroom and when I came back they were gone.
Both of them. I looked everywhere and then I decided to wait and I must have fallen asleep and I woke up to your calls.
" I look at my father with the eyes of someone absolutely devastated by the injustice of it.
"I don't know why they are lying, no one else was with us.
I don't know why they would make up something like that about this man and me, I have never even met.
" I let my voice rise slightly on the last words.
"Unless they just want to cover up what they were doing. "
My father stares at me and I stare back at him letting a tear run down my face without wiping it.
My father turns to Gerald, something passes between them and then he turns back to me and he asks, his voice fractionally softer, "Then why are you only coming home now?"
I look at my hands. "I was afraid," I whisper. "I knew you'd be angry and I just— I couldn't face it. I sat in the hotel lobby all night." I look up at him with an expression of absolute terrified contrition. "I'm sorry. I should have come home immediately. I'm so sorry, Dad."
My father looks at me and I hold his gaze and I keep my chin trembling just enough and I wait.
Then he says in the fake soft voice that I have been able to identify since I was seven years old, "I trust you. But you understand that regardless of all this, you'll need to go and apologize to the Hartley family. Make this right."
He didn't ask if I was alright. He didn't ask whether I had eaten or whether I had been frightened.
I finally understand, with a clarity that has no grief left in it, that I have been trying to fill a space in this man that he sealed shut long before I was old enough to understand what I was pressing against.
"I'll do whatever you need," I tell him, and I mean it in a way he will never understand. "I want to help your campaign. I'll marry him. I'll do everything right, I promise."
Something happens in my father's face that I have spent twenty-three years trying to produce and have never managed until this moment. His eyes open slightly and he says, "There's my good girl."
I smile at him. I feel absolutely nothing except the faint and distant urge to be sick.
I let the smile waver and I look down at my hands and I do the hesitation, the small performance of someone working up to saying something difficult, and my father notices and asks, "What is it?"
"I'm worried," I say quietly. "About my cousin.
" I look up at him with carefully constructed concern.
"I know you care about her and I know her father is important to you and I would never want to cause problems in the family.
" I pause. "But she really does have feelings for him and I think, for now, it would be better if she were kept a little distance from us.
Especially from James. We can't risk another scandal. Not with everything at stake."
"We just need her somewhere else for a while," I add gently. "That's all."
"Of course," he says.
Of course. What couldn't he sacrifice for the right outcome?
He turns to Gerald and begins issuing instructions and then he turns back to me with a smile that doesn't reach his eyes and tells me to go up and rest.
I walk down the corridor until I am around the corner and out of sight of the office and I stop and I take out my phone and I make the call.
It picks up on the second ring.
"I'll send you the details," I say quietly, my back against the wall, my eyes on the corridor. "I need two people taken in."
I end the call.
I look back at my father's office door. All these years of trying to be enough for someone who had decided that I was not worth the effort of pretending.
I put my phone in my pocket. Everything he sacrificed for her, every vote and every headline and every alliance and every deal.
I am going to burn it to the ground.
* * *
It took a month for James to leave the ICU, only then did Senator Hartley agree to sit across a table from my father again. The meeting is arranged for Thursday afternoon, when my father will take me with him to grovel for power.
Senator Hartley opens the door himself, which tells me how much he wants this resolved, because men like Senator Hartley do not open their own doors unless the situation requires the performance of accessibility.
"Phillip," he says. His voice was warm now that the terms are favorable.
My father steps forward and takes his hand and says, "Robert, thank you for seeing us."
The sitting room is expensively furnished and there are no photographs of James anywhere, which I note.
Senator Hartley sits and my father sits.
I sit and Senator Hartley looks at me and then at my father and then he leans back with his arms crossed and says, "You understand how this looked, Phillip.
My son in a hospital bed. His name is all over the press.
His photograph on every front page." He shakes his head.
"I had people calling me asking what kind of family I was getting involved with. "
"Robert, I completely understand your frustration and I want to assure you that—"
"I pulled out of two fundraisers because of this," Senator Hartley continues, talking over my father, so I know whose meeting this is. "Two. Do you know what that costs me?"
"I do and I am deeply sorry and I take full responsibility for—"
"Nathalie."
I look at him.
Senator Hartley leans forward and looks at me with the assessing eyes he had used the first time we met, the same calculation running behind them. "Your father tells me you haven't abandoned the engagement. That you want to proceed."
He doesn't care about the details of that day, just like my father. He just wants to cover his losses.
I clasp my hands in my lap and I look at him with the expression of a young woman very much in love and very much relieved to be given the chance to say so.
"I never wanted to leave it," I tell him, letting something soft and wounded into my voice. "I know how it looked and I know James was hurt. I will spend however long it takes making it right." I pause. "I love your son, Senator Hartley. I want to marry him. Nothing that happened changes that."
Senator Hartley looks at me for a long moment.
Then he laughs.
He sits back and he laughs and he reaches over and claps my father on the shoulder and says, "There it is. That's what I wanted to hear." He is already smiling, already recalculating, already moving forward toward the version of this that works for him. "Now we can get back to business."
I watch these two men look at each other with mutual relief.
I smile pleasantly at Senator Hartley.
"How is James?" I ask, tilting my head with manufactured worry. "I've been so concerned. I blame myself for not being there, for not protecting him from—"
"He's in his room," Senator Hartley says, waving his hand with brisk affection. "Better shape than expected. But his legs might not work anytime soon. What a bother!"
"Could I see him?" I ask. "Please. I've been wanting to see him for weeks, I just didn't know if I was welcome."
Senator Hartley stands already, pleased, moving toward the door. "Dear child," he says warmly, "you have your whole life to take care of him."
* * *
James is in the largest bedroom at the end of the hall, propped up against pillows with both legs in casts from hip to ankle and he looks at me with angry eyes when I walk in.
His father and my father come in behind me and Senator Hartley says, "Look who came to see you, son."
James says nothing.
"Nathalie has been beside herself," my father adds, settling into the chair near the window. "She wanted to come sooner but we thought it best to give you time to recover."
I cross to the bed and I look down at James, "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I wasn't there, I should have been with you and instead I just—"
"She wants to move forward," Senator Hartley says to James. "In fact." He looks at me. "Tell him what you told me."
I look at James.
"I want to get married," I say. "As soon as possible. I don't want to wait." I look from James to his father to my own father with wide earnest eyes. "We can get married in a month."
Senator Hartley points at me immediately. "That's exactly what it is. The spirit!"
"Now, it's a bit soon—" my father begins.
"Next month," Senator Hartley announces, already decided. "We begin preparations immediately. A wedding in a month, that's bold, that's the story we want."
"Father—" James says sharply.
"The girl is right," Senator Hartley replies. "We move forward. We forget the past scandal."
My father looks at me and then at Senator Hartley and he nods.
"We will give you both space then," Senator Hartley says with a twinkle in his eyes.
I sit beside the bed and James looks at me and neither of us says anything until his father and my father take the conversation out to the corridor, their voices fading down the hall.
James looks at me.
"I heard you had Alana sent away," he says. His voice is flat and careful. "What is your game?"
I widen my eyes and bring my hand to my chest. "What was I supposed to do? She was going to take you from me and I just couldn't let that happen, I—"
"Stop," he cuts in. He shifts against the pillows and winces and his jaw tightens. "Stop the act." His eyes are hard. "You did this to me. You made me this way."
I lean forward slightly in the chair and I drop the performance just enough for him to see what's underneath it and I say quietly, "Do you want me to call the press and tell them what you tried to do to me in that room?
Because I will. I have the recording of you and my cousin. You spiked my drink and—
"Don't—" he starts.
"Don't what?" I ask pleasantly.
He closes his mouth.
"You are completely useless to your father right now in every way that matters to him. The best thing you can do, the only thing you can do, is marry me and let me take care of you." I tilt my head. "I'll be a very good wife."
"I don't know what you're planning," he says through his teeth, "but you won't get away with it. Whatever you think you're doing, I will find out and I will—"
I reach out and I punch his bandaged leg.
He screams and the sound fills the room, his face has gone completely white and his breath is coming in short furious gasps and I sit back in my chair and I laugh.
"Your father probably gave everyone the afternoon off," I tell him pleasantly, glancing toward the closed door. "Privacy for the young couple."
"You're insane," he gasps. "You're completely insane, I'll get to the bottom of whatever you're planning, I swear I will—"
"Shut up and be good," I reply.
I stand up and I smooth my dress and I look at him one more time, enjoying the fury in his face that has nowhere useful to go, and then I walk out of the room and I pull the door gently closed behind me.
He and I know his words were useless to his father just as mine were to mine. This wedding is happening, and I'm not opposed to it.