Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
Nash isn’t at the Sword Gate House, he’s sitting on the curb across from it. The bright edges and shadows of him between two crepe myrtle trees are line drawn by streetlight.
Unlike the busy streets of restaurants and shops I jogged down to get here, this one is a quiet neighborhood, the sounds of the city seeming far away. It’s familiar; we were here on his tour.
When I sit next to him, he’s silent, both of us staring at the address opposite us.
Framed by two large stone pillars, the gate between is what I assume to be wrought iron, intricately designed with details of swords and spears.
People and minutes pass, neither of us saying anything, staring at a gate that I know must be more than a gate to bring Nash to it.
Clueless how to handle this, I fish my phone out of my purse and dial his number. He looks at the phone like he might not answer, but he does, silently putting it to his ear and looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say to him and the phone.
His silence is crushing.
“You got the job in DC the day I found out,” I tell him. As badly as it hurts to look at him, I don’t look away. “And I didn’t want you to stay out of obligation then hate me as much as I didn’t want to ruin your dreams because we got swept up in something we didn’t think through.”
He opens his mouth to argue, but I keep going.
“I was trapped between wanting two things: the baby and you. And you were too free to be put in a cage. I damn sure wasn’t going to be the one to try. For better or worse, I made a choice, Nash. For Bennie. For you. For me.”
“Dammit, Rue,” he bites out. “You should have told me. I would have stayed. I—” His voice nearly breaks. “I’ve missed seven years of her life.”
“I know.”
“You know?” he shouts, making me wince and pull the phone from my ear. “Is that supposed to make this better?”
“You think this is what I wanted?” I fight back. “To lie to my kid?”
“Our kid,” he corrects.
I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth. “Our kid.”
“And you were just going to let me sign those papers without telling me?”
He reads my silence as a yes and makes an angry growl. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Yes.” I swallow, rallying the courage to tell him the rest. “My mom wasn’t going to get the surgery if I didn’t.”
“So you had to be blackmailed?” He’s incredulous. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I wince. Because when he says it like that, probably a lot of things.
“What did you tell her about me?” he demands.
“The truth about everything,” I say quickly.
“Your shirts. Your obsession with Ben Franklin—how I came up with her name. Your charm. How much I loved you despite your harmonica.” He fights a smile at this.
“Your laugh. Everything except where you’ve been.
I told her”—I squeeze my eyes shut—“that you died.”
He mutters a swear then blows a strained breath through clenched teeth. When he pulls the phone from his ear and looks at it, I half expect him to throw it.
“I want to know her,” he says.
“Okay.”
“Really know her.”
I smile a little at his conviction. “Okay.”
He drags his hand down his face. “Your fiancé is a piece of work.”
“Ex-fiancé,” I correct him, both of us ending the call and putting our phones away. “And he’s not usually like that. He’s a good man.” We shouldn’t be together, and he came here for the wrong reasons, but guilt chews me up just the same. “Who can’t hold his whiskey.”
A laugh sticks in his throat, and for the first time since I sat down, I touch him with a bump of my shoulder. “Tell me why we’re sitting here.”
“It was on the tour,” he says flatly. “But now that I know you were hiding our child—” He pins me with a look.
“I’ll repeat it. In 1829, this house was a French boarding school for girls run by one Madame Talvande.
A young girl named Maria Whaley was sent here from over on Edisto Island by her father as an attempt to end a love affair she’d been swept up in.
Her father, a colonel, hated the relationship.
The man, George Morris, was older and a northerner.
” Nash shakes his head. “Not a good combo. Maria’s father took all kinds of measures to stop what was building between them, but none worked.
” He gestures with his chin toward the house.
“Thought a boarding school would do the trick and set her straight.”
“Did it?”
“Hell no,” he says. “What makes it such a good story. Maria climbed the school walls to meet Morris every night. One night, they got married before she snuck back in. He showed up the next morning, asked for his wife, surprising everyone when Maria said it was her before riding away with him. They went on to have a good life and a lot of years together. Didn’t bode well for the reputation of the boarding school though. ”
“Hm.” I imagine it all playing out in blurred images of black-and-white characters. “Why do you like that story so much?”
“Reminds me that even the stories with the most unplanned beginnings can have a good ending.” He looks at me then. “Maybe even ones where one person neglects to tell the other about a baby for eight years.”
What I hear: I don’t hate you.
“How mad are you?” I ask, slinking my arm around his until our fingers tangle together. “On a scale of one to ten?”
“Four thousand.” It’s a deserved number. “Doesn’t mean I take anything back I’ve said since you’ve been here.”
I should have known Nash Fletcher would make me swoon at a time like this.
“I’m sorry, Nash.” I swallow. “I’m really, really sorry.”
His slight nod lets me know he hears me, and I grab his face and kiss him until he kisses me back.
Until the way his mouth moves lets me know we’ll be okay.
If the antique shop goes under. If I’m scraping pennies off the street to pay for Mom’s surgery.
And now: as we figure out where we go from here. With Bennie.
Forehead to forehead, he says, “We have a kid.”
“We do.”
“And you’re a pain in the ass.”
We both fight smiles at this.
“I am.”
“I’m pissed.” His eyes let me know he means it. “Really pissed.”
“I know you are.”
“But I know why you did it.” It stuns me to silence. “You were right about a lot of what you said. I was immature. A little selfish with how I wanted to live. The traveling. The houses that weren’t homes. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have dropped it all, but it also doesn’t mean it would’ve come easy.”
My heart trips over itself at his ability to so easily see transgressions and understand mistakes.
He waited, I lied, and he forgives me. Just like that.
If today me could meet eight years ago me, I’d slap that bitch across the face and demand she never let this man go.
Force her to see they’d figure it out together.
He squeezes my hand then pulls me to stand. “We better go get Cap and Sunny before they drink all the liquor in that place or kill Jonathan.”
I almost forgot about that shitshow.
At the nearly empty restaurant, Sunny and Cap are singing karaoke—it’s not a karaoke bar—and Jonathan is gone. The waitress informs us that he was dumped into a cab after he started arguing with the bartender when the bartender cut him off.
Poor guy.
He’ll recover—from me and the hangover he’s going to wake up with. We might not belong together, but he didn’t deserve this.
“Hey, fam,” Sunny shouts into the mic with a slur. “Cappy baby, what song you wanna sing?”
He waves his cane through the air. “Always did like ‘Sweet Caroline.’”
The familiar notes play and their terrible voices collide like cars in a head-on collision; Nash and I sing right along with them. We also close the place down, Nash buying round after round for everyone in the name of fatherhood.
Cap shocks me when he raises his glass and says, “Best job I never knew I wanted.”
He smiles at me, and I smile right back.
Ed was a great dad and a good man and taught me a lot of wonderful things, but maybe I needed a Cap in my life to teach me how to live a little and chase impossible things.
That night before Nash and I crawl into bed, I get a text from Reese: I’ll forget about you being a bastard if you get Mom and Remy away from me.
Mom’s trying to set me up with every blue-collared boy walking down the street (does she even know me?
Tumor must be bigger than we thought) and Remy’s weirder than usual.
I think something’s going on with her and Darren because she keeps saying everything is “so great” in that high-pitched voice.
You know the annoying one she uses when everything isn’t “so great”?
Bennie’s good. Can she still be my niece even if you aren’t my sister? See you in two days.
I laugh, typing, Mom lied about Cap knowing about me—her whole brain might need to be removed. I would say I can’t wait to see everyone, but I forgot you were coming along.
She sends me a picture of her middle finger.
I can’t wait for them to get here.