We were already starting to have problems. Nick and I each got condo apartments in the same building in Los Angeles. It was our way of “living together,” but we were never there anyway. We were both always on the road performing or doing press tours, so our relationship took place mostly on the phone. We would both be exhausted, and I was—surprise!—terrible at the math of figuring out time zones. It was another thing that seemed to set him off. My childishness, which seemed so cute and sweet when I was first with him, seemed to annoy him. Now everything I said seemed to annoy him. We were both concerned about our careers, and our anxieties just seemed to feed off each other. So I stopped calling him as often, even though hearing his voice had become something I came to count on to help me feel safe enough to fall asleep.
I prayed on it constantly, and I decided that he was a good man who deserved a wife. I was two months from turning twenty-one, and I still felt like a child, going from doing everything to please my dad to then doing whatever it was I thought would make Nick happy. I was too dependent on him, and I would never become the independent woman he needed if I kept turning to him for everything. Nick needed a grown-up woman, one who would be willing to start a family soon. That flicker of a feeling with Dan made me wonder if I should take the time to date other guys before committing to forever. Also, I wanted to see who I was, without using another person’s love for me as a measurement of my value. If I put all my attention on a guy, that meant less focus on my career.
“When someone special comes into your life at eighteen years old, your whole world changes,” I wrote in my journal. “For a while, I was so caught up in the puppy love, I could only see perfection. I wanted to take the easy way out and just get married. Thank you, God, for providing me a way to step back and reevaluate my needs. These past couple of weeks, I have found myself. I can do it. People don’t have to do it for me.”
I told him we needed to take a break from each other, just to see what would happen if we both focused solely on work. It wasn’t much of a break because we still talked constantly, which I know frustrated him, and even when interviewers brought Nick up on the press tour for my album Irresistible, I said I was single but still hopelessly in love with him.
I kept telling myself that now I could focus on my career. That seemed like a very grown-up thing to say, and there was a lot to do. On June 4, Columbia threw me a huge record release party at the Water Club in New York City. I arrived on a yacht, and there was a red carpet just for me. Don Ienner and Tommy Mottola were there, flanking me as they gave me a triple-platinum record for Sweet Kisses. There were fifteen minutes of fireworks, and I finally felt like a real star. Ten days later, my Irresistible album came out and would sell 120,000 copies the first week, nearly double what Sweet Kisses did when it debuted.
Nick sent me flowers. “I’m very proud of you and with what you’re doing in your life,” the card read. “I’m happy I can be a part of it. I love you.” I called him that week and started the conversation already angry at him for his absence when I was the one who pushed him away. Nick had this calm, paternal way of talking to me when he had to catch up on a conversation that in my mind was already in progress. He gently reminded me that I had broken up with him. “Our situation is yours to deal with,” he said. “I’m just playing off whatever you give me.”
“Well, what do you want from me?” I fired back.
That made him angry. “There is one thing in life I want to be, Jessica,” he told me. “A good man. A good father. I can’t help it that I fell in love with someone seven years younger than me. I just can’t.”
“I just want to make you happy.”
“Being with you makes me happy,” he said. “I loved us. I don’t have that right now, and it’s something I’m trying to deal with.”
I was certain that one way he was dealing with it was seeing a lot of women, an accusation he said he refused to dignify with a response. I started hanging out with Dan, but that quickly fizzled even though he helped my dancing and onstage confidence tremendously. I think my dad even preferred me dating Nick to Dan. I would tell myself I had no right to be jealous if Nick had a life of his own, and for the rest of that summer—as I toured with Destiny’s Child on the TRL tour, and then began my own Dreamchaser solo tour—we would go through times of calling and not calling each other. I would congratulate myself when I didn’t call him, and then he would call from some stop in Asia, and the cycle would begin again.
I knew Nick was excited about the Michael Jackson tribute concert he was doing at Madison Square Garden on September 10. It was the last night of a three-day tribute to Michael’s thirty years in show business. Nick performed “Man in the Mirror” with 98, Usher, and Luther Vandross, and I knew how much that meant to him. I thought he would call me after, and I told myself not to be jealous that he was invited to do this major event while I sat alone at home nearly three thousand miles away in Los Angeles.
I fell asleep waiting for the call, and when the phone did ring, it was early in the morning. It was Nick, and there was a fear and a rush in his voice I’d never heard. He told me to turn on the news. Planes had hit the World Trade Center, and the towers had already collapsed. I just couldn’t make any sense of the violence. I couldn’t imagine how many people were killed.
“I only want to be with you,” he said.
“Come home to me,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose him. I knew in that instant I wanted to marry him.
All planes were grounded, so the band was trying to hire a van to get them out of the city. Again and again, I told Nick I loved him, and when I hung up the phone, I got down on my knees next to my bed. It felt indecent that God had put this love in my life, and I had the audacity to take it for granted when so many people had just lost those they loved the most.
WHEN NICK AND I GOT BACK TOGETHER, IT WAS SIMPLY UNDERSTOOD that we would marry. We kept it our secret, because my father was already angry that Nick was back in my life. In October, Dad’s mother, my Nanny, got very sick. She had been fighting breast cancer, and now it had gone into her lymph nodes. She had been a nurse, and she knew her hour was near. She wanted to go on her terms, and a wonderful hospice team came to her home.
Nick came with me to see her one last time, and he was my rock. My father couldn’t bear to go into her room, but Nick came in with me. She was beautiful, so sick but still radiating the grace she brought to the demands of being a pastor’s wife. I realized that everything that was good in my life, I had because of her. Nanny had paid to press my first album. She was the reason I had a career at all and the reason I met Nick.
I smoothed her hair back as I told her I was there. She squeezed my hand.
“Nick is here, too, Nanny,” I whispered. “I want you to know we’re back together. I’m gonna marry him, Nanny. Just like you wanted.” She squeezed my hand again. “We’re going to have a beautiful wedding,” I said, “and you’ll always be with me. You’ll be right there.”
She had asked to have my version of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the last song off my second album, on repeat as she passed. As she took her last breath, surrounded by love and her family, my voice filled the room, saying, “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.” It’s a celebration of faith and gratitude that no matter how insignificant we may feel, God is looking out for us.