After all the festivities of the day, Cole gives me another tight hug, saying he has a flight to catch but I had this feeling that he was uncomfortable and on edge the whole time he was here.
I expect him not to say anything about Julian, keeping with our non-verbal agreement to let the past be, but when he pulls me aside at the restaurant John booked for my celebratory dinner, I see it in his eyes.
“I was told to give you a little something,” he had said.
“I don’t want anything from him.”
“Mia, he said—”
“Throw it away, whatever it is or burn it if you can, but I don’t want it.”
“Maybe you’re being too rash—”
“It’s been four years. I’ve moved on. I don’t give a damn anymore.”
He just stared down at me, then wrapped me in his arms so softly and carefully, my heart kinda broke at his continued sincerity with me.
“Maybe I’m just an optimistic, sentimental fool but to me, you two are not over, baby girl. Not by a long shot.”
And with that, he places a kiss on my forehead and then he’s gone.
Liam on the other hand doesn’t even talk about his brother. He just glares at his father all night, drinking and checking his phone obsessively, like he’s waiting on something.
“Why don’t you just call first.”
“Call who?” he says, looking alarmed. That look in his eyes though…
“Roxy,” I whisper. “Or is it her twin, Kendra?”
His face tightens almost immediately. His jaw clenches, making him look like a pissed off, perfectly etched marble statue.
“Did you call Julian?” he fires right back and that’s how Liam and I hurt each other. We go for the deepest wound but in his case, I have no idea what happened between him and Roxy.
It’s later when John asks to talk to me in private. I’m not sure what he wants to say, but I just follow him to a private room off the private dining room we’re in.
“Before you say anything, John. I don’t want to hear anything about your older son or about your stepbrother,” I say as soon as the door closes.
“I’m not here to cause you any anguish, Mia,” John says softly. “I just… please sit.”
I’m skeptical at first but I drop down into one of the fancy chairs close to the faux fireplace. John takes the one opposite me.
“I was fourteen when I met Nancy,” he starts. My head whips up to look at him as soon as he says those words. I wasn’t expecting him to say that. No one talks about Nancy and John and John doesn’t seem like the type to just offer up information.
“That was pretty young.”
Who am I to say that? I was the same age when I met Julian.
“Yes,” he says with a small smile. “But I used to tell her that it wasn’t fair. I wished I had known her years before that, maybe then we would have had longer together.”
Holy shit!
“I met her at this friend’s party. She was literally the life of that party, but she did in such a way that had so much grace and class. She was considerate of others, and when she smiled, I promise you, people would gasp at her beauty. She just shined so bright that girl.”
I don’t know what to say to that, but I’m fully engaged. John is looking at the flames, as if deep in thought.
“I won’t waste my time by keeping this PG even thought I know Nicky and even Nancy would kill me for being this blunt, but I wanted her from that moment,” John says, now looking at me. “You have to understand, at that time, I was just a mess. I was getting in all sorts of trouble. My parents were… well, there we so many wrong turns that have brought me here where my oldest son assumed responsibility of my own brother because I couldn’t step up to the bitch of a woman I married through a contract.”
My breath catches as soon as he says that.
“In all that time, it was Nancy who got me through my mother’s illness and the way my father became an abusive jerk who sunk us so deep in debt, here we are. It didn’t surprise me when he married Helen Montague.”
“Nathan’s mother?”
“Yes, that bitch. She liked was something else, and she came with her own set of trouble into a house that was already in shambles,” he says. “She’s the one who introduced my father to some pretty dark stuff. And it’s from there that my father found the Mason family from where…”
Courtney was bred into the bitch she is.”
“Precisely,” John says. “This is why I like you.”
I can’t help but smile at that, but I do have one question.
“If you had the chance, if the contract wasn’t signed, if you could change things, would you have married Nancy?”
“In a heartbeat,” he says almost immediately. The way he says it reminds me of his son, and again, my grief strings start knotting together. “If only she had accepted any one of my four proposals.”
“What? You proposed four times?”
“Hmm, five if you count the day we met,” he says casually. “I mean, with what was happening at the place I called home and what was happening at her house, there we some periods of time we couldn’t see each other. And even after my father died in a car accident, I couldn’t see Nancy for at least four years.”
I can hear the pain in his voice as he says that. The regret is so potent it travels down my back like a shiver.
“Why was that?” I ask. This time, he looks at me, holding my gaze as if he’s about to relay some pretty important information.
“Because of the responsibilities I had to assume,” he says simply.
Silence. I don’t have to read in between the lines to get what he means.
“You mean you took over the family business?” I mutter.
“In a way, yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t exactly divulge much about it, but I wanted to tell you something,” he says, watching me. “I don’t know if you remember me but there was time, when you were maybe five or six, you, Nancy, Julian and I took a trip to Paris.”
“Excuse me?” I whisper. He just smiles.
“It was a last-minute trip on my part. I knew Nancy wanted an out, I mean, it’s because of you years later after she’s gone that I now know that she hid a lot of stuff from me because if I knew what that imbecile was doing to her…”
“I don’t think she could face telling you,” I mumble. I’ve had some time to think about a lot and one those things is this. Why didn’t Nancy go to the love of her life for help. Then it came to me. “She was a proud woman who never backed down but more than that, she wanted to protect me.”
John is quiet for beat.
“It was on that trip that I asked her to marry me for the last time,” he says. “I mean don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly aware of the fine print of the contract I’d signed years earlier but still I took my shot because Nancy… people don’t get that kind of love all the time. Only a few people are ever truly in love but she, she was the essence of my life.”
I don’t know that I’m crying until I feel the wet trails in my face.
“Do you know what happened to Nathan?” I finally ask.