More Than Words(45)

Tim looked down, into his cup of coffee. “Your father was a good man, Nina. Don’t let that get lost in all of this.” Then he looked up and Nina was surprised to see tears in his eyes. “I loved him, too, you know.”

“I know,” she said, and leaned over to hug Tim. Love was complicated. It didn’t disappear because someone did something horrible, something you didn’t agree with. It lived there, with the disappointment, the disapproval. You had to figure out how to hold both of them in your heart, or you’d lose everyone, everything. Nina had been struggling with that her whole adult life. Now, it seemed, Tim was, too.

They spent the rest of the day going through the house, opening drawers and closets, finding a scarf that Nina threw around her neck, a stack of magazines from December 1992, and Nina’s old umbrella, pink with red hearts, that years ago she’d assumed had gotten left behind at a restaurant or forgotten at a birthday party.

“I’m surprised no one cleaned this place out,” Tim said, as they found a pile of board games in a cabinet. Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Scrabble.

“Me too,” Nina answered. “This seems like it would’ve been a job for Super Caro.”

Tim smiled. “I won’t ask her unless you want me to, but I bet she knows more than we do.”

Nina figured she probably did, but still wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Her vision of her father had already changed last night. She wasn’t sure how much more information she could handle at the moment.

She looked over at Tim and ran her thumb over the band of the engagement ring on her finger. She’d thought Tim had been her last gift from her father. But now she wondered. Did her father know anything about love at all?





44



When they got back to the city, Nina dropped Tim off at his place before heading over to her father’s garage to park the car.

“You sure you don’t want me to come?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” Nina said. She needed some time by herself to process, to think.

Tim assessed her for a beat longer than he might have a few weeks ago, then said, “Okay, sounds good. You’ll wear the ring around your neck?”

Nina nodded. “On a chain so it hangs next to my heart.”

They’d decided that made the most sense for now. That way there would be no questions until they were ready with answers.

“And we’ll go over those financials together tomorrow? Two MBAs are better than one?” He was trying to make her laugh. Nina appreciated it.

“Sure,” she said. “With the two of us looking together, I bet we can figure out what my dad meant. And if we don’t, we can always call Irv.”

They’d talked about it that morning, what her father might have wanted to say. It was something else that Tim suggested they ask his parents—TJ specifically—but Nina thought that if her father had wanted TJ to tell her whatever it was, he would’ve made that happen. Maybe it was something even TJ didn’t know. They’d decided Irv, the Gregory Corporation’s CFO, would be backup. But Nina felt the same way about him that she did about TJ—if her father had wanted Irv to tell her, he would’ve made that happen.

“Nina and Tim, friends until the end,” Tim said, which made Nina smile.

As she drove back across town, she thought, almost as if it were a reflex: I haven’t spoken to my dad in a while, and then realized afresh when she went to grab her phone that he was gone. That she’d never speak to him again. And that he’d lied to her. So profoundly. How could he leave, knowing that this secret existed, that if she discovered it, he wouldn’t be there to help her through it? Was that why he’d told her she should be with Tim? Because she’d need someone to support her when the tectonic plates of her life shifted? When her father tumbled off his pedestal? How could he do this to her?

Nina couldn’t stop the tears that came to her eyes then, hot and angry. They blurred her vision as she drove, and all of a sudden she thought about how her mother had died. An icy road, she knew. Up in the country. The car had gone out of control. She’d hit a tree. The car was totaled. And she was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

But was it just ice? Or could it have been tears that made her veer off the road? Had her father’s affair killed her mother? And if it had, would anyone ever know? That would be the worst headline Nina could ever think of. Joseph Gregory’s Affair Kills Wife. Leaves Young Daughter Motherless.

A taxi honked behind Nina, and she took a moment to wipe her eyes before she stepped on the gas. There was no way she was going to let sorrow end her life. She would not let history repeat itself. Not now. Not ever.





45



It felt good to be home. Nina had taken out her contact lenses and filled up her bathtub with some fancy bubble bath Leslie had sent over a few months before. An “I saw this and thought of you” gift, which was Leslie’s thing. She didn’t celebrate Christmas and sent beautiful cards on birthdays but said that people got so many gifts then, it seemed silly to add to the pile. Instead, she bought presents when she saw things she thought her friends and family would like. It was actually nice—gifts arriving when you least expected them.

Nina looked at her naked body in the bathroom mirror and thought: This body is now engaged to Tim. It was a crazy thought. Yesterday her body had been her own; now it felt like it was partially his. It was amazing to think about how quickly a world could shift. Yesterday I had a parent, today I don’t. Yesterday I was working on a campaign, today I’m not. Yesterday Tim was just my present, today he’s my future. It hurt her brain to think about it.