Dance Away with Me(57)

She bristled. “I’m hardly hiding working at the Broken Chimney.”

“You’re hiding when you don’t want us to be seen in public together.”

“I’m trying not to make any more waves. Work with me.”

He didn’t promise not to show up, but he stopped arguing with her.

Their dinner was long over, but other than getting a bottle for Wren, neither of them stirred. They began to talk about art. He described Paleolithic cave drawings as the original street art and Michelangelo as the first celebrity artist. He spoke of Daumier’s lithographs, Seurat’s dots, and the avant-garde modernists. She expected him to scoff at her passion for Mary Cassatt. Instead, he told her about Berthe Morisot, another female impressionist he thought she would appreciate.

The last spoonful of mango gelato had long ago melted in their bowls when he surprised her by mentioning his mother. “When I was little, she’d take me to the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim—whatever she was in the mood for.”

“A nice memory.”

“There weren’t a lot of them.” He leaned back in his chair, perfectly at ease. “She was a beautiful, alcoholic socialite who could barely take care of herself, let alone protect me from my father.”

Tess’s sense of justice flared. “From what I’ve read, your father should have been tossed in prison for child abuse. Why was he so horrible to you?”

“He was a prick. But also, I wasn’t his kid.”

Tess straightened in her chair. He’d delivered this bombshell as casually as someone giving a weather update. “He wasn’t your father?”

“No. But he didn’t find out about my mother’s affair until I was around five. Too late to take back my name.”

Tess moved Wren to her opposite shoulder. “Your biography doesn’t mention this.”

“I don’t hide it, but I don’t broadcast it, either. Misguided loyalty to my mother, I guess. She’s in a long-term care facility now for dementia. She loved me, but she still looked the other way when the old man was slapping me around—letting me take the punishment for her affair. Her personality has changed with her disease. You couldn’t meet anybody sweeter.”

Tess’s temper blazed. “I don’t care how sweet she is now. She should have protected her child.”

“All women aren’t as fierce as you, Tess.” He actually smiled. “She has no idea who I am when I visit, but she fusses over me the whole time—tries to give me cookies, worries that I’ll catch a chill, takes me around and introduces me to everyone, even though she can’t remember my name.”

“Why didn’t your father divorce her instead of abusing you?” One good thing Tess could say about her own father. He might have abandoned her, but he hadn’t abused her.

“Divorce would have meant admitting he’d made a mistake. And Ian Hamilton North the Third could never make a mistake.” His expression hardened. “Pride was everything to him. He treated the North family name as if it were a holy relic. You can imagine how it enraged him to see that name sprayed on trash bins and Porta-Potties.”

“What about your biological father?”

“An actor. He made a couple of films in the eighties before his career crashed. We had an uncomfortable meeting about ten years ago, and neither of us has any desire to repeat the experience.”

“What you went through as a child was horrible. But you’re so dispassionate about it. How do you do that?”

“I’m not an emotional person, Tess. You know that. I’m pragmatic. I approach life analytically. That doesn’t mean I’m unfeeling. It means I don’t let those feelings rule me. A healthy degree of detachment makes life easier.”

She’d seen the anger in his work, and she didn’t buy his explanation, especially when she thought about his mother. The woman who’d purportedly loved him had never interceded to protect him from his father’s horrors. Was it possible if, instead of feeling too little, he felt too much?

“Don’t look so stricken,” he said. “When I was seventeen, I got even. I beat the shit out of my father. He couldn’t call the cops because it would have brought even more shame on the North family name than my arrests.”

“Some people should never have been born.” Wren let out a little wheeze. Tess cuddled her against her neck. “Not you, sweetheart. You should definitely have been born.”

And the Dennings were coming in five days to take her away.

*

Tess couldn’t do anything right at work. She mixed up orders, dropped a tray of mugs, and when Freddy Davis came in, burned herself on the espresso machine. She only wanted to be with Wren. But being with her was sometimes worse than being separated. Taking in the little sounds she made—the squeaks and yawns, her baby snores. Her perfect deliciousness.

She and Ian didn’t repeat their dinnertime coziness, but each day when she got back from the Broken Chimney, he took Wren from her and ordered her to rest.

*

She stayed home on the last day before she had to hand Wren over to the Dennings and kept her cradled to her body. At bedtime, she propped herself against the headboard and held Wren through the night. “It’s going to be all right, my little one,” she whispered. “They’ll take good care of you. They will.”