The Billionaire's Embrace (The Silver Cross Club) (17 page)

I wouldn’t have to do anything in terms of actually getting him
into
college. I was confident that Nelson had that part covered.

That afternoon, we went to the Bronx Zoo. It was cold, but we agreed that winter was the best time to visit the zoo, because we had the entire place practically to ourselves. Nelson showed little interest in the charismatic megafauna—“They’re big,” he said about the elephants, looking unimpressed—but he would have spent all day in the reptile house if I let him. I didn’t find frogs particularly interesting, but Nelson’s excitement was contagious, and I had to dredge my memories of high school biology to answer his questions about camouflage and toxicity.

“So why don’t they just make themselves brown, like the lizards? They can’t get eaten if nothing can see them,” Nelson said. “Why go to all the trouble of making themselves blue?”

“I don’t know, Nelson,” I said, for the fourth time in a row. “Why don’t we find a book about amphibians?”

“I thought you were supposed to know this stuff,” he said, and shook his head slowly, so like his mother in his disappointment that I couldn’t help but laugh.

We had pizza for lunch, at the overpriced cafeteria, and he said, “You’re acting all sad and stuff.”

“Am I?” I asked. I didn’t think I was behaving any differently than I usually did.

“Yeah. Like, quiet,” Nelson said. “Was somebody mean to you?”

I smiled at him. For all his sharp intellect, Nelson was still very much a child in some ways. “Sure,” I said. “You could say that. It’s not a big deal. Let’s finish eating and go look at the monkeys, okay?”

He didn’t mention it again, and was so worn out by the time we left the zoo that he fell asleep in the car on the way back. His mother took one look at him and said, “Oh Lord, dinner and straight to bed with you, kid.” He nodded sleepily and shuffled inside.

“Sorry,” I said. “You know how he gets.”

“Oh, I know all too well,” she said. “You won’t come in for dinner, will you?”

I shook my head. She always asked, and I always refused. I didn’t want to impose. “I still have some work to take care of tonight. Tell him good luck at his competition tomorrow.”

“I will,” she said. “Thank you. I know he’ll have all sorts of stories to tell me about those animals.”

“Make sure to ask him about the frogs,” I said, and waved to her as I walked back to my car.

I thought about it over the next few days.
Was
I acting sad? I didn’t think so, but nobody could accuse me of being excessively self-aware.

I asked my mother about it, when I had dinner with her on Tuesday night.

She set down her fork and gave me a piercing look. “You seem perfectly ordinary to me. Is it about that girl you’re seeing? Oh, what was her name—”

“Regan,” I said. My mother hadn’t forgotten a name in all the years I’d known her; she being deliberate obtuse in an attempt to annoy me.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “My mind isn’t what it used to be. Old age, you know.”

I rolled my eyes and took another bite of food. I wasn’t going to embark upon this conversation.

“She seemed like a very nice girl,” my mother continued, obviously unwilling to let it rest.

“I’m not seeing her anymore,” I said stiffly. This wasn’t a topic I was eager to discuss.

“Oh?” my mother said, perking up. “That’s a shame, although I have to say, she didn’t seem as though she would be capable of meeting the demands placed on a politician’s wife. She didn’t have any fire in her.”

That was completely untrue. Regan’s fire was banked down to hot coats, but it still burned fiercely. She had, I suspected, spent most of her life trying to extinguish it altogether, and she hid it well, but I had caught enough glimpses to know that it was there. But I had no interest in defending her. She had left me—thrown me away with a five-minute phone conversation that let me know exactly how little I meant to her. So I merely said, “Mother. I’m not going into politics.”

“Of course you aren’t, dear,” she said, which meant she had already started planning the first campaign.

She didn’t push the issue further. We finished our meal with a pleasant discussion of the new exhibit opening at the Guggenheim. Then, over dessert and coffee, I said, “I’d like to ask you a question about Father.”

It was a sensitive subject, and not one I broached lightly. My mother raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Go ahead.”

“Why did you take him back? After he left,” I said. “What made you do it?”

She sipped her coffee and looked at me over the rim of her cup. “Why are you bringing that up now?”

I couldn’t have said, other than that I had spent the last few months thinking about loss, and my father leaving had been the first time I realized that I wasn’t the center of the universe, that other people had inner lives, and that even the people who were supposed to love me the most would abandon me if it suited them.

I was eleven when my mother discovered that my father had been having an affair for the past two years with a woman in her garden club, the young wife of a plastic surgeon. I still remembered the late-night arguments behind closed doors, after they both thought I had gone to sleep. It ended with my father moving out. He was gone for almost five years, and during that time I saw him on only a handful of occasions. He traveled a lot in those years, working on expanding the business overseas, and he had no time for the adolescent son who missed and needed him.

I never knew what led to my parents’ eventual reconciliation, and I had never asked. I woke up one morning and my father was sitting at the breakfast table, and that was that. It was never discussed, and I did my best to forgive him and put the past behind me, but his absence hurt me deeply. We never regained the closeness we had when I was a child, and even when he was on his deathbed I found that I couldn’t relinquish my resentment.

“I always wondered,” I said. “He was gone, and then he came back, and neither of you ever explained it to me.”

“No,” my mother said. “We didn’t.” She took another sip of coffee. “We probably should have. Carter, there are some things in life, about duty, and loyalty, and turning the other cheek, that are impossible to explain. You’ll have to learn those lessons yourself. Your father and I both made many mistakes. I chose, in the end, to forgive his, and he forgave mine.”

“He left me,” I said, a plaintive whine that broke out of me without permission. I hadn’t intended to say that.

“He left both of us,” my mother said, unsympathetic, and finished her coffee.

That was that. My mother was clearly not going to be a good source of insight into my emotional state. I abandoned that notion and instead took Carolina out for lunch at her favorite Chelsea hotspot. She was happy to accept my invitation, and happy to drink three mimosas and order the most expensive item on the menu.

I would expect no less from Carolina, of course. She was one of two people I considered an actual friend, the other being Elliott, who was currently “finding himself” somewhere in Southeast Asia. I had known the two of them since we were all snot-nosed brats at a tony private school on the Upper East Side. When I was younger, I had a wide and varied circle of companions, but as I grew older I realized that most of them were interested in me only for what I could do for them. One particularly painful incident had led me to cut ties with most of those so-called friends. Carolina and Elliott were the only ones who had stuck with me through thick and thin, wild parties and the hungover aftermaths, terrible breakups, post-adolescent ennui, and everything in between. I trusted that they would never take advantage of me.

Well, Carolina was always willing to take advantage of my credit card, but that was different.

She spent a good quarter of an hour chattering about her latest photoshoot, and then set down her mimosa and said, “Very well, you asked me to lunch for a reason other than to listen to my silly model talk. Out with it.”

There was no point in beating around the bush. “Nelson told me that I seem sad,” I said.

She laughed. “Is that all? Poor Carter, so unaccustomed to having emotions. No, you don’t seem sad. It’s only that you were much happier when you were dating that woman. Nelson is noticing the contrast, I think.” She leaned toward me across the narrow table. “You pretend otherwise, but she obviously meant a great deal to you. But you have mourned long enough, I think.”

“I’m not mourning,” I said. “We were only together for a about a month. It wasn’t serious.”

“Of course,” Carolina said. “Whatever you say. You will go on a date with my friend, then, yes? She is very beautiful, and she just arrived in New York and knows nobody.”

“Except for you, clearly,” I said. This was classic Carolina—she always had a friend who was new in town and needed to be shown the sights.

“Oh, I don’t count,” she said, with an airy wave of her hand. “Say you will take her out. It will be good for both of you. You are far too serious, Carter. Spend less time working and enjoy yourself. Soon you will be too old to have any fun.”

“I’m thirty-one,” I pointed out.

“Yes, exactly,” Carolina said. “Oh, don’t remind me that we’re all in our thirties now. I cannot think of it, I’ll grow wrinkles just from the thought.”

“You don’t look a day over eighteen,” I told her loyally. I was fudging the truth, but only slightly: she was still as fresh-faced and wide-eyed as she’d been in her early twenties.

“What a flatterer,” Carolina said, but she looked pleased. “So my friend—”

“Yes, okay,” I said, succumbing to the inevitable. It was one evening. The worst that could happen was that she would be incredibly boring. And I couldn’t spend the rest of my life feeling sorry for myself. “Fine. I’ll go on a date with her. Are you happy?”

“Immensely,” Carolina said, beaming.

* * *

T
he girl’s name was Jenna, which sounded suspiciously Middle America for someone Carolina claimed to be friends with. I met her on Friday evening at one of my favorite restaurants in Midtown. I made sure to arrive fifteen minutes early, so that I was seated and had already ordered a bottle of wine by the time the maitre d’ escorted her to the table.

She was, as Carolina had promised, very beautiful: long auburn hair waving loose over her shoulders, a full mouth, high cheekbones. She wore a low-cut dress that revealed ample breasts lightly dusted with freckles. I appreciated a woman who knew how to display her assets to good effect.

I rose as she approached the table, and bent over her hand, very gallant, and kissed her knuckles. She blushed prettily and said, “Am I at the right table?”

I laughed. “Did Carolina make you think I’m a complete ogre? I’ve got my work cut out for me, in that case.” I pulled out her chair for her while the maitre d’ uncorked and poured the wine, and she sat and smiled up at me in thanks.

She really was very lovely. Even if the date went horribly, at least I would have a nice view. I could think of worse ways to spend a Friday night than admiring Jenna’s cleavage.

“So, how did you and Carolina meet?” I asked. Not the most interesting opening, but I’d found that the simple approach was often the best—both in business, and with women.

“Summer camp, actually,” Jenna said, smiling. “In high school. Well, I was in high school. Carolina was my counselor. We stayed in touch, and when I told her I was moving to New York, she helped me find an apartment and get settled in. She’s been so helpful. I would be completely lost without her.”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten about her camp counselor days,” I said. “She did that all through college, didn’t she? I still can’t believe that anyone put her in charge of helpless children.”

“Miraculously, none of us died,” Jenna said. “Don’t tell Carolina I said that! It’s just, she was afraid of everything—”

“The snakes, the pine needles,” I said. “I can imagine. Well, I’m glad you survived that experience.”

“Only a little worse for the wear,” she said. She picked up her glass and swirled the wine around. “Is this any good?”

I pressed a hand to my chest in mock affront. “I would never order anything but the very best.”

She grinned. “That’s right, you’re some kind of fancy businessman, aren’t you? Carolina told me you run some sort of company, but I’ve made it a policy not to go digging around on the internet before the first date.”

“You’re a wise woman,” I said, amused. “Did you move here to be a model?”

“Wow, you think I look like a model?” she asked. “I’m flattered. No, I’m an actuary. I’ve been living in Boston for the last few years, but my job gave me the option to transfer to the New York office, and I thought it would be nice to have a change of scenery.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed. Beautiful
and
intelligent? This woman was the full package. “Tell me about your work,” I said. “How did you decide to become an actuary? I thought all little girls dreamed about riding horses professionally.”

“What a horrible stereotype,” she said, laughing and shaking her hair over her shoulder. “See, I took this statistics course...”

She told me about how she started college intending to be an English major and ended up with a degree in mathematics, and how she loved her work even though it wasn’t glamorous or exciting. Her hands moved as she spoke, and I watched her, thinking about that I should have been plotting to end the night with her in my bed—but I wasn’t. There was no spark. The first time I saw Regan, it was like sticking a fork in an outlet. Talking to Jenna was more like looking at the outlet, knowing that it held a current, and seeing no reason to investigate further. I could already predict how the evening was going to play out. We would have a nice meal and an interesting conversation, and at the end of the night, I would leave alone.

I didn’t know what in God’s name was wrong with me.

Or, more accurately: I knew, but I preferred not to think about it.

It wasn’t Jenna’s fault, though, and it wouldn’t be fair to punish her for my inability to move on with my life. I had agreed to this date; it was my responsibility to ensure that Jenna had a good time. I did my best to be entertaining and attentive company, asking her questions about herself, how she liked New York so far, whether she had picked a baseball team yet. And she made it easy for me, laughing at my weak attempts at humor, teasing me about how she thought fancy businessmen were supposed to rent out the entire restaurant when they had a date. If I had met her six months earlier, I would have been completely smitten.