by Wendy Silk
“I can’t tell you the whole story,” Hailey replied. “I’ve promised not to tell anybody. But there’s something that he’s holding over her. Something that he’s threatened to do to hurt her. You know, he’s really not even somebody we knew before they started dating. He’s a business partner of Nathan’s. Maybe that’s who you should ask. Or better yet, ask Jennifer, Amanda’s mom. She’s always been a friend to me.”
Billy looked as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to go poking around in the family secrets of a woman that he had just left for good. He hadn’t told Hailey that he had just broken it off with Amanda, but his face made it clear that something serious had just occurred between them.
He limited himself to replying, “I don’t think Amanda and I have a future together. What am I saying? Of course we don’t have a future together. She’s told me that in no uncertain terms.”
Billy stood quickly, looking down at Hailey, who remained seated, lost in thought. He nodded goodbye to her and left. She watched him walk away, wondering if her best friend had just thrown away the best thing that had ever happened to her, to try to keep the worst.
Chapter 21: Desolation
Amanda turned up the collar of her coat. As she stepped out of the car in front of her family’s imposing limestone co-op building, she felt the chill in the early fall Manhattan air and shivered. What a contrast, to come here from the heavy warmth of the South, where the insects still chirped at night, as they had when she and Billy found the empty shed in the woods.
Now that she was back in New York, she didn’t feel the joyful recognition of her home that she had anticipated. She had thought she would be glad to return to the place where she had lived for years, where at least she knew who she was. But this didn’t feel like home anymore. Maybe her brief time in Austin had changed her enough that she wasn’t the same person who had left.
Amanda paid the cab driver, and swiftly entered the building, nodding at the doorman’s polite smile. She carried only one small leather bag at her side. As she stood in the elevator, she fidgeted with the handle of her case. Her nerves were getting the better of her. Fidgeting was for unempowered teenagers, not grown women who could make their own choices.
The elevator doors opened. Jennifer was waiting there in the entry hall, somehow exactly where Amanda had needed her. For years, it had been like that; it was only recently that she had felt her bond with her mom slipping away. She had thought it was Nathan’s fault. He had always been remote, but his patrician reserve had reached new levels in the past few years. Looking back, though, Amanda saw that she too had pulled away from both of them, placing more importance on her own independence than on the needs of her own family.
“My girl,” Jennifer spoke into Amanda’s hair as they embraced. “It’s been too long. But also not long enough!” She chuckled. “You said you were going to take a whole year of grad school before you married Michael. Why did you decide to come back? I’m glad to see you, of course.” She was still smiling, but her face held a hint of real concern. After the strain of her daughter’s engagement to Michael, it had appeared to be an ideal solution when Amanda had announced that she was going to take a year on her own.
“Mom,” Amanda gulped, closer to tears than she had known. “I know, I’ve come back so suddenly. I really did plan to stay for a year. It just...it just didn’t work out.”
“When did you know you were coming back? I only got your call yesterday, but did you have time to pack anything?” Jennifer waved her long fingers at the single leather shoulder bag that her daughter had carried in herself.
Amanda teased, “Mom, are you really just wondering where all my nice clothes are? I swear, you love those clothes far more than I do. I left them behind. We can have movers pack everything up for me and ship it to New York. I won’t be going back.”
Jennifer took in the finality of this declaration. “Did you have a fight with Hailey?” She held her breath, worried that her daughter had split from her oldest friend. “I know you two are very different, but that’s always been a good thing. She keeps you steady when you fly off into rash situations. And you lend, um, spontaneity to her steadiness.”
“Yeah, rash situations, that sounds about right,” Amanda replied. “No, Hailey and I are fine. At least I think we are. Even if we’re not, we’ll always be able to fix what might be wrong between us. I’m not worried about that.”
She didn’t know how to explain to her mom the text she had gotten from Hailey yesterday. It had read only: “I didn’t sell you out--didn’t tip off that photo guy.” That had been a welcome relief to her, to know that her friend was still as loyal as ever. Somebody else had told him where to find her, she was sure of it. Could it have been Billy himself? Had he been trying to put her in a position where she had to admit Michael’s existence to him? She wasn’t sure if that idea made any sense. Nothing did right now.
Jennifer looked more closely at Amanda. “If it’s not something with Hailey, then it must be a man. Do you want to tell me what happened?” She still had an arm around Amanda’s shoulder as they walked to the plush white couch, and she squeezed her in a gentle hug as she spoke.
Amanda shook her head. “Mom, I don’t know how much I can explain about this. There was somebody. I know I’m engaged to Michael, but I guess I thought this year in Austin would allow me to still spend some time with other guys. I thought I could date a little bit, just have some fun, you know? But there was only one man that I met who meant anything to me. It was important. But I acted like a total idiot and I scared him off.”
“Important? That’s an interesting word to choose.” Jennifer’s background was as a school psychologist and it often showed in the way she listened carefully
“Oh Mom,” Amanda wriggled away. “I really can’t talk about it yet. I kind of hate myself right now for making stupid decisions.” She changed the subject. “When is Nathan getting back? It’s already late enough that he should have left the office.”
Jennifer accepted the change of subject. “No, we probably won’t see him for a while. He’s been busier at work than I’ve ever seen him before. He and Michael are supposed to be closing a big company merger together. Lots of money changing hands.” Her hand waved vaguely around the room, referring to the entirety of Manhattan, where money was always in flux.
“Mom, you really love Nathan, don’t you? I’ve wondered before. I hope it’s ok if I ask you this. I’ve wondered if you married him partly for the money. For the security.” Amanda let the words tumble out, but then was unsure if it was going too far to actually ask her mother such a question.
Jennifer had heard it all before, though. She had been a widow from nowhere who had married the most eligible permanent bachelor on the Upper East Side, taking him away from the younger and richer women who had hoped they had a chance with him. So much gossip had already reached her ears about those days that she was immune to the topic.
“Amanda, you’re not the first person to ask me that. I think most of Nathan’s friends wondered that when we married, and perhaps some of mine as well. I don’t mind, because I know it’s not the least bit true. It’s hard to see sometimes, but Nathan is a good man. He has faults just as everybody does. But he has been an excellent stepfather to you and a loving husband to me. He likes things the way he likes them, that’s true. I know it can make him hard to be around. But I understand that about him and I love him very much. I wouldn’t ever marry for money.”
Jennifer scrutinized her beautiful daughter, whom she knew had more passion than sense when it came to men. She asked quietly, “Would you, Amanda?”
Amanda startled as if she had been pricked with a pin. “No!”
After her hurried exodus from Austin and the strain of her goodbye with Billy, she found the accusation to be too much. Tears began to run down her cheeks. She almost never cried; she had prided herself on never crying about a man before. No tears had come when Billy had walked out last night. Now, however, sitting next to her mother,
it all became more than she could handle.
“You think I would marry Michael for money?” she whispered. “Why does everybody think that money is the only thing that matters to me?” She shifted in her seat, aware that she would not be able to unburden herself even now, to her own mother. “I’m marrying Michael because I want to,” she stated firmly. “Because I love him.” With the last words, she became still enough that she could almost hear Billy’s voice, as he made the same declaration to her.
Jennifer could see that the conversation had stalled with the mention of Michael. She tried a new tack. “Amanda, maybe what you really want to know is whether I loved your father.”
At that, Amanda raised her head, eager to hear more. She knew so little about her parents’ marriage. When her father died in a car accident, she was only seven. She remembered him well from a child’s perspective, and she knew that she had loved him fiercely. As she had grown old enough to seek romantic love in her own life, she had wished she knew more about what their relationship had been like. She had shied away from asking Jennifer about it, though, fearing it would make her sad.
Jennifer saw that Amanda was listening closely, and she continued. “He was the love of my life, did you know that? You must have. Nathan knows how I felt about him. It’s ok for me to say it out loud. It was nothing like me and Nathan. We were young, Brian and I, and we were so different. Did you know that he came from ‘the wrong side of the tracks?’ His parents were poor farmers from the panhandle. He was so smart and ambitious that it never mattered. He made himself into what he wanted to be, and he swept me up with him. It was like electricity flowing between us when we were together. We were always right for each other, like a kind of magic. We just fit.”
Seeing her mother flush as she spoke of a man who had been gone for a decade made Amanda sad. Why had her father been taken so soon? Her mother’s account of him was new to her. She had faint memories of her parents holding hands as they walked together, kissing when her father came home. All these years, though, she had not wanted to ask too much about her father, in case it was too painful for her mother to remember.
“Mom, I don’t think you ever told me he grew up poor. How could I not have known that? I can’t even remember meeting anybody in his family. It’s been so long since Gran and Gramps died, and there wasn’t anybody else.”
“Oh, it was never important to me,” Jennifer answered. “I forgot about his poor upbringing the moment I spoke to him the first time, the moment we touched. We had a very strong physical connection.” She saw that Amanda was uncomfortable. “Sorry, I don’t mean to embarrass you by telling you stories about your parents having sex. I figured you knew we did it at least once, though.” She laughed.
“Mom, no, it’s not that,” Amanda smiled ruefully. “It’s that I’m thinking about myself and the man I met. I’ve made terrible mistakes. I wish I’d been more like you. I kept fixating on things that weren’t important and turning them into a big deal. Maybe I needed to distract myself from how powerful my feelings were because they scared me.”
Jennifer looked at her soberly. “Does this mean that it’s over with the man you met in Austin?”
Amanda broke down, lowering her head into her hands. “It’s completely over. I ruined it. He was kind and generous with me. He gave me a hundred chances to change, but I just kept stubbing my toes on my own prejudice. Now that he knows what I’m really like, we could never make it work. I’m sure of it.
Chapter 22: Capitulation
Amanda had been home for a week when she finally saw Michael for the first time since her return to New York. She hadn’t called him. She knew that Nathan would mention to him that she was back. When he wanted to get in touch, that would be soon enough for her.
On Friday evening, she and Jennifer were alone in the apartment, sitting cozily together without talking, each with a glass of wine and a book. They had shared a simple dinner, just the two of them. As had happened every evening that week, Nathan had stayed at his office for a long workday, only returning in the dark hours when his family was asleep. Amanda understood from Jennifer that it was just that he was spending hours poring over contracts with Michael as they prepared for the deadline of the corporate merger they were handling. Was this what it would be like to be married to Michael?
The two women looked up in surprise as the elevator door opened and Michael and Nathan’s voices drifted ahead of them into the living room. Jennifer rose smoothly and headed to the hallway to kiss her husband hello. Amanda knew she should offer Michael a similar greeting--it had been months since she had seen him--but she hung back.
“Amanda!” Nathan’s loud voice preceded him into the room. Now that Amanda knew that her mom was genuinely happy with him, he did appear less overbearing. There was no denying that he tried to take control of every situation, including matching her up with Michael for his own reasons. But perhaps he was doing the best that he knew how. His motivation for convincing her to marry Michael had been founded in his love for Jennifer, after all. Her attitude toward him softened slightly as she accepted his hug.
Seeing Michael enter the room, Amanda knew that she could never change her mind about him. He reached for her with an wooden grasp that bore more resemblance to a torture device than an embrace. He sent her an approximation of a smile, but he did not pause to ask her about her time in Austin, or how her travel had been. Instead, he turned back to Nathan to continue his harangue about their business deal.
“I think we’ve got them right where we want them now, Nathan. We’ve hammered them down to just what we need. We’ll be able to close the deal on Monday, I have no doubt of it. This merger is going to shock everybody. We just need to make sure we buy the stock we’ve planned before it all goes public. You’ll be setting it up through the offshore holding company, like last time?”
Nathan shook his head at Michael sternly. “No talking business here at the house. You know that’s a strict rule here.”
Michael shrugged off the admonition with a gesture that showed little respect for the older man. “All I care about is that we secure those profits. You know that’s what we’ve been working toward. Doesn’t matter how we do it. And it really doesn’t matter who hears us talking about it. Your family name is what keeps us both safe from the SEC. Nobody can touch you unless they have the actual proof of your offshore accounts. Rumors aren’t worth worrying about.”
Nathan silently acquiesced, but at the same time, subtly steered Michael back toward the elevator doors. “It’s been a long day. A long week. Let’s regroup on Monday. When we have the contracts signed, we’ll all have a celebratory dinner.” He glanced back at Amanda. “Maybe we’ll talk about some wedding planning then, hmm?”
Without waiting for Michael to respond, Nathan nodded coolly at him and returned to the women. Never had Amanda seen him so short with Michael. Was it possible that they were no longer as close as they had been? She began to feel a glimmer of hope. If she could just talk to Nathan about how revolting she found Michael, perhaps there was a way out of this trap.
Amanda’s hopes sank in the next moment, as Nathan sat down heavily next to Jennifer on the crisp white couch. He lowered his head and said in flat tones, “I think that Michael and I are both going to end up in prison. I’m so sorry, Jen.”
Jennifer’s eyes registered her shock. “Nathan, what are you talking about? Tell me what you’ve been doing. Was he telling the truth just now? Are you hiding your trading deliberately by using offshore proxies? I can’t believe you’d do that: even I know that’s illegal.”
“Oh, I wish I knew what I’ve been doing. I don’t even know how it got started. It’s been going on for a years now. I thought I could pull off a few trades on the market that I should have left alone. Deals that I was too close to. I never told you that I was investigated once already for insider trading, before we met.”
Jennifer’s face was a study in conflicting emotions. She felt sorry for her husband’s despair, but at the
same time, her jaw had firmed with anger at the news that not only had he been breaking the law, but that he had hidden from her that this was not the first time.
Nathan watched her with understanding. He went on. “When I got to be friends with Michael, he egged me on, and I was too foolish to see that he was setting me up. Now he’s determined to take it too far with the profits from this merger. I’m convinced he plans to pin it on me so he can try to wriggle out of it himself. If we arrange to buy and sell that stock based on what we know about this merger, then I’ll finally have the SEC on my doorstep for insider trading, make no mistake. Michael is wrong: my name won’t protect me from something this big. He’s got the proof that I’m connected to the offshore companies. He’s going to turn over the evidence to get a lighter sentence for himself, I can feel it.”
Jennifer could no longer stay seated as her outrage bubbled over. “Do you mean to tell me that this is the man that you’ve encouraged Amanda to marry? What were you thinking? Not only do you know he’s involved in unethical behavior, but you think he’s disloyal to you. You sound like you’re scared of Michael. Are you?”
Nathan remained seated, his elbows on his knees and his head bowed. He rested his left hand on the back of his neck, so that the priceless wristwatch that had been his grandfather’s glinted from underneath his French cuff. Neither woman needed to see his face to know that he was at the lowest they had ever known him.
“Yes, Jen. You’re right. I have been afraid of him for a long time. I’ve been worried about what he would do to our family if I didn’t give him what he wanted.” At the last words, Nathan glanced over to Amanda, who knew just what he meant.
The complete story began to dawn on Jennifer as well. “Do you mean to tell me that you set him up with my daughter to keep him from exposing your business practices?” She spoke the words with unfailing control. “You were being blackmailed about a crime that you admit you committed, and you thought you would save yourself by giving him Amanda?”
