The Last Thing He Told Me

“You just said they’d do anything for you.”

“Maybe that’s what you wanted to hear,” he says. “What I said was they are generous with me about certain things. Not everything. Even families don’t let everything go.”

“No,” I say. “I guess they don’t.”

This is when I realize something else that is going on. I figure it out in what Nicholas isn’t owning—not yet, at least.

“You never liked Ethan, did you?” I say.

“Excuse me?” he says.

“Even before all of this, when you first met him, he wasn’t your choice. For your daughter. This poor kid from South Texas, wanting to marry your only daughter. That couldn’t have been what you wanted for her. He could have been you. He grew up in a town like the one you came from. He was a little too much like what you had organized your life to be better than.”

“Are you a therapist?”

“Not at all,” I say. “I just pay attention.”

He looks at me amused. Apparently he likes this. He likes me throwing his words back at him.

“So what are you asking me?” he says.

“Everything you did, you did so your children would have different choices than you did. Kate. Charlie. Easier choices. So they’d have a promising childhood. The best schools, the greatest possibilities. So they wouldn’t have to struggle so hard. And yet, one of your children drops out of architecture school and decides to take over your wife’s family bar. Gets divorced.”

“Careful,” he says.

“And the other one chooses someone who was the last person you’d want for her.”

“As my wife used to say, we don’t get to pick who our children love. I made my peace that she chose Ethan. I just wanted her to be happy.”

“But you had a feeling, didn’t you? He wasn’t the best person for Kate, he wasn’t going to make her happy.”

Nicholas leans forward, his smile gone.

“Did you know when Kate and Ethan started dating she didn’t speak to m

e for a year?”

“I didn’t even know Kate existed yesterday,” I say. “So the details as to how that relationship played out aren’t something I’m familiar with.”

“She was a freshman in college and she decided she didn’t want to have anything to do with us. With me, rather… her mother she never stopped talking to,” he says. “That was Ethan’s influence on her. We came through it though. Kate came home again and we made peace. That’s what daughters do. They love their fathers. And Ethan and I…”

“You came to trust him?” I say.

“I did. I clearly shouldn’t have,” he says. “But I did. I could tell you one story about your husband and you’d never see him the same way again.”

I stay quiet. Because I know Nicholas is telling the truth, at least the way he sees it. Owen, in his eyes, is bad. He has done bad things to Nicholas. He betrayed his trust. He stole his granddaughter. He disappeared.

Nicholas isn’t wrong about any of that. He may not even be wrong about me. If I choose to wade into the chasm of doubt Nicholas wants to create about Owen, it won’t be hard to go there. Owen isn’t who I thought he was, at least not in the details. There are parts I wish didn’t exist, parts I can’t look away from now. In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.

Because there is this too. The details are not the whole story. The whole story still includes this: I love Owen. I love him, and Nicholas isn’t going to sway me that I shouldn’t. He isn’t going to sway me that I’ve been fooled. Despite everything, despite any evidence to the contrary, I believe I haven’t. I believe I know my husband, the pieces and parts that matter most. It’s why I’m sitting here. It’s why I say what I say next.

“Regardless of that,” I say, “I think you know how much my husband loves your granddaughter.”

“What’s your point?” he says.

“I want to make you a deal.”

He starts to laugh. “We’re back to this? Darling, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not your deal to make.”