Nathan didn’t answer. He only smiled weakly and ske
wered a bit of his broccoli beef onto his fork.
“Oh, come on,” I teased him. “You don’t have to be modest—not in here with me. You can brag a little, if you want.”
He chewed, then swallowed a gulp of his own green tea. “I thought you didn’t like arrogant, self-centered Nathan?”
“I don’t. But I have to give credit where credit is due. You’re putting your life on the line for the greater good. That’s something not a lot of people would do. It’s something you can be proud of.”
Nathan went quiet for a time, watching me eat. When he spoke again, it was in a tone I’d never heard from him before.
“Can I tell you something?”
I looked up at him and frowned. He sounded soft, hesitant, uncertain. His brows were furrowed and the corners of his eyes pinched. For the first time since I’d known him, Nathan looked like a man shouldering an unseen burden, a far cry from the man who would tie me to a bedpost and fuck my brains out without even a hint of care.
I stopped eating and put my fork down. “Yeah. Of course.”
Nathan puts his elbows on the table, wringing his hands together as he looked away from me and to the dancing candle flames instead. They lit up his eyes, highlighting the gold rimming his pupils as he took in a deep, shaky breath that nearly snuffed them out. When he spoke, his voice grated with the pain of a man who’d made a terrible, perhaps unforgivable mistake.
“When my father died,” he began, “I took over his company. You know that, obviously, but… what you don’t know is that I’m nothing but a figurehead. I have no idea how to run a business, let alone an international corporation. Dad tried to groom me for the job as best he could, but I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to do what he did for a living. Besides, Dad was young. Nothing was going to happen to him for a long time. When he passed from a heart attack at forty-nine and it all fell to me, I panicked. I decided to continue on with my original plan and ignore its very existence.”
I watched the shadows playing across his face. He suddenly looked older and farther away, not the twenty-something playboy with a smart mouth and no responsibilities. This was a facet I’d never seen before. It was like looking up at the dark side of the moon.
“But… I don’t know… When you broke things off with me things changed. I started to spend more time at the office. I started to like it. People looked up to me, Sandra. They wanted my advice. My ‘wisdom.’ I never wanted to be some big shot CEO, but once I was in the chair, I didn’t want to give it up… In a way, you gave me that,” Nathan trailed off, staring down at his fork. I kept silent, and he continued.
“When the head of our logistics division coordinated a meeting with Peter Wallace, I agreed, knowing full well who he was. He was offering us an obscene amount of money to transport those shipping containers. When he said it wasn’t anything illegal, I believed him, not because I actually thought he was telling the truth, but because I didn’t care if he was or not. I’d hired people to worry about that kind of thing, and they were all in agreement that the contract was on the level. Mr. Wallace has never been convicted of a crime—you know that. And he does plenty of legal shipping. I didn’t even consider that my advisors might be lying to me. I had no idea it’d be…”
He hesitated, lips parting as he struggled with the word.
“People. Women. Children…”
“But you knew?” I asked him, horror knotting in my stomach. “You knew what he was bringing into the city was illegal, and you let him do it?”
Nathan nodded slowly. “I suspected. Maybe… But everyone on the board wanted to take the contract. A substantial part of my inheritance is tied to maintaining my company. They could’ve voted me out if I didn’t do something, and once I lost the reigns, there was nothing stopping them from carving the whole damn company up for themselves. That would mean…”
“No more fancy title, no more office?” I finished for him. “You would’ve had nothing except for your things, your fancy home, your garage full of expensive cars, and the hundreds of millions of dollars you probably have stashed away in the Cayman Islands. Wasn’t that enough? You’re telling me you secured a job title on the backs of those young women and girls.”
“I didn’t know,” he insisted.
“Because you didn’t want to know!” I replied, gripping the edge of the table so hard my knuckles turned white. I could feel the smoke of anger swirling in my lungs, tightening my chest as it rose into my throat and spilled out of my mouth. “You just wanted the money! You wanted the power! If you’d bothered to look, you would’ve seen their faces. But you couldn’t have that, could you? You couldn’t have that kind of guilt on your head!”
Nathan sat back, folding his arms and looking away from me. “You’re wrong. I never, not for one second, considered there might be people in that container. Look, my family, my whole company has a history of looking the other way. My father didn’t build a huge mansion in Miami on the back of Chinese imports—he built the foundation of this company on cocaine smuggling. Sure, he went ‘legit’ by the Nineties, but that was on paper, Sandra. There were people putting pressure on me to keep quiet and maintain business as usual. Maybe I wanted to make everything legal, but it was easier to let other people deal with the dirty parts of the business. I chose to look the other way and play stupid. That’s on me.”
“We’re talking about lives here, Nathan,” I whispered. “Not drugs. Not guns. People.”
“If I had known… I would have done the right thing. That’s why I came to the police. Because when I heard what he’d been doing… When I heard about that container they shoved off into the ocean… I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d had something to do with it. If I had, and I let that asshole walk free, I couldn’t have lived with myself.”
I shook my head, and he blinked back tears. “Christ, Sandra… Haven’t you ever made a mistake in your life? One that you could’ve avoided if only you hadn’t looked the other way?”
The question hit me like a kick to the chest. My words dried up in my throat and I looked away from him, staring at the dingy table and my fingernails pressing into it. I closed my eyes, letting the whirlwind inside me die down.
Haven’t you ever made a mistake?
“Yeah,” I said finally, nearly choking on the word. “A long time ago, before I knew better. Before I… became a cop. I didn’t see what was happening around me because I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe in a pretty little lie, and it cost my sister her life.” My stomach turned. “I guess that makes me just as bad as you.”
Nathan’s expression softened. “What happened?”
It wasn’t a story I told often—or ever, if I could avoid it. But there was no backing out of this conversation now, not with the tidal wave of my shame brimming in my eyes and on my lips. I had to tell him.
“I got emancipated when I was seventeen,” I said at last, dropping my hands into my lap to keep from breaking my nails on the wooden table. “I took custody of my sister, Jenny. Our mother was a junkie, in and out of prison all the time, and after our aunt died… Well, it was just the two of us. I thought I had my shit together. I thought that I was the best thing for her. I thought that she’d see me working hard and playing by the rules and she’d want that for herself, too. I refused to believe that the fifteen years she’d spent watching our mom shoot up and smoke meth would tempt her to do the same thing. She’s a good girl, I told myself. She’d never do that shit.”
Nathan had put his fork down, just listening intently.
“So when Jenny started going to parties and not coming back for a few days, I told myself she was just troubled and going through some hard times. When I saw track marks in her arm, I told myself that there had to be some other kind of explanation, though I never even bothered to come up with one. When she lost so much weight that she was sometimes too weak to walk, I tried to ignore it all.”
“That’s not your fault,” Nathan offered, but I continued despite his petty attempt to stem the flow of w
ords.
“And when she ODed in her room while I was cooking dinner? You’re trying to tell me that wasn’t my fault? That was when I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. That was when I finally had to look at her and see what she really was, what she had been for damn near a year. I finally had to see her bruises, the punctures in her arm and between her toes, the way her body had so obviously been used by the men supplying her with the shit that took her life. But by then it was too late, wasn’t it? I’d already put her in the ground with all the lies I told myself. I may as well have been holding the needle.”
I went quiet for a moment, the memories drifting through my head, taking a little piece of myself with them. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.”
A silence fell between us, uncomfortable and heavy.
“So, yeah,” I whispered, my voice hoarse and quavering. “Yeah, I get it. Sometimes we don’t want to see the truth, because it would mean we’re the monsters. And that’s not an easy thing to look in the mirror and accept.”