“I don’t want to be either,” Rafael said.
She kissed him. The top of his head first, then his nose, then his lips, so glad that he was still there. So glad that she hadn’t scared him away. He was the eye in the middle of the storm. He was her strength, her center, her fuertrado. “I was going to take you to my room,” she said. “But it’s down in the other wing of the house. How about if we sleep here tonight?”
“Works for me,” Rafael said. “As long as I get to wake up next to you.”
Nina climbed under the covers. “I promise,” she said again.
Rafael fell asleep in her arms, and she watched him breathe. He had a glamour, she realized, just like her father. The confidence, the charm, the megawatt smile. Inside he was just as broken as everyone else. Maybe even more so.
She thought about her dad. His affair wasn’t the problem, it was a symptom. There was something deeper there. Something that made him act that way. That was the case with Manxome Consulting, too. It was just a symptom of a different kind of disease. He felt the same pressure she did, Nina realized, inherited along with the family name: to appear to the outside world as if everything were perfect, even when it wasn’t. To swallow your own feelings. To be afraid of failure, not because you wouldn’t recover, but because of what everyone else would say. Pressure like that, it could break a person in so many ways. And it had broken her father. Nina knew it now.
With that realization, the anger she had been feeling toward him dissipated. She couldn’t accept what he’d done, but she could at least try to understand his actions, put them in context. And make sure she didn’t end up the same way.
Nina leaned back against the pillow and, with her arms still around Rafael, she fell asleep.
75
The next day, after an early-morning ride home from the Hamptons, dropping Rafael off first so he could make his breakfast meeting, Nina was back at her apartment, getting ready to head to the Gregory Corporation offices.
She had to start preparing for the board meeting where TJ was going to announce his retirement and she was going to talk about some changes she wanted made at the hotel. Because she wasn’t going to sell. She realized on the ride back that morning that she’d never be able to sell her family’s company. After her night with Rafael, she’d come to terms with who her father was; she loved him in spite of his flaws. And that realization made it easier to make the decisions she wanted to make, to run the company the way she wanted to. She’d talked to Rafael that morning about her ideas: rooftop gardens to supply the restaurants, a partnership with local homeless shelters to donate the extra shampoo and soap and lotion, and a philanthropic foundation that she’d run personally that would funnel money to charities working to support young entrepreneurs as her own silent apology for what her father had done. Vorpal Sword, she’d call it. It didn’t have to be named after her. And it would remind her that she could slay the Manxome foes—and any other foes who came her way. That she was of her father, but she wasn’t her father. And she didn’t have to work in politics to help change the world. That was what Nina had decided in the car. And the decision had felt good.
So she’d made another one, as Rafael drove along the Grand Central Parkway. She’d picked up her phone and Googled Daphne Lukas. Her aunt had passed away three years before from a heart attack.
Instead of sorrow, Nina had felt anger.
Life was so goddamned unfair sometimes. Someone else was gone from her world forever. But at the end of the obituary, Nina saw a line: Daphne Lukas Harrison is survived by her daughter, Clio Harrison of Denver, Colorado. It was her cousin. The one she’d never met.
Nina Googled her and found an e-mail address at the Mountain School, a science magnet high school where her cousin taught biology.
“Are you going to e-mail her?” Rafael had asked.
“I need to think about it,” she’d answered, leaning into him.
He kissed the top of her head, his eyes still on the road. “I know I don’t get a vote,” he said. “But I think you should. Not today, necessarily. But one day, when you feel ready.”
Nina had kissed his cheek after that. Maybe she would. One day. When she felt ready.
* * *
• • •
When Caro came by Nina’s office later in the day to say that she and TJ had decided they were going to live apart for a while and asked if she could stay in the apartment on Central Park West until she found one of her own, Nina made one more decision. She texted Tim, told him that if he wanted to talk about his parents, if he needed a friend, she was still there for him. He didn’t respond, but Nina didn’t blame him.
76
The Friday evening before the election, Nina was in Rafael’s apartment on Central Park North for the first time. They knew they shouldn’t, but there was too much to do this weekend to sneak upstate or out to the Hamptons, and Rafael said he couldn’t bear being away from her for another night. So she came in with folders filled with paper in her arms as a cover, and even then, went in through the building’s back entrance. Luckily, there’d been no photographers waiting there. They mostly camped out in the front, when they staked out his place.
Rafael’s apartment was in a new building on 110th Street, and the wall facing the park was made completely of windows, tinted for privacy. It was amazing to Nina how many beautiful views there were in New York City.
“Want a drink?” Rafael asked her as she walked into the living room. There was a bottle of red wine already in his hand. “I sure as hell could use one.”
“How come?” she asked, dropping her bag and the folders next to a guitar leaning against the wall and taking off her coat.
He uncorked the bottle. “My poll numbers are down.”
“What?” Nina turned to him after hanging up her coat. “Do you have the breakdowns?”
He handed her the bottle of wine and then pulled a folder out of his briefcase. “Here,” he said. “I’m down in the older male demographic. Older white men, if you want to drill down. Mac says it’s the tax thing I talked about in the last debate. It’ll pay for universal pre-k, but you know—taxes are a touchy issue.”
Nina looked at the numbers. “Older white men?” she repeated.
Rafael nodded and poured two glasses of wine, handing Nina the first and taking a sip from the second.
“Did you and Mac talk about using the Irish side of your identity to combat this?” She and Rafael had discussed it a bit since it had first come up, even though Jane and Mac were clearly against it. They decided it wasn’t worth messing with a good thing, since he’d been far enough ahead in the polls that a win was likely. But it wasn’t anymore.
“We actually did,” Rafael said. “He’s worried I’ll lose other demographics if I incorporate that side of my identity.”
“What do you think?” Nina asked, sipping her own wine.
“Deep down? En mis tripas?” Rafael asked.
“Yes, in your guts,” Nina said. “God, that sounds so much better in Spanish.”
Rafael laughed. “In my guts, I think you’re right. I think I should win or lose as myself—all of myself. And if we do nothing, if we just cross our fingers and hope, the polls have me losing by two percentage points. So what’s the risk?”
Nina leaned over and kissed him, and he tasted like red wine and determination. “Well, polls aren’t always right, but it’s your campaign, you’re the boss.”
“I know,” Rafael said. “I’m just so afraid to let all of them down. My team. They’ve put in so much time, so much passion. They believe in me, all of them. And I don’t want to mess it up—for them even more than for me.”
“You won’t,” Nina said. She’d been getting used to seeing this vulnerable side of Rafael, ever since their trip to the Hamptons. It made the relationship seem balanced, somehow. She needed him. He needed her. “I believe it—en mis tripas.”
Rafael smiled at her. “By the way,” he said, “I’m cooking tonight.”
Nina raised her eyebrow. “You are?” she said. He’d been her sous chef up in the country and out at the beach a few times over the past weeks, late at night, when his campaign obligations were done for the day, but he hadn’t made anything for her on his own.
Rafael picked up a plastic bag. “I bought ingredients on the way home,” he said, “to make picadillo. My abuela’s recipe.”
Nina agreed to be his sous chef this time and started chopping peppers at his request. Half an hour later the two of them were sitting at the kitchen table with steaming plates of picadillo in front of them.
“This is delicious,” she said, after she took her first bite.
“Gracias,” Rafael said. Then he paused. “Now you say it.”
“How come?” she asked.
Rafael smiled at her. “Because I think the way you speak Spanish is especially sexy. That hint of a Castilian accent? Makes me crazy.”
“Delicioso, gracias,” Nina said, giving him what he wanted, her c more like a th than an s.
“How did I get so lucky?” he asked her.
“How did we get so lucky?” she answered.