“Nora said you didn’t have the best relationship.”
“No, we did not.” Nate lets out a humorless laugh. “All I ever wanted was to earn his approval, but he never gave it to me. I never did anything right, or at least not the way he wanted me to. Micha tried to help and often even took the blame for my screwups, but Pops…well, he never had a kind word to say to anyone, but especially not to me.”
“That sounds painful,” I say quietly. I recall the portrait of the man in Nate’s office, and I can picture him clearly. He didn’t even look like someone who was kind to others.
“He was…he was…” Nate stops and takes a big breath, and I find myself wishing I were there to hold his hand. “He was awful to me. All the time. Nothing I did was ever good enough. It was never enough for him. I was never enough for him. He had Micha; he didn’t need me.”
“And then Micha was gone.”
“Yeah.” I can hear Nate trying to control his breathing before going on. “Once Pops knew I was going to be the head of the family, he got even worse. Any suggestion I made was wrong, and he laid into me about it. He said I was incompetent. He even threatened to disown me and give the family business to Antony.”
“Not to Nora?”
“Pops didn’t exactly value women,” Nate says grimly. “Maybe I shouldn’t bitch too much about him. At least he acknowledged my existence. He barely spoke to Nora. He never even visited her in the hospital after she was kidnapped and raped.”
“Wow.” All this time, I’d been wishing I’d grown up with a father in my life, but now I’m not so sure. I wonder if Roland Ramsay was anything like Carlo Orso. “Would he really have given everything to Antony?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. I think he was ultimately too proud to do something so denigrating to the family’s public appearance. He’d be admitting his son was a fuckup, and that wouldn’t fly with him.”
“Was he always like that?” I ask.
“Oh yes, even when I was a kid. You know how people go on about corporal punishment being wrong and that you shouldn’t spank your kids and shit like that?”
“Yes.”
“I would have taken a spanking. Wouldn’t have batted an eye. When Pops got pissed, he didn’t smack my ass—he belted me in the face. Broke my nose once.”
I gasp, but Nate just keep going.
“Not that he didn’t do the same to Micha—he did—but I got the brunt of it. I was the one always screwing up.”
“You mean, according to your father,” I say. “Maybe you weren’t screwing anything up at all.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. When Micha died—when he was murdered, that is—it was clear that Pops blamed me. I should have been there to protect him, and I wasn’t. With Micha gone, Pops was left with me as the only male of his bloodline to take over the business, and I was the one person he didn’t want in that chair. I thought maybe if I worked hard enough, he would eventually start to trust me, but then…”
“You didn’t get the chance.”
“No, I didn’t.” Nat’s voice cracks a little. “But I did. At least, I thought I did…or thought I was…fuck!” I hear a thud through the phone, but I’m not sure what it is. “No matter how many times I talk about this, it doesn’t get any better. I could have sworn to anyone that he was right there. He was there at…at the funeral, but it was his own funeral. I couldn’t understand…”
“You needed him,” I say softly. “You needed him to be there, and he suddenly wasn’t. It’s no shock that you saw him when you needed to.”
“I was a nut,” Nate says, “a certified lunatic.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“It’s hard to reconcile what I was seeing without bringing up insanity. How could I not be? I thought he was right there—in that office—giving me advice. I should have realized none of it was true because he was too kind. If that isn’t delusional, I don’t know what is.”
“You understand now, right? You know he’s dead.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Do you still see him?”
“No. I haven’t seen him since…since the night y
ou left.” Nate pauses for a moment. “He could come back.”
“Do you think he will?”