Though aware that I had become public enemy number one in Arya’s camp, I still thought I could salvage it. If she gave me the time to explain and I told her all about Claire, she’d understand. Arya was a highly pragmatic person with a terrific bullshit meter. She’d know I was telling the truth.
My next stop was her apartment. This time, I got a little farther than the buzzer. All the way to her apartment’s door, in fact. I knocked frantically. Jillian threw the door open, leaning a hip against the frame, her face slathered in a green mask of some sort. “Yes?”
“I’m here to see Arya.”
“Ambitious.” She made a show of checking out her fingernails. “You know, considering the circumstances.”
“Is she not here?” I narrowed my eyes. I couldn’t imagine her anywhere but home on a day like this. Maybe her mother’s apartment. But unlikely.
“Oh, she is here. But she can’t see you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re dead to her.”
My teeth ground together. “I can explain.”
“I’m sure you can, Nicholai. Feel free to do it to the door while I call the police. Which is exactly what I’m about to do if you don’t evacuate the premises in the next three seconds.”
With that, she slammed the door in my face.
Nicholai.
Nicholai.
Nicholai.
Jillian had called me Nicholai. As I made my way home in a taxi, I tried to gauge what, exactly, I was facing. It seemed like whatever Arya knew was a lot worse than the fact that a few of our sloppy kisses had been plastered on some news websites.
It seemed like she knew the truth.
And the truth was unbearable, to both of us.
When I got to my apartment, there was no room for doubt. Arya had raided the place while I was gone, most likely sometime after I hadn’t taken her calls and she’d realized we’d been outed by the media. The place was a dumpster fire, sans the pretty flame. The tragic part was I knew she hadn’t looked for the truth. She’d looked for her book. Searched for it everywhere. The garbage can included. Or maybe her flipping it over had just been the final, screw-you touch. Like an exotic flower on a pretty dessert at a restaurant.
Either way, what she’d wanted was clear—to take away the piece of her that had temporarily belonged to me and make sure that I’d never have access to it again.
I headed toward my bedroom, my soul in my throat. Even before I walked in, I knew what I was going to find. The manila envelope I’d kept a secret for all those years was open, the documents scattered everywhere. I didn’t have to crouch down and look for the book to know that it was gone. Atonement was no longer mine.
I’m sure you can, Nicholai.
Arya knew.
She’d told Jillian.
There was no reason to think Arya hadn’t told her parents too. Her father’s lawyers. But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to give much of a damn about that part. My ungraceful second fall.
All I cared about was that she’d found out and not in the way I had wanted her to.
There was no point calling her. She wasn’t going to pick up. Whatever I could salvage of our relationship—of my life—had to wait until tomorrow.
She needed time, and I needed to respect that, even if it killed me.
I picked up the phone and called one of the very few people in the universe who knew.
“What?” Arsène barked out groggily.
“She found out,” I said, still frozen to my spot at the entrance of my room. This was the time when he was going to tell me that he’d told me so, that he’d warned me.
“Shit,” he surprised me by saying.
“Indeed.”
“Grabbing my keys and coming. Beer?”
I rubbed my eye sockets. “Go north. Way north.”
“Brandy?”
“More like a bullet.”
“A bottle of A. de Fussigny and a full metal jacket coming right up.”
That night, I didn’t sleep. Wasn’t dumb enough to even try. I ended up polishing off that cognac Arsène had brought over, then hitting the indoor gym in my building. I hopped into the shower, got dressed for work, went through the same predictable motions . . .
Only I didn’t go to work.
The firm—the company I’d wanted to take over more than anything else in my life—had become trivial, laughably inconsequential. A shiny toy that had kept me occupied while life happened in my periphery. Every time I tried to muster the motivation to haul ass to the place that deposited seven figures into my bank account annually, I couldn’t help but feel like a hamster getting ready to hop on a wheel. The constant spinning got me nowhere. More money. More wins. More dinners I didn’t like with clients I loathed.
It occurred to me that I wasn’t only jaded; I was dizzy from solving other people’s problems all the time. Well, now I had a problem of my own to solve. Arya knew I was Nicky and that I’d kept it a secret from her.
Even more horrifying—she knew I was Nicky and therefore that I was worthless.
I went straight to Arya’s office that morning, arriving at eight o’clock sharp. An hour before opening. I’d spent enough mornings with Arya to know she was an early riser and liked to be at the office before the birds arose.
As it turned out, this was the one morning when Arya had decided to sleep in. I watched Whitley and her sidekick march through the door at nine o’clock, throwing murderous looks my way, then Jillian joining them at nine thirty. Arya was nowhere to be found until ten past ten, when I noticed her briskly turning a corner onto the side street and making her way to her office building, looking like a summer storm. An unthawable ice queen ready to conquer the world.
I stood up from the step leading to the front of her building’s door. She didn’t slow down when she spotted me through her sunglasses. She stopped when our bodies were flush against one another, swung her arm backward, and slapped me so hard I was pretty sure parts of my brain were splattered on the sidewalk.
“I deserved that.”
“You deserve much more than that after the revenge plot you planned for me and my family, Nicky.”
Nicky. I hadn’t heard that name in years. Only Arya had called me that. Ruslana had tried it on her tongue a few times and found it distasteful. I missed it.
“No revenge plot.” I rubbed at my cheek. I was mesmerized by her. Like I hadn’t seen her dozens of times before, in compromising positions, stark naked and sucking different parts of my body. Was this what love felt like? Wanting to kiss and protect the woman you wanted to ram into from behind? How peculiar. And nauseating. And so terribly predictable of me. Falling for the one woman I could never have. Who’d ruined everything, and I, in return, had done the same to her.
And this time, I didn’t even want to get even.
“Believe it or not, Amanda Gispen walked into my office one day by happenstance. Can’t say I didn’t live every day wanting to get back at your father for the years he put me through, but it wasn’t the first thing on my agenda.”
It had been the second thing, though, before she’d turned my life upside down, in true Arya fashion.
“There’s no excuse for what he did that day.” Arya stepped back, her face contorting in agony. “Trust me, I spent an entire year refusing to look at him. Then an entire lifetime second-guessing every decision I’ve made. Letting him off the hook always made me feel like I was on the wrong side of history. But he apologized for it and ended up sending you to live with your dad, like you wanted.”
“Is that what he told you?” I smiled tiredly. “Before or after I allegedly dropped dead?”
Her pink lips turned down into a scowl, but she didn’t answer.
“Trust me, beating the shit out of me in front of the girl I crushed on was the least of his sins. He made my mother throw me out the night I kissed you. I had to sleep on the neighbors’ couch. Then he put me in Andrew Dexter Academy and told you I was dead.”
Arya removed her sunglasses. Her eyes were shiny, full of tears. “I grieved you for years. Every day.”
“I grieved you, too, and I didn’t even think you were dead,” I said gruffly.
“You didn’t want to go?” Her voice was soft, pliant now.
I shook my head. I’d have chosen life in poverty if it meant being close to her.
“It wasn’t Conrad who told me you passed away. I hired a private investigator to find you when I turned eighteen, you know.” She sounded defeated. “He was the one to deliver the news.”
I smiled. “Now, let me guess.” I took a step forward, wanting to sniff her, to bury my hands in her hair, to kiss with both our past and our present, now that she knew who I was. “That private investigator guy, he worked for your father, didn’t he?” By the look on her face, I could tell I was right. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. But I’m not done telling you about the hell Conrad put me through.”
“Hurry up, because I’ll give you my own brand of Roth hell when you’re done.”
“While I was at Andrew Dexter, your father sent the headmaster to straighten me up, so to speak. Every now and again, I’d get a thrashing simply for existing. The headmaster himself wouldn’t lay a finger on me, but he got other students to hit me. Conrad also ensured my mother cut off all contact with me. I only saw her once after the day she kicked me out. Not during summer and spring breaks or the holidays. I always stayed at the dorms. That’s where I met Riggs and Arsène. How I created my own family.”
Arya swallowed visibly. She was wrestling with competing emotions. Her desire to kill me for what I’d done to her, and her desire to maim her father for what he’d done to me. “Ruslana . . . she died?”
I nodded. “I got a theory about that too.”
“Yeah?”
“When I was a junior at Andrew Dexter, I got a job as a stable boy and met Alice—my so-called cougar, as you like to call her. Suddenly, I was in close proximity to money and lived the rich life, even if by proxy. One summer break, when I was in New York, I bumped into Ruslana. I drove around in Arsène’s Bentley and wore his rich-asshole attire, head to toe. Ruslana flung herself over me and kissed me. She made a scene. I peeled her off me and told her I’d try squeezing her into my New York plans, but of course that never happened. She began writing to me after that. I never replied. She must’ve taken my silence as a test of her determination, because the more time had passed, the more she felt compelled to tell me everything that happened to her. I still have the letters. They were in the manila file. I don’t know if you read them. She said she had a long affair with Conrad. That he had promised to leave Beatrice for her. Said when she began to doubt his intentions, his assurances, she told Conrad that she was going to tell Beatrice herself. He got rough with her, pushing her around. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time he’d put a hand on her.”
“That’s how you knew everything about him was true.” Arya pressed a hand against her chest. “Knew that Amanda and the other accusers were telling the truth.”