“I love you, Arya Roth. I’ve loved you the entire time. From that first day at the cemetery, when we were kids. When everything around us was dead, and you were so alive I wanted to swallow you whole. When you put that little stone on Aaron’s grave so he’d know you came to visit. I loved you that day, for your heart, and every day after that. I never stopped loving you. Even when I hated you. Especially when I hated you, in fact. It was agonizing, thinking you’d forgotten about me. Because Arya? There hadn’t been a minute in my life when I hadn’t thought about you.”
There was a moment—a fraction of it, anyway—when I thought she was going to concede. Finally cave in to that thing between us. But then Arya stepped backward, readjusting the strap of her shoulder bag, her head tipped up defiantly. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“Being partly responsible for your decision to quit. Because it doesn’t change anything.”
She wasn’t partly responsible. She was wholly responsible. But there was no point in pointing that out, because now that I’d quit, I knew I should’ve done that years ago. Regardless of her. When you do something right, you feel it in your bones.
“Yes, it does.” I smiled. “It changes one fundamental thing, Arya.”
“And that is?”
“Now I can chase you however much I like. Because your dad’s case means jack shit to me, and you know damn well I don’t give that much of a crap about getting disbarred, seeing as I just quit. It’s on, Ari. I will win you.”
“I’m not a prize.”
I turned around and walked away. “No, you’re not. You’re everything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ARYA
Present
While the city slid into a colorful spring, a vast black hole formed in my parents’ penthouse.
No word went in and no word got out. The Roths had vanished, disappeared from the face of the earth.
My mother was the one I tried repeatedly. I felt compelled to look after her, now that I knew my father had emotionally abused her. She was unreachable via phone, email, or text messages. As for my father, I never tried to contact him again after the string of scathing text messages he’d left me the day he’d gotten convicted. His ability to cancel his emotions toward me like they were a streaming-service subscription proved that said feelings had never really been there.
Finally, after seven days of radio silence, I made my way to the Park Avenue penthouse. As I took the elevator up to the last floor, a tug of worry pulled at my stomach. I realized they might not even be there anymore. What if they’d moved? My parents owned the property, but there was no way they could keep it with the amount of money they had to pay after losing the case. I had no idea what the stipulations were. How much time they had to come up with the money. I suppose Christian could’ve given me answers to all these questions, but I couldn’t ask him. Couldn’t make any contact with him. My defenses were already spent, my mental core raw.
After stepping out of the elevator, I knocked on the door leading to my childhood home. I didn’t know why, but for some reason, I did the secret knock Dad and I had used when I was a kid.
One rap, beat, five raps, beat, two raps.
There was silence from the other side. Maybe they weren’t there. I could probably call one of my mother’s country-club friends and ask if they’d given them a new address. I was about to turn around and leave when I heard it, coming from the other side of the wooden barrier between us.
One rap, beat, five raps, beat, two raps.
Conrad.
I froze, willing my feet to move. The traitorous things had taken root in the marble floor, refusing to cooperate. The soft click of the bolt unlocking chimed behind my back. A chill ran through my spine. The door opened.
“Ari. My sweet.”
His voice was so syrupy, so placid. It transported me back to my childhood. To playing tic-tac-toe in front of a pool in Saint-Tropez. To him butchering a braiding job, making my hair look like I’d gotten electrocuted. To us laughing about it. The memories flowed like a river inside me, and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard I tried.
Dad wrapping an arm around me, kissing my head, telling me it would be okay. That we didn’t need Mom. That we made a great team all on our own.
Dad dancing to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” with me.
Dad assuring me I could get into any college I wanted.
Dad buying a baseball bat when I turned sixteen and got pretty overnight, because “you never know.”
Crumbs of happiness, littered in a lifetime of pain and longing.
“Arya, please look at me.”
I spun on my heel, staring at him. There were so many things I wanted to say, but the words wilted in my throat. Finally, I managed to say the one thing that had burned in me since this nightmare had started.
“I will never forgive you.”
No more being on the wrong side of history.
I’d done this to Nicky. I would not do it again.
My father dropped his head. All the anger and wrath that had burned inside him were gone now. He looked defeated. Shrunken. A shadow of his former self.
“Why did you do it?” I demanded. “Why?”
As a woman moving in corporate circles, I’d always wondered what made men feel invincible. It wasn’t like greater, more powerful men than them hadn’t been caught. It seemed silly to think it wouldn’t happen to you. The truth had a way of catching you with your pants down. In my father’s case, also literally.
“Come in?” His face twisted, begging. I shook my head no.
He let out a sigh, dropping his head to his chest.
“I felt lonely. Very lonely. I don’t know how much your mother has confided in you. I noticed you two have gotten close over the past few weeks—”
“No. Don’t you dare try to manipulate me. Answer my question.”
“I’m not shying away from responsibility over what happened in our marriage. We both did terrible things to each other after Aaron died. But the truth of the matter is, I didn’t have a wife in all the ways that mattered. So I started looking for things elsewhere.
“At first, it was just sex. Always consensual. Always with women I knew from work. I was young, good looking, and climbing the career ladder. Conducting short affairs wasn’t hard. But then my needs expanded. I wanted emotional support too. And once you seek emotional support, you are expected to give it too. That’s what happened with Ruslana. She wanted the fairy tale, and I wanted to have the faux feeling of going back home to someone every day. Someone who’d rub my feet and warm my bed and listen to me. You had me, and I had Ruslana.”
“You told her you would leave Mom for her.”
He looked up at me, smiling sadly. “I told her whatever I needed to say to keep her. And when I realized she was going to go to your mother and tell her, I lost it. I still love your mother. Always have.”
You just have a weird way of showing it.
“Ruslana died very unexpectedly.”
I had to be careful with what I said to him. He didn’t know Christian was Nicky or that I’d seen the death certificate. No matter how I felt about Nicky’s betrayal, I was never going to hand him over on a silver platter to Conrad. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
“Yes, she did.”
“Some would argue it looks like a planned accident,” I poked.
My father’s eyes enlarged, and his bushy eyebrows dropped in a frown. “No, no. Ruslana did that to herself. She had a lot of financial problems. I had nothing to do with her death. I swear.”
“Remember when you told me she decided to quit randomly and move to Alaska? What was that all about?” I didn’t let it go.
My father bristled. “Yes, okay. It’s true. I knew she’d killed herself at some point, but I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to hurt you. I felt bad enough about what happened to her without the burden of knowing your heart would be broken too.”
“And Amanda Gispen? The dick pics? All of that?”
He blew out air, closing his eyes, as if bracing himself for the worst.
“Sometime through my ongoing affair with Ruslana, we started having . . . issues. Beatrice-related issues. I wanted to make a point. That she was not the only one. That there were others. She had no right to ask all those things she asked me for. I started seeking out other women. Conducting affairs. But it wasn’t as easy. I wasn’t the same young man I was when you were a kid. There were other hedge fund executives, more attractive, and more willing to splurge, putting their mistresses in nice apartments, handing them their Amex cards when they sent them to the French Riviera. I wasn’t one of those men. Amanda was my last mistake. But these other women . . . they all gave me mixed signals, Arya, I swear. Giggled one day and acted cold the other. I didn’t know what to do with them. I got cocky. I thought if I stayed persistent, they’d cave in.”
“You harassed them,” I said quietly, tears running down my cheeks. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t cry. But this had the anatomy of goodbye. It was final and painful and cleansing and unbearable. It cut through my bones to simply look at him.
“Yes,” Conrad said, looking a lot like that man with the pale, sweaty expression I’d met at the Cloisters shortly before everything had unfolded. “There was a lot of pressure to be there for you. To keep your mom in check. I needed an outlet.” This was the way he constructed it in his sick mind. That he had to keep my mother on a leash and be both my parents, so he had the right to abuse others. He continued, “And when you found out . . . well, it was too much. You were the one person who always looked up to me and the one woman I actually cared about. I didn’t want you to witness everything I did. I pushed you away. Amanda’s lawyer was a great excuse.”
“He had nothing to do with this,” I said hotly. I wondered if there would be a time when I wouldn’t defend Nicky like my own life depended on it.
My father smiled. “Sweetheart, I know.”
“Know what?” My pulse escalated, my heart hiking up to my throat.
“Who Christian is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I straightened my spine.
“My PI, Dave, was onto him shortly after the trial had started. There was something about him. A hunger I recognized. Those damn blue eyes.”
“That makes no sense,” I said. “You kept asking what made him act the way he did.”
Conrad shrugged. “I stopped the minute Dave came back with the information.”
“But . . . but . . . if you knew, you could’ve . . .”
He looked away, at the floor. “And then what, Arya? Nicholai would get disqualified, disbarred, and his story would come out. The story in which I ruined his life, detailed and time-stamped. It would have looked even worse for me. He was just another victim of mine. Amanda and the rest would have gotten another lawyer, and I’d still be found guilty. All paths led to the same destination. And it had to be said”—he grinned sardonically—“I appreciated his coming full circle. He did good, that kid. If I went down, I wanted to go down in style, and he delivered. It’s why I told Terrance and Louie not to file an appeal.”
“You wanted to ruin his life,” I repeated, dumbfounded. Even at our worst, the year following what he’d done to Nicky, I’d thought my father had anger-management problems, not that he was malicious. “Why?”
“Because he touched the only pure thing I had in my life,” he said simply. “You.”