Page 96 of The Honest Affair

“Associates start at five hundred an hour at Kramer,” Matthew confirmed, not terribly enthusiastically. I noticed he didn’t even reply to the offer of working for DVS. “But I didn’t get into law to make money, per se. A little coin is nice, but I wanted to get these guys off the streets, not work for them. Like I told Nina, I wanted to do some good.” He shook his head. “After seven years with the DA, I can’t really see myself just switching sides like that, Eric.”

But it was me he looked to with regret. Like he thought he was disappointing me or something.

“Nor should you,” I said. “Ever.”

I was dying to touch his shoulder, his knee—anything to demonstrate that I cared. He didn’t actually need to work anywhere he didn’t want to. At some point, he and his family would want for nothing, once I was unraveled from this terrible mess. Didn’t he know that?

The sharp green look that flashed my way told me he did know that. Very well. And did not particularly appreciate the insinuation.

I kept my hand in my lap. Matthew sighed.

Eric cleared his throat as Jane raised her eyebrows at him over her wineglass.

“That reminds me, Nina,” Eric said. “With the trial and everything, I forgot to ask you how it went with Liv. How did she take the news?”

Every eye in the room turned on me. Beside me, Matthew’s entire body tensed. He already knew this story, of course, and had offered to be with me when I told her. He thought it might make things easier, given the fact that she liked him and that he could support my story as someone who had been in Italy with me.

But this was a matter between Olivia and me. Matthew couldn’t save me from that, no matter how much he would have liked.

I had chosen to wait until her April break to tell Olivia the news of her true parentage. February had been too soon—for one, her sisters in Florence were still reticent when it came to talking to me, and when Olivia begged to go with her friends on a ski trip to Vermont for the week, I had acceded. I wanted my darling girl to have as much happiness as she could these days. I didn’t like the shadows I had seen under her eyes too often when she was home.

The week before the trial, I had chosen to take Olivia to Southampton for a week of riding and vacation instead of staying with Eric and Jane in the city. By way of helicopter directly to and from Boston, we had managed to escape the local press entirely, and so it was in the warm, hay-filled barn, after a day of riding our horses on the beach, that I had told my daughter the truth of where she had come from.

* * *

Olivia satdown on one of the worn wooden stools in the tack room and pulled a felt rag tight between her hands.

“Does this mean Daddy isn’t actually…my daddy?” she asked finally.

For a moment, I wondered if I should say no. Children love their parents no matter what. Thinking of my own absent father, I knew that as well as any. I could, in fact, tell her the same thing other adopted children heard: that while they had one parent by birth, they had another by love. That her father was her father no matter what. I could allow her to have a relationship with him even when I could not and allow her to negotiate it on her own terms as she got older.

But I was done lying. She deserved the truth, and the truth was that Calvin had never loved her or shown any interest whatsoever in being her father. The sooner she stopped clinging to that as a possibility, the better. For her own safety, if nothing else.

“No, darling. He is not.”

Olivia was quiet for a bit more, the only evidence of her internal strife being the way she continued to wring the tack cloth beyond an inch of its life.

“Good,” she said finally, then looked up with an expression more tired than any ten-year-old girl ought to be.

“Good?” I repeated.

“Yes. He doesn’t act like a father. He’s never given me hugs or said he loved me or done anything with me at all. Not like my friends’ fathers do when they get them from school sometimes. Or your friends. Like Mr. Sterling, remember?”

Ah. So that weekend in Boston had made quite the impression on her. My heart warmed at the clear memory of one afternoon when Skylar, Jane, and I had entered the house to find Matthew and Brandon, Skylar’s husband, asleep on a sofa, each with a small girl curled up on their chests—Brandon nestled with his daughter, Jenny. And Matthew’s arm wrapped securely around Olivia.

“Yes,” I agreed softly. “I do remember.”

“And, Mama…you were scared of him. Weren’t you? I saw you. That one time.”

I almost told her everything right then. It would have been so easy to make the man she had grown up with into a villain for her as well as me. And maybe one day I would divulge everything that had gone on in our lives. But for now, this one trauma seemed enough.

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “But yes, I was sometimes. And that’s why I’m doing everything I can to keep him out of our lives. I’m so sorry I lied to you, my love. I should never have done it. But from now on, it’s you and me in this world. And I promise, I’ll never keep secrets from you again.”

She quieted once more, digesting each word like a separate bite. But she didn’t wring the tack cloth quite so tightly.

When she spoken again, it wasn’t with the questions I expected. She didn’t wonder where we would live or what would happen to Calvin or any of those basic questions I would have expected.

Instead, she asked, “Do you have pictures of the farm? And of Lucrezia and…Rose…Rosi…”