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“Alethea…” He looked up and sighed. “I understand. I know that the decision had to be yours. It is your body. But I wish you’d told me beforehand so at least I could have prepared myself. So I could have supported you.”
“I wish I had too.” She brushed an errant tear away from her face. “Nico, if I could turn back time and do things differently I would. In a heartbeat.”
“One moment I had a family. When you told me you were pregnant…” He shook his head. “I thought I was finally going to have the thing I’d wanted most in my entire life.”
“I know I hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me, Alethea. You crushed me.” Anger warred with grief, creating a vicious storm inside him. “Living with your family, having your father teach me and guide me was something I’d never experienced before. And the day you told me you loved me, I thought I was a changed person. I didn’t have nightmares anymore. I didn’t see the future as something dark and vague in front of me. I wanted to live.”
Her tears fell quicker now, the fat drops plopping onto her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if you’ll ever believe it, but I did love you. So much.”
“That’s the problem with loving people, isn’t it? They’re the ones who have the ability to inflict the most pain.”
He’d expected Alethea to flinch, but she didn’t. “It’s true. Even if they don’t mean to inflict the pain, they still do. I’m still angry at Dad for dying.”
Nico didn’t want to feel sympathy for her. Worse, he didn’t want to empathize, because that would mean feeling something for Kosta. The man who had thought he’d taken advantage of a young woman, who hadn’t even given him a chance to defend himself… He didn’t deserve Nico’s grief. So why did Nico still feel the loss as keenly as if it were his own, real father?
“He smoked those fucking cigarettes every day, even though I told him they’d kill him eventually.” Her lip trembled. “I asked him one day if he loved those damn things more than he loved his family. Of course he said no, but he didn’t stop. Everyone else is sad, and I’m so…I’m so angry. And I can’t talk to anyone about it.”
In that moment, she was the Alethea he remembered. Bare-faced and expressive. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks. Her eyes were always wise beyond her years, filled with emotion and passion that bubbled close to the surface. It was the same thing that had attracted him to Marianna. It was the same thing he admired about his best friend. They all had that one quality in common: an ability to let their emotions rise up and tip over without restraint.
It was something he never nourished in himself.
“I’m not your counsellor, Alethea,” he said. “I can’t be, because I’m not unbiased.”
“I know. I don’t even know why I wanted to talk to you so bad. I felt like it might help me to move on if I could tell you face-to-face that I’m sorry for making the decision without you. I don’t think I would change what I did, but I should have told you first. And I didn’t want Dad to die while you still thought he hated you.” She fiddled with the strap on her dress. “He was as devastated about losing you as you were about losing him.”
Nico pressed his lips together. “I doubt that.”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but you were like a son to him. That day he found you in his office, reading those dusty old stock market books, he told me you were going to make something of yourself. He saw how smart you were and how much potential you had.” She reached down into her bag and pulled something out. “I found this when we were cleaning out his office last year. I’ve been hanging onto it in the hopes you might speak to me.”
It was a parcel, wrapped in brown paper that’d yellowed with age. The corners were worn, and the edges of a book poked through the wrapping paper in places where it’d torn. This gift, whatever it was, had been wrapped a very long time ago. Way longer than one year.
Nico accepted the parcel from her and inspected it.
“Please open it,” Alethea said.
He forced his hands to remain steady as he carefully unfolded the edges of the paper. The sticky tape was old and also yellowed, and it didn’t offer much resistance. When he pulled out a hardcover book, a lump formed in Nico’s throat.
He remembered this book. The spine of it, with its fancy gold font, had gleamed at him from Kosta’s office. At the time, he knew he wasn’t supposed to be in there. But Nico wanted to sit for a second in the older man’s chair, to feel what it might be like to live in a large house. To have staff. A family. Money to put any and every kind of food on the table.
This book had been shoddily replaced on the shelf, and so it stuck out a bit. Nico had opened the first page, and then the second. And the third. It talked about something called the “stock market” which was making men rich. Some men, like him, who hadn’t finished school. Apparently, that was how Kosta had come to have this big house with a giant pool in the backyard and how he afforded the fancy parties they hosted there.
