“Exactly. And I didn’t even mind that he stayed with music. That’s the thing. People would tell me he was immature or irresponsible for staying in music, but I didn’t expect him to get a desk job. He would have been miserable. What bothered me was that Hannah and I always ended up coming in second. It was like he was in love with another woman—the music industry —and she kept breaking his heart, and he couldn’t give her up because he wanted to believethis timewould be different. So he couldn’t say no, even if a gig came up on my birthday. Or…this past year, he promised Hannah he’d come for Christmas.”
Ollie winces a little. “And he got a gig.”
“It was a good gig, but she was sosad, because he promised her. I let him promise her he’d be there Christmas morning, and then I had to deal with the fallout when she realized he wouldn’t be. And a few weeks ago, he was supposed to come for Hannah’s spring break, and he missed half of that for another job. And I just stopped being in love with him. It took years, but you can’t be madly in love with someone who’s in love with something else. It burns you out. I think Nick thinks that once he makes it big, he can turn around and make it all up to us, but I’m done waiting, because he stopped being a man worth waiting for.”
Ollie nods. Our shoulders are almost touching. “But last summer? You went back to him?”
“That was him trying to prove that he’d changed. He had a steady gig at a jazz club in Atlanta, and he promised that if Icame down, he wouldn’t take any more gigs away from home. He’d be with us.”
“Right.” Ollie’s eyes are sympathetic.
“And that lasted four weeks, five? And then…”
“Something good came up,” Ollie finished.
“Really good.” I nod. Tears come into my eyes. “And it made me feel so stupid.”
“No, you weren’t.” Ollie leans forward and speaks gently. “It’s okay to trust people.”
“You told me that you don’t trust anybody,” I remind him.
“I’m working on it,” he says with a rueful smile.
“We have a kid, so I felt like I owed it to Hannah to try. But the reality is that I owed it to her not to try.”
He is gazing at me, watching the expression on my face carefully.
“Your turn,” I say, pretending there aren’t tears in my eyes, willing the tears away like they will dry on their own if I ignore them even though that has never worked, not once.
His smile turns ironic. “Okay. Let me think about what I would say if I was totally drunk. You want messy? My wife left me for my brother, who got her pregnant. You may remember I was expecting a baby the first time we spoke a couple of years ago.”
It is my turn to nod. I don’t want to admit I’ve heard any of this.
“Well, that was the day I found out that the baby wasn’t mine. She had slept with him at least once, and she figured out the timing and realized it could be his child, so she took a test, and she had texted him the results. But I picked up her phone that day by mistake, so I saw his response.”
“Oh no.”
“I always wonder if I subconsciously knew, and that’s why I grabbed her phone. Or what would have happened between usif I hadn’t. But…I told you she dated my brother before me. So they had a history. And if…if it had just been some random guy, I might have forgiven her. But I realized she had only ever loved him. I was the backup plan.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t it.”
There’s a skeptical look in his eyes. “Anyway, I broke it off. And then two months later, she and Sean were married. And I still don’t know if my brother really loves her or if he just wanted to take her away from me.”
“That’s horrible.”
He smiles bitterly. “And I can’t talk to my family about it because my parents have forgiven him, and now I’m the problem because I’m unwilling to do the same.”
“They can’t possibly expect you to forgive him.”
“You haven’t met him. He can spin a really good yarn, and he was working on my parents, selling his side of the story, for the years I was away. I’m sure he told them I had stolen his one true love, never mind that they broke up several years earlier.”
“How can they not be furious at him?”
“They were. But on some level, I think the whole thing pleased my father. When I was in college, I used to act superior to my dad, like…I’ll never treat a woman the way you do. I think he likes seeing my me and my brother rolling around in the mud like this. It means that we’re on his level. Cheating is what real men do, you know? And my mother just wants a grandkid. She wants her family to stick together, and right now I’m the problem for not agreeing to it.”
My jaw drops open. “Your mother said that?”
“She says that I have to forgive Phoebe, because I don’t realize how guilty she feels, and you can’t help who you love. Which I know is true, of course, but…”
