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He is helping her. That’s what she thinks. He is helping her now, and he is always going to help her—seven-year-old Nate, thirty-three-year-old Nate—if she gives him the choice. It warms her, and makes her feel something else too. Something like pride. Who wants to hear about that, though? He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to hear her say any of that right now.
So, instead, she rubs his back, and hands over the black bottle of extract from the spice rack. Its small cap, loose.
“Thank you, baby,” she says, as he takes it.
“Don’t mention it.”
She leans toward him, as he adds the lemon zest, her secret ingredient, the way she showed him a long time ago, the way he has remembered to do.
“And you guys are going to be fine,” she says.
“Me and Georgia?”
“You and Maggie. People don’t break up because someone’s family is a little . . . messy. If that were the case, no one would ever get married.” She touches his jaw. “But I am sorry. Have I said that yet? I’m sorry if I caught her off-guard. I’m sorry if I caused any strife.”
He shakes his head, cracks open an egg. “The truth is that I managed to freak her out all by myself about sixty minutes before we came here. I waited until this morning to tell her some things that I should have told her about before now.”
“Like what?”
Nate doesn’t answer at first, reaching forward and plugging in the mixer, holding it over the bowl, slowly running it through the mixture.
“I didn’t tell her much about how I grew up,” he says. “Or, I should say, I didn’t tell her everything. I didn’t really tell her about the finances, for starters.”
Gwyn unplugs it. “One more time?”
“It never seemed like the right time to tell her.” He looks at Gwyn, meets her eyes. “It feels so separate from my life. From our life.”
“Nate, your life is that you are opening a restaurant together.
And she had a right to know. . . . Not that you were going to take any money for it from us, after last time. You made that much clear. But you should have explained that part to her. My God, she must feel so confused.”
“I can see that now.”
He starts to mix again, but she puts her hands over his, tries to make him listen to her. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I know that.”
“I don’t think you do.”
He looks at her. He is silent, as if considering it for a minute, whether to say what she can already see on his face. The worst part.
“The thing is that she doesn’t know about the last time.” Gwyn can feel her jaw drop in disbelief, can feel her disbelief running through her—and something like anger. Because he looks in this moment—she sees it in him—like his father. She usually sees pieces of his grandfather, Champ, in him. But now, it is Thomas she sees. Those sweet but put-upon eyes, that reluctant frown. And now it scares her.
“You haven’t told her, Nate?”
“I wanted to.” He clears his throat. “But she was already so freaked out that I didn’t tell her about the money situation, and then we saw Murph on the bus. I think learning another secret of this magnitude now would be a lot for anyone to take.”
“And what? This morning is the first time the two of you have ever had a conversation?”
“Apparently.”
He pulls the food coloring out of its box, puts several drops into the bowl, stirring it into the mixture. And refusing to do it, refusing to look at her, which tells her more than she wants to know.
She shakes her head. How can she explain it so he will hear her? He needs to tell Maggie now. Because if she finds out about Ryan another way, it will make the rest of it, anything else he hasn’t told her, seem bigger, and also pale in comparison.
“I’m going to tell her, Mom. I will. I’ll tell her as soon as we get back to Brooklyn, as soon as this weekend is behind us . . . I’ll tell her the rest of the story.”
It’s not a story, she wants to tell her son. It’s your life.
