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“No loss, since I never met them. Never even saw their faces.”
He says it nonchalantly, but I can’t imagine what it’s like for a child trying to understand why his own blood would want nothing to do with him sight unseen. “And what about your dad? Did you at least know his parents?”
It takes him a moment to answer, as if he’s searching for the right words. “When I was still a baby, my grandmother put a shotgun under her chin and pulled the trigger. As for my old man’s father, he was a violent drunk so I did my best to steer clear of the bastard.”
I close my eyes, trying to hold back my horror at the grim picture he’s painted. I didn’t mean for our conversation to stray into this awful territory, but it’s the first time Nick has ever opened up to me about the people in his early life or the way he grew up.
“But you did have the water,” I remind him gently.
When Nick took me to Miami last year and we spent several days aboard his beautiful sailboat, Icarus, he told me that he practically grew up on the ocean. Now I wonder if the water was more of an escape to him than a safe harbor like it had been for me.
“I sailed to get away from the life I had on land,” he says, confirming my suspicions. “My father was a fisherman. So was his father before him. All the Baine men for several generations made their living off the swamps and inlets of the Keys.”
“But not you?”
“Not me. The old man wouldn’t even teach me how to hold a fishing rod.” He laughs humorlessly. “He pretty much hated me from the day I was born.”
I wince to hear it, my heart refusing to believe Nick could be right. “Why would you think tha
t?”
“He made it clear enough, believe me. He disapproved of everything I did. Ridiculed me constantly about being too weak, too useless to go out on the boat with him. Called me a sissy because I liked to draw and paint like my mother. Fortunately, he wasn’t home much. When most of the good fishing dried up he opened a swamp boat charter and made his living off tourists.”
“Your father couldn’t have been more wrong about you, Nick. You’re the strongest man I know—in every way that matters. There’s nothing useless about you.”
He gives me a faint, wry smile. “I guess I should thank the bastard for driving me to make something of myself. Baine International is the ultimate fuck you to that sadistic son of a bitch.”
I reach up and stroke the back of his head. It’s the first time I’ve touched him since he’s been here, and while I’m not sure we’ll find our way back to the place our relationship needs to be, right now I want Nick to know that I care. That I believe in him and always will.
And as much as it hurts me to hear about his father’s unconscionable treatment of him, I can’t help but latch on to the one ray of light amid all of the bleakness he’s described. “Your mom . . . she was an artist too?”
“Not professionally. She gave that dream up when she married my old man. But yes, she was incredibly gifted.”
“You’ve never mentioned her before.”
“No.”
“Why not, Nick?” I’m terrified that he’s going to tell me that she treated him hideously too. But I have to know. “Was she as cruel as your father?”
“God, no. She was as kind as she was beautiful and gifted. She was the only good thing I had in my life.”
My relief leaks out of me on a deep exhalation. “Then I don’t understand. How could she allow your father to treat you that way?”
“She didn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t want her to think I was weak and useless too.” He glances away from me again, his gaze retreating back to the large expanse of the lake. “And then, when I was ten years old she got cancer. The doctors said she could beat it, but nothing worked. None of the painful chemo treatments. None of the medicines that made her vomit and writhe as if her insides were being ripped out.” He exhales heavily, then hisses a low curse. “I sat at her bedside every day for seven months, the last few spent at the hospital. I watched her die in agony, felt her slipping away a breath at a time those last few weeks.”
“Oh, Nick.” I take his hand in mine. The raised spider webs of scars are smooth beneath my touch as I gently rub my thumb over the back of his hand. “That’s why you’ve seemed so uncomfortable around Kathryn at her house. And at the hospital. I’m sorry if all of that brought back uncomfortable memories.”
He lifts his shoulder. “I haven’t stepped foot in a hospital since my mother died—other than the emergency room I was ambulanced into the night my father sent me through that window eight years later.”
“Where is your father now?”
He slants me a sardonic look. “We haven’t kept in touch.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I wouldn’t give a damn either way.”
He shakes his head, going somewhere distant now in his mind. I can see the way his gaze detaches from me. He’s sitting beside me, but I feel him starting to drift out of my reach again.
