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“Sure, talk to you later.”
I hung up the phone, staring at the gym I’d spent so much time building, an empire I hoped to start. For the first time, it felt empty.
* * *
The maître d’ escorted me through the restaurant, deftly winding us around the servers with their giant trays of food and the closely packed tables surrounded by men in suits and women in cocktail gowns. Brad sat at the back, in a booth meant for eight but reserved just for us.
“Andrew, good to see you.” Brad stood, extending a hand.
“Nice to see you, too.” I shook his hand and slid into the booth opposite him. “How’s it going?”
He shrugged. “Same old. Angela’s trying to get me to step back, while Payton’s chomping at the bit to take over. I heard you two met up in Chicago.”
I gave him a quick nod, opening the menu before I tipped my hand about that night. “Yeah, she dragged me out to some trendy bar.”
Brad laughed indulgently. “She makes me glad I stopped at one kid. Absolutely unstoppable. She swung by New York last weekend and dragged Angela and me to a half-dozen new hotspots. Well, she dragged me. Angela was happy to leave the house.”
I relaxed with confirmation that Payton had seen her father.
“Angela used to drag me to every bar and club in New York back when we first started dating. I couldn’t keep up then either.”
I grinned. “I imagine that wasn’t easy.”
When I’d first met Brad, he’d just married Angela, so I’d never met him with Payton’s mother. But Brad and Angela had a relaxed energy that made it easy to forget the twenty-year age gap. Until I went out with Angela and Payton without Brad, that was.
He laughed. “She’s a wild one at heart. We dated for six months before my doctor told me I needed to break up with her or convince her to slow down. Otherwise, I’d be dead by the end of the year. And there was no way I was breaking up with that woman.”
“So, seeing as you aren’t dead, how’d you convince her to slow down?”
He sipped his drink, leaning in close and dropping his voice. “Well, the thing was, I had to do something first. I had to stop lying to her. Sure, she suggested every club and bar and kept me out until three, four, sometimes even seven in the morning, but I told her I loved it. In actuality, I just loved her.”
I sat back on the bench, my mind turning over his confession.
“See, that’s the thing about marriage.” Brad reclined with a shrug. “You need to be brutally honest with them to pull through. Marriages don’t last if you can’t do that. Trust me. I have a failed one under my belt.”
I washed the thought down with the whiskey a waiter had placed in front of me. “So, you think your first marriage failed because you weren’t honest enough?”
While Brad had chosen to be my mentor, he’d never talked much about his personal life. I got some insight from Payton and Angela, but the years before them were fuzzy. Other than being born in Chicago and the existence of an ex-wife, he hadn’t offered much more information about his past.
He picked up the wine glass before him, swirling around the liquid while pondering my question. “Weweren’t honest enough. Payton’s mom and I, we were young. Too young, probably. We didn’t know who we were, and we both constructed the people we thought we should be. She wanted to be the wife of a CEO; I wanted a partner. We were interchangeable. We were playing parts.”
“Playing parts?”
“We were acting like the people we wanted to be, not the people we were. Payton’s mom and I never had a chance. We had too much going against us from the start, but my second? That could have worked if we hadn’t built the relationship on a foundation of half-truths. I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he laughed. “Sweet woman like Nora; doesn’t seem like she has a dishonest bone in her body.”
I nearly choked on my drink, coughing violently and reaching for a glass of water.
“You okay?” Brad raised a gray eyebrow, shifting his attention to calling a server to bring more water.
“Fine,” I lied before catching myself. “Actually, I’m not.”
CHAPTER31
Nora
My palms stuckto the steering wheel. I shifted in the driver’s seat, pulling my dress down from around my waist and checking the fabric for wrinkles.
Tons.
