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Nova traced a circle on the edge of the notepad with her fingertip. “I was just wondering
if that was how people would look at me. As a story to gossip about.”
“Some will. That’s human nature. And when you have a family as prominent as the Coltons, people do look. And watch. It comes with the territory.”
“Now who’s being honest?”
Although he’d kept his physical distance since their kiss, Nikolas reached out to her now. “I told you I can’t be anything but honest with you. And you should be prepared for the ways that your life is going to change.”
“I thought being a mother was going to be the big change in my life.”
“That will be, too. The biggest of the big. And it’s going to happen along with your new family dynamic. It’s a lot all at once.”
Nova shifted the hand resting on her lap to her belly. She increasingly didn’t have a lap to speak of, the baby’s growth and development continuing to change her body in the most obvious of ways. Up to now, Nova had considered all of it a mental preparation for motherhood. The day-by-day changes in her body that would prepare her for the major changes in her life.
But the reality was that in a few short months, she would have a child and she’d never go back to her old life. She’d never be just Nova Ellis. Or Colton. Or whoever she ended up being.
“Nova?” Nikolas’s voice was gentle. “Was that a bit too honest?”
“No.” Nova pulled herself from the lingering thoughts. “You’re only saying what I already know. My life is changing. It has been, really, since my mother’s diagnosis. And each step that’s come since keeps making that more and more clear.”
“You don’t just mean the baby, now, do you?”
“No. Like you said, the baby’s the biggest of the big, but everything for the past year has been sort of big.”
Nikolas had grown quiet, his expression taking on a faraway look before he reached out and closed the lid of his laptop. She sensed that he was working up to something and gave him the space he needed.
“I lost my mother five years ago.”
Nova mentally did the math and realized Nikolas had lost his mom at the same age she’d been when she’d lost hers. Much too young, as far as she was concerned, even as she knew you were never old enough for that terrible event to take place.
“She was an amazing woman. She believed in me and supported me. And she did it all with a smile, even when she probably didn’t feel like it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“My father loved her. Loved us both. But he wasn’t exactly a faithful husband.”
Nova thought about her own mother and Allegra’s teenage affair with Ace. How she’d quickly rushed into a relationship with Paul Ellis after Ace had broken her heart. Had Paul ever known that he wasn’t biologically her father? Had her mother shared that with him?
Questions that would never be answered, even as Nova wondered how people built relationships with each other. How they committed, day after day, when there was the potential for such large secrets between them.
Hadn’t Ferdy proved that? He carried secrets that weren’t just painful, but illegal, too.
It was a wonder people found each other at all. That they created and built and stayed in relationships for a lifetime.
“Your mother knew, obviously?”
“She did. I often think that’s why she didn’t want more children. She never came out and said it, but I think it was easier on her to focus on me and not think about sharing one more bond with him.”
“But she loved him?”
“Totally. And died heartbroken because while he loved her, he never loved her all the way. He never gave her all of himself. He never found a way to put her first.”
“Do you think that’s what it’s about? Putting someone else first?”
“I think it should be. But I don’t know that it often is.”
Nova thought about that, wondering what it all meant. Humans were innately flawed, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t good in people. But how did you know? Certainly not everyone was Ferdy, hiding criminal activity. A lot of them were men like Nikolas’s father, just finding their way through life. Stumbling—terribly sometimes—but not all the way bad.
