Chapter 36

36

MASON

M y parents’ apartment in the city was quiet as I entered with snow covering my shoes. I shrugged out of my jacket and hung it up in the closet like this was just another visit, a regularly scheduled dinner and not Christmas Eve. I’d parked and walked several blocks, needing a moment to think, needing some time to be angry, to be upset, and try to come to a conclusion about why I’d walked away from Fia like that.

The thought of her hit me in the chest hard enough to crack several ribs. Maybe that was just my heart finally shattering.

Soft classical Christmas music floated through the air as I walked through a narrow hallway toward the kitchen. Rodney, their city chef, was pulling a roast out of the oven as I stepped through the maze of alabaster-colored cabinets and stainless steel.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. O’Leary. You’re just in time.”

I nodded, looking at him briefly with hooded, heavy eyes. I couldn’t muster a response. Nothing felt even remotely merry right then. “It smells great, Rodney.”

I walked into the dining room, scanning the table settings. Four. Four plates, four sets of silverware. Four wine glasses resting amongst a tasteful spray of evergreen sprigs and holly. I chewed the inside of my cheek for a moment before gathering up the fourth setting and carrying it to the butler’s pantry, where I gripped the counter and hung my head.

“What are you doing?”

I turned toward Mom’s voice. She stood in the doorway with her arms hanging at her sides as she scanned my face, then dropped her gaze to the plate on the counter. “Oh, Mason. What happened?”

“Nothing I care to talk about right now.”

She pinched the fabric of her brown dress between her fingers, looking so disappointed. She’d been excited to meet Fia, to meet the woman I’d fallen head over heels in love with.

“It was my fault.” It was all I could say.

Mom nodded, taking a deep breath, and motioned toward the dining room again. “Dad’s in the study.” She walked away with heavy shoulders and a straight back, the telltale sign she was upset.

I gathered myself before walking through the rest of the apartment. I lived here for a time as a teenager before starting college. My mom preferred the estate up north. Dad, however, spent most of the week at this place with its quiet, empty rooms. I often wondered if the separation bothered my mom. I was sure it did. I remembered it bothering me as a child when Dad spent the entire week in the city to be closer to the office.

He was in his study just like Mom said he’d be. There wasn’t a door to close, but he lifted his head from the book he was reading as I approached the archway leading off a small sitting area with windows overlooking Central Park. He set the book down with a sigh and stood, wordlessly moving to the bar cart on the far wall. He poured two glasses of scotch. Not my brand, either.

“She’s not coming, I heard,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Your mother is upset. What exactly did you do?”

I accepted the glass from him, only two feet or so distance between us. “You might have been right. About how different we are.”

He turned from me and went back to his chair. I moved to the window, leaning on the sill as snow fell in heavy sheets, blanketing the sparkling city in white.

“I was wrong.”

“You weren’t.” I sipped deeply before adding, “Her brother, my CFO no less, made that very clear earlier tonight.”

“I was wrong about what I said about her, and about you, the two of you together.”

“No.” I looked at him, the heartbreak washing over me like a tidal wave and my uneven heartbeat driving the current. “I looked around at her family. At the full dining-room table and the warmth there and I realized I hadn’t ever experienced anything like that. I realized you never experienced anything like that. Mom did her best, didn’t she? To try to give us some of her warmth but I would strip that from Fia within a year. She’d lose everything she is because of me. Because of this world.” I motioned around his office. “She deserves to be with someone who can give her everything, not just a comfortable life.”

“And you don’t believe you’re capable of giving her that?”

“I believe I’m capable of making her miserable.”

Colin’s harsh words rang through my head. “ You’re taking her away just like you took your family’s recipe. You’ll turn her into something she isn’t, and when she has the whole world in front of her now, finally .”

In those few moments I had him alone, he’d ripped me to pieces. Not as his CEO. Not even as his friend, no. In that moment, I was just a guy getting in the way of his sister’s future. The career she wanted. The life she deserved.

What neither Colin nor Fia knew was that when I found out about her job opportunity, I’d been secretly relieved. The ring still burning a hole through my jacket pocket felt heavier as I trudged to my parents’ apartment, and not because I was second guessing my own feelings and desires.

Fia got a glimpse of my world. She changed my perception. She ingrained herself in my heart so fully I wasn’t seeing clearly anymore. Colin was right. She’d be a caged bird. I would have inadvertently clipped her wings.

I drained my drink and turned. “I don’t think I can do this tonight.”

“Do you know what your mother went through for me?” he said in a gravelly voice, a tone I’d never heard from him before. “Before we married?”

I leaned on the archway as the scotch poured through my veins. “I know your father didn’t want you to marry her.”

“Her family was once very wealthy. Gilded Era money, you know. When I met her, her family was selling the family home on Fifth Avenue. They were broke. They’d lost everything and the money had run completely dry but your mother was happier than she’d ever been. She was free. Free of the constraints of the elite circles her parents ran in. Free of socials and garden parties. I met her at a club downtown. She was smoking her first cigarette, coughing until she turned red. That was in the early eighties I believe, and I’ll never forget seeing her for the first time.”

My father told me she’d been wearing a vibrant purple top and black jeans with studded boots, her hair wild in a fresh perm. She was the definition of rebellious, wanting to throw away everything she was before and embrace the change with open arms. She had no idea who Dad was. He had no idea who she was until one fateful day later that year at a party in the Hamptons she’d attended with her aunt, who was in the good graces of the circles her parents used to run in.

“Her father had made a few business deals that saved the family estate,” he explained, pouring another dram of scotch into my glass. “They were trying to get back into society at the same moment I was making my grand entrance at your grandfather’s behest. I was already working on Wall Street. I had no plans to take over the family hedge fund at the time. I had no plans on stepping in and taking over his seat on the board of the oil business he founded, the reason we have the kind of sway we do to this very day. He was angry with me for it, and he dragged me to that party to try to show me what I was missing out on, but the only thing I saw was your mother, dressed in pastel Chanel, looking weepy in the garden as she drank champagne.”

I sat on the armrest of the couch as Dad rested his elbows on his knees. My parents were quiet people. I’d always assumed they never truly loved each other because they didn’t show it, not like in the movies where parents held hands and hugged when their kids were in the room. They never talked about their feelings, especially not with me, but now I was seeing that for the first time, hearing it in his voice as he talked about her with so much love and passion it made me feel slightly dizzy.

“I immediately went over to her and reminded her I’d caught Daddy’s little princess smoking cigarettes at a seedy dive bar in the lower east side. I used that to get a date with her. God, she hated me at first. But I was in love. I could see a future with her. When she finally started to reciprocate those feelings and we started making plans, I got sucked back into your grandfather’s business. At first, we’d envisioned a life with a little apartment above a bodega. We’d drink cheap wine and eat Chinese takeout for dinner. She’d get a job at a gallery and I’d work on Wall Street, paving my own way, but then your grandfather got sick, and your grandmother needed me, and I took your mother with me when I dove headfirst into the family business I’d sworn I would never be a part of.”

He looked down at his hands. “Her light flickered for a while, being thrown back into a life she almost escaped. Suddenly she was a wife being carted to the same exclusive parties and running in the same old circles, those dreams of our future shattering while living in a mansion, never having to worry about money. I lost the woman from the bar, and I couldn’t live with that. So, I made sacrifices. I stepped down from the board, letting men I barely knew run the family business. I went back to Wall Street shortly after your grandfather died, starting from pretty much the bottom and clawing my way up. It didn’t matter how much money we had. I didn’t want to take an easy route. I wanted to show your mother that I hadn’t given up on that fantasy life. Things were easy for a while, happy. You were born and we thrived here in the city. We bought this apartment after I started my own firm and then…”

“Then Grandma got sick.”

He nodded, meeting my eyes for the first time in several minutes. “Your mom took you to the estate and I stayed in the city, torn between two places. I could’ve handed my business over to someone else, like I’d done with your grandfather’s oil company, but I didn’t. I stayed, hanging onto a dream I’d had with my wife when we were young and dumb, and it was the best decision I ever made, but you grew up so fast. Suddenly you were a man and were fighting over that stupid recipe. I never even wanted it. I didn’t care. I don’t know why I cared so much about that one thing when my mother died but I did. I guess, at some point, we all turn into our fathers.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “I let it eat away at me while you built your business and paved your own path, just like I’d done. I was wrong for that.”

I wasn’t sure what to say or even where he was going with all of this, but he said, “Your mother is, and will always be, the brightest light in any room I enter, regardless of what life throws my way. That’s why I kept her, against my better judgment. Maybe it was selfish, but she was strong and stood by me when things were tough. She still does. I’m not sure what kind of life I would have had without her.”

“Fia was offered a job in California,” I admitted. “I want her to take it.”

“And she might.” He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “What will you do if she does?”

“Throw everything I’ve ever worked for away and go with her.”

“Then what are you doing here, Mason?”

I met his eyes. That was a very, very good question.

I could probably tell him the truth. That I faked being in a relationship to try to prove something to him. It had been a foolish idea but it had led me to the woman of my dreams.

“Dinner’s ready,” Mom said from the archway, and I noticed the way Dad’s eye lit up as she smiled softly at him, a secret smile I’d never noticed.

But Dad turned his attention to me, arching a brow.

Was I staying?

Or was I going to go make things right with the only woman that had ever felt right?