I’d done this to Nicky. I would not do it again.
My father dropped his head. All the anger and wrath that had burned inside him were gone now. He looked defeated. Shrunken. A shadow of his former self.
“Why did you do it?” I demanded. “Why?”
As a woman moving in corporate circles, I’d always wondered what made men feel invincible. It wasn’t like greater, more powerful men than them hadn’t been caught. It seemed silly to think it wouldn’t happen to you. The truth had a way of catching you with your pants down. In my father’s case, also literally.
“Come in?” His face twisted, begging. I shook my head no.
He let out a sigh, dropping his head to his chest.
“I felt lonely. Very lonely. I don’t know how much your mother has confided in you. I noticed you two have gotten close over the past few weeks—”
“No. Don’t you dare try to manipulate me. Answer my question.”
“I’m not shying away from responsibility over what happened in our marriage. We both did terrible things to each other after Aaron died. But the truth of the matter is, I didn’t have a wife in all the ways that mattered. So I started looking for things elsewhere.
“At first, it was just sex. Always consensual. Always with women I knew from work. I was young, good looking, and climbing the career ladder. Conducting short affairs wasn’t hard. But then my needs expanded. I wanted emotional support too. And once you seek emotional support, you are expected to give it too. That’s what happened with Ruslana. She wanted the fairy tale, and I wanted to have the faux feeling of going back home to someone every day. Someone who’d rub my feet and warm my bed and listen to me. You had me, and I had Ruslana.”
“You told her you would leave Mom for her.”
He looked up at me, smiling sadly. “I told her whatever I needed to say to keep her. And when I realized she was going to go to your mother and tell her, I lost it. I still love your mother. Always have.”
You just have a weird way of showing it.
“Ruslana died very unexpectedly.”
I had to be careful with what I said to him. He didn’t know Christian was Nicky or that I’d seen the death certificate. No matter how I felt about Nicky’s betrayal, I was never going to hand him over on a silver platter to Conrad. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
“Yes, she did.”
“Some would argue it looks like a planned accident,” I poked.
My father’s eyes enlarged, and his bushy eyebrows dropped in a frown. “No, no. Ruslana did that to herself. She had a lot of financial problems. I had nothing to do with her death. I swear.”
“Remember when you told me she decided to quit randomly and move to Alaska? What was that all about?” I didn’t let it go.
My father bristled. “Yes, okay. It’s true. I knew she’d killed herself at some point, but I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to hurt you. I felt bad enough about what happened to her without the burden of knowing your heart would be broken too.”
“And Amanda Gispen? The dick pics? All of that?”
He blew out air, closing his eyes, as if bracing himself for the worst.
“Sometime through my ongoing affair with Ruslana, we started having . . . issues. Beatrice-related issues. I wanted to make a point. That she was not the only one. That there were others. She had no right to ask all those things she asked me for. I started seeking out other women. Conducting affairs. But it wasn’t as easy. I wasn’t the same young man I was when you were a kid. There were other hedge fund executives, more attractive, and more willing to splurge, putting their mistresses in nice apartments, handing them their Amex cards when they sent them to the French Riviera. I wasn’t one of those men. Amanda was my last mistake. But these other women . . . they all gave me mixed signals, Arya, I swear. Giggled one day and acted cold the other. I didn’t know what to do with them. I got cocky. I thought if I stayed persistent, they’d cave in.”
“You harassed them,” I said quietly, tears running down my cheeks. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t cry. But this had the anatomy of goodbye. It was final and painful and cleansing and unbearable. It cut through my bones to simply look at him.
“Yes,” Conrad said, looking a lot like that man with the pale, sweaty expression I’d met at the Cloisters shortly before everything had unfolded. “There was a lot of pressure to be there for you. To keep your mom in check. I needed an outlet.” This was the way he constructed it in his sick mind. That he had to keep my mother on a leash and be both my parents, so he had the right to abuse others. He continued, “And when you found out . . . well, it was too much. You were the one person who always looked up to me and the one woman I actually cared about. I didn’t want you to witness everything I did. I pushed you away. Amanda’s lawyer was a great excuse.”
“He had nothing to do with this,” I said hotly. I wondered if there would be a time when I wouldn’t defend Nicky like my own life depended on it.
My father smiled. “Sweetheart, I know.”
“Know what?” My pulse escalated, my heart hiking up to my throat.
“Who Christian is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I straightened my spine.
“My PI, Dave, was onto him shortly after the trial had started. There was something about him. A hunger I recognized. Those damn blue eyes.”
“That makes no sense,” I said. “You kept asking what made him act the way he did.”
Conrad shrugged. “I stopped the minute Dave came back with the information.”