“We’re as close as two people could ever be.”
Feeling those words to my marrow while reliving that memory had me closing the document without signing, giving Easton the victory. Just after, I stared at my phone, praying for any word from him, but it never rang—and I knew why.
While he’s blaming me, I’m blaming us both and my father. His determination to keep the ball in my court and remain silent only magnifies the fact that he feels I should shoulder all the blame for our marriage imploding. And for that, I’m still furious he was so damned impatient he didn’t even give us the time to sort out the nuclear bomb we set off by eloping. He gave me six weeks to clean up the destruction we left in our wake, my life having the most debris to sort through, before doling out his impossible and unfair ultimatum.
Five hours after that headline broke, Nate Butler was standing in the doorway of my Chicago office. Though we spoke briefly during the months of my absence—mostly through Mom, curt check-in texts, and emails—our dynamic had drastically changed, and it was painfully apparent.
Not long after his unexpected arrival, Dad whisked me to a small, screen-littered sports bar he frequented when he came to Chicago, which sits a few city blocks from Hearst’s high rise.
Half a beer in, the silence lingered as I glanced over at my father, who felt more of a stranger to me than he ever had in my entire adult life. Sipping my beer, I’d allowed him the floor to start the conversation until he finally took his cue.
“I hate that I don’t know what you’re thinking right now and that it’s my fault,” he admits, opening a line of honest conversation.
“I do too.”
“Tell me what to do, Natalie. I can’t do my part to repair our relationship if you continue to give me vague replies while remaining in Chicago.”
“I’m trying to figure out what I want,” I tell him honestly.
“You want Speak,” he fires back. “Or you did, and I feel like I’ve tainted that. No, I know I have,” he exhales harshly, clear fatigue in his posture.
Guilt threatens as I bat it away, having declared it an enemy of self-preservation.
“The truth is,” Dad continues as I keep my gaze fixed on my beer, “more than anything, I still want to hand it over to you when we’re both ready.”
He says my name with a fair amount of authority—in a request for my full attention—and I oblige, lifting my eyes to his. “But not because it’s some birthright. It’s what you’ve been working toward for a large part of your life. That chair is yours, if you still feel like it’s where you belong, Natalie.”
“It’s easier for me to work at Hearst,” I relay, “Speak would be a circus if I came back now.”
“Not necessarily. The traffic has cleared out for the most part. It thinned out a lot when I hired security.”
“Jesus,” I palm my forehead. “I’m sorry you had to do that.”
He waves his hand in dismissal.
“You know as well as I do, Dad, they’ll just come running back to the doors if and when our divorce is final.” I see no satisfaction in his eyes with that admission.
“I don’t give a damn about that…the media part,” he clarifies, knowing the hard line still exists where I refuse to discuss my relationship status with Easton. I’m still protective of my husband, even if I’m shifting from one emotion to another regarding him on the daily.
“You have employees that will care. It’s not fair to them.”
“Already thinking like a chief,” he says with immense pride, “but tough shit if they can’t handle it. It’s our chosen arena, so they can deal with it or find the door.” He pauses, his beer halfway to his mouth, “but that’s not why you won’t come home.”
Pushing up the sleeves of my thick sweater, I turn and face him fully. “I’m still in Chicago because I’ve realized I’ve let the people in my life—especially the men I trusted—have too much sway over me and say in my decisions. A flaw I didn’t realize I desperately needed to correct—if only for my sanity’s sake. I’ve set new boundaries because of it, and I refuse to go back to that.”
“I’m proud of you, and I’m not trying to lure you back with the promise of inheriting a position you’ve already earned. It’s your decision, okay?”
Dipping my chin, I take another long sip of beer. Unable to help myself, I finally speak up.
“How in the hell did you endure it?”
Fiddling with the cocktail napkin, he returns my gaze point-blank. “Sometimes, love, no matter how real it feels and is, isn’t always the right love, and you don’t figure that part out until you’ve lost it and put some time between your feelings and reality. I got that perspective after my split with Stella. In my case, time helped, Natalie, and it’s been a very, very long time.”
I shake my head. “But you still had so much animosity.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not proud of myself,” he says, looking down at the napkin he’s shredding. “But that had far more to do with you. Between finding out the way I did and being in the same room with Reid and his son—knowing your last name was theirs—it was too much at once. Though I’ll forever be sorry for how I behaved that day and the ones after.” His next admission is full of remorse. “I had Brad draw up those papers in my worst hour.”
“I’ll always be sorry, too, especially for the way you found out. I never thought it would go as far as it has.”
Silence lingers until he tilts his head back up to me. “Do you still want to know?”
I dip my chin.
“Okay…the honest to God truth about my relationship with Stella is that I realized in retrospect that I held her back with my own aspirations for the paper and expectations for my own future.” He shifts back on his stool, his eyes glazing over with thoughts of the past. “She tried to talk to me about it more than once, but I was selfish because I was perfectly content with the way things were. At times it felt as if she was waiting for something to happen, for her life to begin, and I couldn’t figure out why. As much as I wanted to be the man for her, I wasn’t right for the future she envisioned for herself and was working so tirelessly for. When I saw how much she wanted her idea of her future and with whom, I broke off our engagement immediately.”
“So, you broke up with her?”
“Yeah, I did,” he sighs. “But she loved me, Natalie, truly. I still believe she loved me enough to go through with marrying me. If I hadn’t broken it off so abruptly, I think she might have because we were good together. But some of that choice would have been made from loyalty, and I fucking hated that. I hated it so much that I kept my distance from her for months after we broke up. That was after being together for almost four years, living together for half of that time. Talk about hell on earth. It was hard.” He sips his beer.
“So, you didn’t know about Reid?”
“She told me she got hurt before we got together but hid the depth of her relationship and feelings for Reid from me. The night I found out was one of the most painful nights of my life. Seeing how much she loved him and how drawn she was to him fucking gutted me. I broke it off right then.”
“Is that when she quit the paper?”
“Yes, and it was brutal,” he confesses. “Despite making her aware he wanted her back, Reid kept his distance. He respected her choice to stay with me if that’s what she wanted—and I did the same. Selfishly, I entertained getting back with her when she didn’t go running to him, but it would never have been right. Because though we were very much in love, we never fit the way we needed to in order to last. So, I let her go, and she set out on her own and started a future without either of us. You read the emails.”
I nod.
“They found each other again by crazy coincidence, and the rest is their history, Natalie—not mine.”