“Okay, okay.” Blythe laughed. “I get it. I’m happy for you. Just be careful, please.”
“I am. Don’t worry,” Marin said, checking her phone again. “Hey, Mom, can I ask you a kind of crazy question?”
“Sure,” Blythe practically sang, so thrilled to be her daughter’s confidante once again. “Ask me anything.”
“Is there any chance Dad is part Spanish or Italian or something?”
Blythe felt the color drain from her face. She looked down at her shorts, suddenly focused on a smudge of dirt. “Not that I know of,” she said, trying to sound casual.
“Portuguese? Anything like that? I know he likes to say his family is more British than the Crown, but I mean, what’s the real story there?”
“Where is this coming from?” Blythe felt her body go cold with alarm.
“It’s silly, really. But you know that new client I told you about at dinner last week? Their product is a home DNA-testing kit and since I’m part of the team, I sampled one. It came back that I’m fifty percent Southern European—Spain, Portugal, that region.”
“Oh. Well, there must be some mistake. Or maybe I’m half Spanish.” Her forced laugh came out like a yelp.
“You’d have to be a hundred percent Spanish.”
“Well, then it’s a mistake.” The guilt—oh, the guilt. Like an anvil on her chest.
Marin nodded. “I figured.”
Blythe, hands shaking, stood up from the table. “Well, anyway. Come out back. I want to show you my Swiss chard.”
Any excuse to get closer to the ground, on her hands and knees. Before she fainted.
Marin had plenty of time to think while stuck in GW Bridge traffic heading back into the city. She never would have planned to drive into Manhattan on a Saturday night—she’d intended to stay over in Philly. But her mother practically shoved her out the door.
“I have a lot going on here and I know you’re busy with work. We’ll have a longer visit next time,” she’d said.
Strange. Usually her mother found any excuse to get her to stay longer. On the plus side, Marin would have more time with Julian. She drove straight to his town house.
“This is a surprise,” he said, hugging her. “I thought you were staying in Philly the entire weekend.”
Files were everywhere, and his laptop was on the glass coffee table. She had asked him once why he didn’t just use the house’s second-floor office, and he said he never meant to spend all night working in the living room—he’d start out opening his laptop to do just one little thing and the next thing he knew, three hours had passed. She was the same way.
“Yeah. So did I. But my mother seemed to want some space.” Oddly.
“How’s she taking the split?”
Marin shrugged. “It’s hard to say. I think she’s putting up a brave front. But I know she’s not used to living alone. And this just seems out of nowhere.”
“It might seem like that, but it never is. There’s always something.”
“I just can’t imagine what.”
“Of course not. There’s no marriage more mysterious than one’s own parents’.”
She knew he was thinking of his parents’ divorce. It was the source of a lot of pain for him growing up. His father had left when Julian was nine, and Julian had never seen him again after his mother moved them back to New York. Growing up with a lonely, underemployed mother in the picturesque Rye suburbs, he always felt like an outsider. He made up for it by being the captain of every sports team and getting straight As and flawless test scores. He attended Harvard on a full scholarship.
He told Marin that only recently had he and his father been back in contact. Julian suspected he just wanted money.
She felt stupid complaining to him about her parents.
He stood from the couch and reached for something in the drawer of one of the antique side tables. When he turned back to her, he was holding a small orange box wrapped in a brown bow.
“We never got a chance to properly celebrate your birthday,” he said, smiling.
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” she said nervously.
Something about Julian spending money on her made her uncomfortable. Greg Harper had thrown money around like it meant nothing, and to him, it hadn’t. He’d been born with tons of it, and as a banker he earned even more. Julian had a huge salary at the firm, but because he had struggled growing up, he approached any purchases with great seriousness and care. He wasn’t cheap; he just thought about everything because every dollar meant something to him. It was almost as if how it was earned and how it was spent was a moral issue and not just a financial one.
The box was from Hermès.
“Open it,” he said, moving closer to her and rubbing her back.
Hesitantly, she slipped off the bow and lifted the lid to find a delicate platinum key chain, her initials engraved in ornate cursive on the oblong oval base.
She gently removed it from the box and looked at him.
“Julian, it’s beautiful! Thank you. But you really didn’t have to…”
He kissed her, holding her face, and she wrapped her arms around him. Her chest to his, she felt the rise and fall of his breathing. She wished she could stay like that forever.
I love him, she thought. I’m completely in love with him.
He pulled back, took her hand, and pressed something into her palm.
A key.
The Hermès chain suddenly took on much more meaning.
“Julian…”
“We have to be careful at the office, but I want to see you more. As often as you can come over here.”
Her heart soared. This was happening. They were going to be together.
“Oh, Julian. I’m sorry about the other day, barging into your office like that.”
He kissed the bridge of her nose. “It’s okay. No harm done. I get it—you were upset. But you really can’t do it again. I don’t want to raise any red flags.”
“I know,” she said. “But I am working on Genie. It’s not totally outrageous that I would have an issue to discuss.”
“You just wouldn’t necessarily burst into my office with it.”
“True.” She tried to push the next thought away, but she couldn’t. “Julian, did you ever get your results from Genie?”
“Sure. Didn’t you?”
“Um, yeah. Why didn’t you mention it?”
“I didn’t really think about it, to tell you the truth. No big revelations. Why?”
“I was just wondering.” She glanced away. “What’s the probability of Genie results being wrong?”
“Very low. There’s always a slight margin for human error, but to the knowledge of the executives at the company, that has not happened.”
Her heart began to pound but she kept her tone casual. “I mean, this is serious stuff. People get emotionally invested.”
“Like I said, the probability of an individual’s results being wrong is extremely low.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Anything is possible. Why—did you get something surprising in your results?”