Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 106935 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106935 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
My face is red hot, all over again.
Layla reaches for my hand across the table. It feels good—her touch as I tell this story.
“He said she will finish college like all Bancrofts do. And if you want to go to school too, we will raise her child while she’s at Yale. He’ll have our name. He’ll be a Bancroft.”
“Oh, Nick. That’s what you meant by their rules,” she says, frowning.
“Yeah,” I say hollowly, scrubbing my free hand across my jaw, like that’ll erase the shame I felt then. But time has healed that wound, since that’s what time does. “They barely let me see my own kid when I was in college, right after he was born. I didn’t have much choice in the matter. The only way either one of us could go to school was if the Bancrofts raised David in those early years. Rose and I were lucky, I suppose, to have that option.”
“I understand what you mean,” she says.
“I wouldn’t quite call it a Faustian bargain, but I had to go along with their wishes if I was going to carve out a life someday for myself, for my son, for the mother of my child.”
“That’s hard. You made the only choice you could make,” she says.
I’m glad she sees it that way. That’s how it felt to me. I had no other options. “I just wanted to pay the bills, make my own way. Take care of my family,” I say. I don’t share this story with just anyone. Hell, I don’t think I even told Millie. But I want Layla to understand me. To know why I said this is wrong. “So that’s why David and I don’t have the same last name. When Rose and I graduated from college and finally got married, there was still no relenting. A name was a little thing. I didn’t push. I just said thank you, then moved into a small apartment with my wife and my kid. Until Rose and I both finally admitted we were a terrible match.”
Layla links her fingers through mine. “That’s a lot to go through,” she says.
But she’s been through a lot too. “We all have stuff to deal with. I’m just glad he’s a good kid. I’m glad I have a good relationship with him. We’re in the same city again. We work together and see each other a lot. I don’t want to mess it up, Layla,” I say, and I sound desperate.
Desperate to have it all.
But I can’t.
Even when she squeezes back. Even when it feels so right to share pieces of myself with her.
But it’s not right, and we’re going to leave Connecticut very, very soon.
25
LITTLE RICH GIRL
Layla
After Nick parks the car in my nearby garage, he walks me to my home on Seventy-Third. We stop by the stoop of the brownstone next door. He looks up at my building with obvious admiration in his eyes.
It is, by all measure, a gorgeous building. One that most twenty-three-year-olds wouldn’t live in on their own.
And, really, I don’t.
After what he told me in the diner, I might as well slap a sandwich board on my chest—I’m a little rich girl.
It’s borderline embarrassing that I don’t pay for my beautiful, sunlit, sixth-floor one-bedroom by myself. I don’t pay for it at all. In Miami, I held back pieces of myself. I’ve still clutched tight the stories I don’t want to share.
But he opened the drawer to his past tonight, offering the unvarnished truth. And the more he gives of himself, the more I want to give him the real me.
All of me.
The desire to open up is almost rabid, like I have to exorcize words, and stories, and truths. This impulse is so new. I certainly didn’t look for this kind of connection with a person. I didn’t expect it. I even tried to avoid it.
And yet every time I’m with Nick, all I want is to get closer to him. I can’t physically. We have to stand a few feet apart, and I hate the distance. It’s the opposite of what I want as I succumb to this animal instinct clawing at me to share with him.
Even if we can’t be a thing, I want him to know the me without makeup. “I have a trust fund. My mother is disgustingly rich. My father was very successful. I’ve never struggled like that,” I say, the truth tasting saccharine-sweet for the first time. “I’m sorry.”
His eyes are soft, caring. “Don’t say that. Don’t apologize.”
“But I feel bad. I’m everything you don’t like.”
“Stop,” he says sternly as he wraps a hand around the railing behind him, like he needs it to hold him back from touching me. “You are everything I like.”
I don’t deserve that kindness. I didn’t earn it. “You must think of me as the poor little rich girl,” I say, as I wave a hand at the beautiful brick building I didn’t earn, the residence most New Yorkers would trade an organ for. This building is straight out of a silver-screen romance. “I didn’t even have to use my trust fund money for this. My father owned several apartments in this building. He was a defense attorney. The best in the city. The apartments were a real estate investment he made after a particularly good year at his law firm,” I say in another confession that feels almost shameful. Like, look how one percent of one percent I am. “Well, my mom owns the apartments now. Everything of his went to her. Including what was left of his law firm, Mayweather and McBride.”