Chapter 6: Everything Nia Didn't Say
I stood there holding my mother's hand in the middle of my wedding reception, and I thought about every conversation I had ever had with Nia about family.
She had told me her father left when she was young.
She had told me she was an only child.
She had told me her mother was difficult but well-meaning, and that the tension between them was something she was working through.
She had told me these things with the particular kind of calm that I had always read as emotional maturity.
It was not emotional maturity.
It was practice.
"How long have you known?" I said.
"Michael—"
"How long have you known that your brother had a relationship with my father?"
The string quartet had quietly packed their instruments.
I noticed it only because the cases clicked shut one after another, small sounds in the larger silence of the room.
"Before we met," Nia said.
"Marcus told me about a man he'd been close to.
He didn't give me a name at first.
When I met you — when I found out your last name — I recognized it." She stopped.
Started again.
"I told myself it didn't matter.
That it was separate.
That what Marcus and your father had was in the past and it had nothing to do with us."
"But you didn't tell me."
"No."
"You let me fall in love with you.
You let me propose.
You planned a wedding.
You never said a word."
"I know."
"Did you pursue me because of him?
Because of my father?"
The question landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
Nia's face tightened.
"No."
"Then help me understand why any of this makes sense."
"Because I loved you," she said.
"Because I still do.
Because by the time I realized how complicated it had become, we were already — I didn't know how to go back."
"By going back, you mean telling the truth."
She said nothing.
I turned to Diane.
"And you.
You found out about the transfer agreement.
About the money."
"Gerald contacted me directly," Diane said.
She had recovered her composure.
The crack at the corner of her mouth had sealed itself back over.
"He wanted to ensure that Marcus was provided for quietly.
Without disrupting his estate or his family.
I agreed to act as an intermediary."
"You agreed to take money from a dying man in secret."
"I agreed to honor a private wish between two adults."
"And when I came along and started building a life with your daughter, you realized I might eventually find out.
So you wrote letters to my mother telling her to stay silent, or else."
Diane held my gaze.
"I wrote letters to a woman who was asking questions she had no business asking."
"She's my mother."
"She was becoming a problem."
Mom's hand tightened slightly in mine.
I felt it.
"She walked three blocks in the rain to get here," I said.
"With a torn sleeve and no phone, because someone in your family took it." I looked at Nia.
"Who took her phone, Nia?"
A beat.
"Marcus was with her earlier today," Nia said.
"He went to her house.
He wasn't supposed to — I didn't ask him to — but he found out she was planning to come here and he panicked.
He took the phone so she couldn't call for help."
"Where is he now?"
"I don't know."
"Where is he now?" My voice did not rise.
I had found, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, a stillness I did not know I owned.
Nia looked at her mother.
Diane looked toward the far set of doors.
I followed her gaze.
A man was standing just inside the entrance.
Tall.
Late thirties.
He had been there long enough that he must have come in while Diane was speaking.
He was watching us with an expression I had no framework for yet — part dread, part something else.
Something that looked almost like grief.
He had my father's eyes.
Not the color.
Not exactly.
But the shape.
The way they sat in his face.
The particular quality of stillness in them.
I had seen that face in photographs my entire life, and I had never once looked at it and thought: *there is something here I haven't found yet.*
"Marcus," Diane said.
A warning.
May you like
He didn't move.
I let go of my mother's hand and walked toward him.
