by Lizzie Shane
What would his mother think of adding Samira to that portrait? Which would bother her more? The fact that Samira was Muslim or the fact that she was the Help?
“Aiden? Is everything okay?” Candy must have heard something in his voice.
He was slipping. Letting it all get to him. The bitterness. The futility. “Peachy keen.”
“Aiden…”
He didn’t wait for her to finish whatever she was about to say. “How did you do it? How did you just walk away?” She made it look so easy. Like he could just decide to be free—when he wasn’t even sure what freedom looked like.
“What?”
He’d managed to surprise her. Not easy to do with Candy. But he wasn’t feeling much like himself tonight. For the first time, the idea of walking away from the family legacy sounded good. He could be with Samira. Raise the girls. Did his life really have to mean more than that?
“We’re spoon fed that shit from the cradle. Family loyalty. Civic service. The great Montgomery-Raines dynasty. Our entire identities are shaped around grooming us for public office and you just decided one day—nope, not gonna do it, gonna run off to California and play with celebrities instead. How did you do that?”
Her answer came without hesitation, unvarnished. “I stopped buying the family propaganda.”
“How?” It had never sounded like propaganda to him. It sounded like truth. Meaning. The guiding principles of his life. How did he walk away from that? How did he walk away from who he was, who he was meant to be, for someone he wasn’t even sure wanted to be with him? “Never mind.” He released a ragged sigh. “Not like it would do me any good anyway. Night, Candy. See you at the wedding.”
He thumbed off the call without waiting for a reply. No closer to figuring out what he wanted to do than he had been before he called. And wishing, stupidly, for Samira to talk it through.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The sun was clearing the horizon when Samira climbed the townhouse steps the next morning, shivering in the early morning chill. She hadn’t slept well the night before and had been up at four, unable to quiet the thoughts chasing one another around in her brain.
She and Jackie had talked about everything except Aiden last night—and she was incredibly grateful her friend hadn’t pushed it or given her a hard time. Jackie seemed to sense she wasn’t up for an I-told-you-so. Instead, they’d talked some about Jackie’s frustration with Amal and the sudden importance of having babies.
With everything going on in the world, Samira knew it was silly to be upset about a little broken heart, but no matter how many times she told herself that her love life was unimportant in the scope of things, that didn’t make her feel any better.
She’d let herself buy into the fairy tale and now it was over.
She tried the knob—expecting to find it locked. The only reason she hadn’t come back at four was because she was waiting for it to be a decent hour to ring the doorbell, since she’d left her keys behind. But the doorknob turned, the door opened and Samira slipped inside, glancing around the entry like a burglar sneaking in.
She turned to softly close the door, but her gaze caught on the figure slumped over the desk in Aiden’s office, visible through the open double doors. His face was mashed on top of his closed laptop, one arm flung across the desk palm up and an empty tumbler at his elbow. He hadn’t even made it to the couch five feet away.
She closed the front door, careful to keep it quiet, but Aiden jerked awake at the soft sound and jolted upright in his chair. He blinked sleepily, hair sticking up on one side in a way that made her heart lurch affectionately, and as soon as he saw her standing in the foyer, he jerked to his feet, stumbling and bracing himself on the desk. “Samira.”
“Aiden,” she murmured, a wealth of could-have-beens in her voice.
She’d made up her mind last night, somewhere in the long predawn hours. Now it was just a question of doing what needed to be done.
As he came around the desk she realized he’d slept there so he would have a clear view of the door if she came back. Waiting for her all night. Looking as wrecked as she was by the way they’d left things.
Regret bubbled up in her chest. Maybe they could make it work. Maybe it didn’t have to be a fantasy. He was so unlike her ex-husband—who would have locked her out and gone to bed without a second thought.
How different would her life have been if she’d married someone like Aiden? She’d written off the idea of ever being with someone again and somehow just by being himself he’d made her see that not all men were like Trevor. He’d made her believe in things she hadn’t even realized she’d stopped believing in.
But even if she wanted to be with him, he’d never made her any promises. He’d never talked about the future or what it meant for them, and now he was running for office. She was no political wife—even if he’d wanted to marry her—something she was getting way ahead of herself even considering.
They’d been fooling around. Having fun. That was all it was. And it had to be over.
Awkwardness hung in the air, cloying in the early morning quiet of the house.
“I’m sorry—” They both spoke at once, the words pushing over one another, and she flushed, ducking her head. Waving him to go first.
“I thought I’d told you. I wasn’t trying to blindside you like that—we talk about everything…” His voice faded, eyes pleading.
“I shouldn’t have run off,” she offered. “I just… I couldn’t think.”
He stepped toward her, cautious. “You can always talk to me. We’ll figure it out.”
She shook her head. He was talking like it wasn’t over, but that was just denial. “It wasn’t just that. A lot happened yesterday. I think I just needed to run away from reality for a minute.”
Concern puckered his brow. “Are you okay?”
He took another step forward and she fell back an equal distance. “I’m fine.”
He froze in place and she could see him trying to hide his frustration that she’d shied away, but she couldn’t let him touch her. If he touched her, she wouldn’t be able to explain and she needed to explain. Things were different between them now. Her walls were back up and she needed them to stay that way—no matter how much he might hate them.
He looked like crap. As if the night had aged him. Or maybe that was the scotch in the glass still sitting on his desk.
She wet her lips. “Even if I wanted that life—which I really don’t—you have to see that it’s impossible, Aiden.”
“Nothing’s impossible. Isn’t that what you’re always telling the girls? If we could just talk about it—”
“You aren’t hearing me.” She walked past him toward the kitchen. He followed on her heels, but she didn’t reach for the kettle to occupy her hands like she usually did, forcing herself to face the conversation head on. She turned toward him, meeting his eyes. “My father was detained at the airport coming back from a conference because his name is Ashkan Esfahani and his passport says Iran.”
Aiden’s expression intensified as he kicked into lawyer mode. “Is he all right? Does he have representation?”
“He’s fine. It was a while ago, but this week he had to take down his Facebook page because a student started smearing him online and it got out of hand.”
“My firm can help him or he can contact the ACLU in his area—”
“Aiden, that isn’t the point. This isn’t about my father. We’re just… we’re too different. Our realities are too different.” She sank down onto a stool at the island, propping her elbows on the counter and dropping her forehead onto her hands, trying to figure out how to make him see. “Do you know what I thought, when the towers were hit on September eleventh? I was in school and they made an announcement, brought televisions into the classrooms so we could watch and I remember thinking, with this incredible clarity, ‘What did we do to them to make them want to hurt us so much?’ It took me a while to realize that a lot of people saw me as part of the
them, not part of the us. That’s a hard lesson for a middle schooler.”
“Samira…” He reached for her, as if he would comfort her, but she held up a hand to stop him. She didn’t want comfort. She didn’t want him to tell her it was okay. She wanted him to understand.
“My father is a history professor. His main focus is Ancient Persia and he takes the same pride in being Persian that the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding took in being Greek. The cradle of civilization—he can go on about it for hours. But then 9/11 happened and suddenly no one cared that he speaks Farsi and not Arabic—in popular culture, suddenly everyone like us was a threat. How would you feel if that happened to you?”
“Angry, I expect.”
“Not at first. We were pretty insulated on a liberal college campus, but it was still scary when the world got divided into us and them. My dad would rant about the racial profiling at the airport. He was bitter about the injustice of it, the unfairness, the ignorance, but mostly we were scared. My mother worried about going back to Iran to visit family—afraid they wouldn’t let us back in. They’d lived here for decades. I was born here. My mother is a citizen, but a lot of people just didn’t see Americans when they looked at us anymore. I would hear her tell my father to be careful what he said and who he said it around and he would get frustrated because other people didn’t have to. They could say whatever they wanted to him, call him whatever they wanted, and he had to be the bigger man. Free speech didn’t go both ways anymore—if it ever had—and I think anyone would have gotten sick of having to always be the bigger person, but he just kept debating his ideas and teaching people about Persia and swallowing his bitterness.”
“The bitterness wasn’t misplaced.”
“But it didn’t do any good either,” Samira argued. “That’s why I love working with kids. I had to find some way to see hope instead. When I said I wanted to be a preschool teacher, my father thought I was wasting my potential, but they are my potential. They haven’t learned to be scared of things that are different yet.” She shook her head. “It’s just so frustrating because we aren’t so different. But every time some madman does something halfway around the world, I have to wonder how it’s going to come back on us. It seems like everyone is dominated by fear these days and we’re an easy target because we’re other. I don’t understand the violence any more than anyone else. I don’t know what makes them hate us—and I still feel like part of the us, no matter how people see me.”
“You are part of the us.”
“Not to everyone.”
“They’re wrong. We just have to show them they’re wrong.”
“Aiden…”
“It’s the pendulum of change,” he argued, speaking quickly. “Things get worse before they get better. We have to go backwards before we can all acknowledge how backwards we are. When things seem to be moving in the right direction, we forget how far we still have to go. Sometimes adversity is the best thing for change.”
“Aiden.” She shook her head. He still wasn’t getting it. Still trying to force the world to be as good as he wanted it to be by sheer force of will. He didn’t see it. How deep it went. She supposed she’d always known he was an idealist, but she’d never seen it as clearly as she did now. She didn’t want to pop that bubble of idealism with reality, but she needed him to understand. “It isn’t that simple.”
“Maybe some people are prejudiced—”
“Maybe?”
“So we change their minds! We do something. We stand up for what we believe is right. That’s why I want to run. So we can make a difference. So we aren’t just sitting by helplessly and watching it happen. So all those people who want the world to be better have someone to fight for them. So the positive energy that comes out of resisting hate has someone to speak for it. That’s who we can be, Samira.”
“No. It’s who you can be. And I know you can be. You can be amazing, Aiden. But that’s never what I wanted.”
*
Aiden ground his molars as Samira’s expression closed down like a bank vault sealing. His head was pounding—though he wasn’t sure if it was from his hangover or the impending sense of futility. That fucking morass of helplessness. Like he’d already lost her and this conversation was just a formality.
She might say she was shy. Passive. Quiet. But she was also stubborn. So stubborn when she’d made up her mind. She held her own easily with the girls—always calm, always firm, never raising her voice. He should have expected the same implacable resilience in their relationship, but this was the first time they’d disagreed—perhaps ever.
“Samira, I want you.”
“What are you going to run as?”
“What?”
“I’m Muslim, Aiden. And my parents were Iranian immigrants. Your family leans to the right, don’t they?”
“What does it matter what my family thinks? Besides, political beliefs don’t come in packages. I can be fiscally conservative and socially progressive. The world is shifting.”
She gave him a do-you-think-I-was-born-yesterday look. “You know how this works as well as I do, Aiden. You’re about to have a political base—especially if you want any money or help from the party. You’re going to have to care what those people want and for a lot of them political platforms do come in packages.”
“I have no intention of being a candidate who only says what polls tell him to say.”
She snorted, her expression harsh. “The principled politician. Are you sure you’re a Raines?”
“I thought you wanted to see hope. Where’s that desire now?”
“It’s exhausted. And tangled up in self-preservation.” For a moment something flashed in her eyes—something that looked like regret. But then it was gone and her walls were back, stronger than ever. “You can change the world, Aiden. But not if we’re together. And I’m not going to get in your way. I need us to go back to being professional towards one another.”
“Are you kidding me? I haven’t even decided for sure yet if I’m running.”
“You should. But it isn’t all about elections. This was never going to work—”
“Says who?” He raked a hand through his hair. “We can talk about this—”
“There isn’t anything more to say. What we had ran its course. I can’t be your date for your sister’s wedding. I can’t be your anything. Except the nanny. This is how it has to be, Aiden. I’m done pretending we can be more. The fairy tale’s over.”
He watched her flee the room, staring after her with that awful helpless feeling climbing up his throat. They couldn’t be over. He just needed to give her time to cool down and he would convince her of that. But if it wasn’t really over, why couldn’t he breathe?
*
Samira shut the door to her room and leaned back against it, focusing on her breathing and trying to swallow down the feeling that she’d just made a huge mistake—but she couldn’t be a politician’s wife. Better to nip things in the bud before they got too emotionally involved.
As if she wasn’t already too emotionally involved.
But this was the right choice. It would only be harder the longer she let it go on. She’d made the right decision. They’d had some fun. It had been great, but they needed to go back to being professional.
She only hoped they could. She didn’t want to lose Aiden or the girls in her life. She just wanted to pretend things were as they’d always been. If it wasn’t already too late.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Aiden! Girls!” Regina Montgomery-Raines rushed forward with outstretched arms, her heels clicking on the stone walk. “Can you believe the big day has finally arrived? Or the big week, I suppose.”
Aiden restrained himself from mentioning that finally didn’t apply in a four-month breakneck engagement as his mother threw her arms around him. She stepped back to accept the leg-hugs from her granddaughters, patting each of them affectionately on the shoulder. She wasn’t the prototypical doting grandmother, but she did adore t
hem in her own way. “I believe the cook has a surprise for good girls. Have you been good girls?”
Maddie and Stella chorused yes and his mother shooed them toward the kitchens with a “Well, go on then!” before turning to Aiden and making a show of scanning the area around the SUV. “Well? Where is she?”
Aiden’s gaze went automatically to the tailgate where Samira had already gone to begin unloading the small mountain of junk the girls traveled with. “Where’s who?”
“The girl! The date! The one you were bringing. Is she only coming in for the wedding? I thought I’d told you that there was room at the cottage for her all week, but with this wedding I can’t seem to keep straight who has been told what. I am very unimpressed with this wedding planner. But that’s what you get when you have to take whoever is left when all the good ones are booked years in advance.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Aiden saw Samira stiffen at the mention of his date. “Change of plans. I was convinced it was wiser to bring the girls’ nanny instead.”
His mother followed his gaze and sighed. “Oh well. That’s probably wise. We’ve hired on extra help for the wedding since your grandfather’s staff had been reduced to the nurses and essential personnel, but the new people are always a little slower to learn the ropes. I can only hope everyone will be up to speed before the wedding. Very smart of you to bring your own girl.”
The dismissive description of Samira rankled, but his mother went on before he could correct it.
“It’s probably for the best you didn’t bring a date. Tamara Hilton RSVPed without a plus one. You remember Tamara from boarding school?”
Almost against his will, he looked toward Samira, searching for some sign of jealousy, some reaction, but she didn’t look up from her task.
His mother misinterpreted his look. “Don’t worry about that, darling. Walters will see that she knows where to go. We may be short-staffed but we aren’t entirely uncivilized.”