“Fancy meeting a woman like you in a place like this,” he said, putting his hand on her arm to steady them both.
“We caffeine addicts need to stick together,” she told him. They hadn’t touched since the car ride to the Norwood Club nearly a month before, and his hand on her arm brought an unexpected blush to her cheeks.
“Amen,” he answered, letting go of her and raising his paper cup in a toast. “I’ve got a triple shot of espresso in here. Hey, I just found out those Lancers you introduced me to are planning to throw me a fund-raising dinner. Christy’s going to add it to my schedule this morning. Any chance I could prevail upon you to come along? You’re good at that whole thing—you make the introductions seem so natural.”
“Sure,” she said. “Happy to. Has the date been set?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll tell Christy to make sure you know as soon as she does.”
Nina nodded. “Okay,” she said.
Rafael’s hand hovered above her shoulder and then dropped at his side. “Okay, great,” he said. “Thank you. It’ll be fun.” And he smiled at her—his genuine grin.
As Rafael walked out the door and Nina got in line, she couldn’t stop thinking about how her body had responded to his fingers on her arm. Did touching her make his heart race, too? Was that why he’d almost put his hand on her shoulder? Was that why he’d decided not to?
Nina pulled her phone out of her bag. Just saying hi, she texted to Tim. Hope you had fun at the game last night.
She’d have to be careful.
10
It turned out that the Lancers’ dinner was the same evening as the event at Smith for the retiring professor.
“I don’t understand why you’re so annoyed about this,” Tim said, as he and Nina got ready to go to work the next morning. He was at her sink, wrapped in a towel from the waist down. Nina watched his pectoral muscles twitch as he ran the beard trimmer across his square chin. “You don’t even like Maggie Lancer all that much.”
It wasn’t that, though. It was the fact that it wasn’t her choice.
“I just . . . I hate that I couldn’t say no,” Nina said, as she clipped her grandmother’s pearls around her neck, the ones she’d inherited the day she was born. “Is that bratty? I sound bratty.”
Tim turned the beard trimmer off and shrugged, his freckled shoulders rising just slightly. “There’s a trade-off,” he said. “Money comes with strings. This is one of your strings. How about . . . we can have, I don’t know, three or four or even five kids and then we can ask them to make these speeches for you. Or . . . I can do them, if you don’t want to.”
Nina looked up at Tim’s familiar smiling face. She imagined little kids with his red hair and her blue eyes. She’d never make them fulfill obligations like this.
“Our kids can choose what they want to do,” she said, more seriously than she intended, then pulled her hair out of the way and turned around. “Will you zip me?”
He obliged.
Nina continued talking. “No strings attached. Not from me. I’m doing this speech because my dad asked me to, but next time, maybe I can send something for someone else to read.”
Tim had walked into the bedroom and was buttoning his white collared shirt; his jeans and sport jacket were laid out on the bed. “I bet you can,” he said. “It’s not a bad position to be in, you know, being asked to give a speech because your family endowed a professorship.”
Nina looked at Tim again. She knew she was extraordinarily lucky—in so many uncountable ways. She always tried to remember that—how millions of people would trade places with her in a heartbeat. But still, in that moment, she wished that she and Tim could swap. That he could be the one to take over the Gregory Corporation, and she could be the one who was Caro and TJ’s child, with no expectations except success in the field of her choosing. But it didn’t work like that. She was a Gregory. And that meant there were some responsibilities that were hers and hers alone.
11
The next Monday night, Nina headed to her dad’s for their weekly Jeopardy! and dinner date. Like Tim, Joseph Gregory was a creature of habit, and, especially after her mom died, Nina found comfort in the predictability. When she was a kid, they would have Chinese food together at least once a month on Monday nights, and they still did. As Nina walked to the Chinese food restaurant, she said hello to Janusz, who’d been working in the pharmacy on Columbus since Nina was in high school, and waved through the window at Penny, who had been ringing people up at the diner across the street since Nina was in lower school. Visitors often criticized New York City for feeling impersonal, too filled with people to make any lasting connections, but Nina had found the opposite to be true. The blocks around her father’s apartment seemed like a small village. The pizza place, the fruit stand, the dry cleaner, the clothing boutique. Nina thought, not for the first time, that New York City really was made up of hundreds of different worlds, each right next to another. She wouldn’t go to a pharmacy five blocks away any more than she would go to one in New Jersey. Carrying the bags of Chinese food, Nina headed into her father’s building.
Earlier that year Priscilla’s parents had moved out of the apartment she’d grown up in, and Pris had been sadder about it than Nina had expected. “It’s my whole childhood!” she kept saying. “It’s gone!”
“It’s not gone,” Nina had reassured her. “Your memories are there, no matter where your parents live.”
But ever since then, Nina had felt extra fond of this building, the place she learned to walk and talk, where she lived with people who watched her grow and mature. In Manhattan, a building like this was a community, a small town in a big city—and everyone here, staff and residents, had played a role in turning Nina into the person she’d become.
When she got up to 21-B, she walked into the gallery and called out to her father. “Dad!” she said. “I’m here! Where are you?”
“In the dining room,” he called back. She noticed that his voice sounded weaker than it used to. And his words were punctuated by a cough. But only one.
Nina walked through the great room, which was broken into different sections with rugs and furniture; one area had couches, another a table and chairs, and another was filled with bookcases and a love seat. Pieces from her grandmother’s art collection hung on the walls.
Through the great room was the kitchen, and then the dining room. Their housekeeper, Irena, had set the table with Nina’s grandmother’s gold-rimmed china and put a vase full of daisies in the center of the table. Six months after Irena had started working for the Gregorys, when Nina was in sixth grade, Irena had told her a story about her two sons who were in middle school, too, in Brighton Beach. Nina had realized then that when Irena was at her house, she wasn’t home with her own kids. After that Nina had started telling Irena she was going to have dinner with friends after school, so Irena could go home early. Sometimes Nina actually did go over to Priscilla’s place on the Upper East Side, or Tim’s a few blocks away. But sometimes she spent the afternoon at the Met, doing her homework in the Temple of Dendur and then having an early dinner in the Trustees Dining Room on the fourth floor. They didn’t usually serve dinner on weekdays, but the chef made an exception for her, their secret.
* * *
• • •
“You think Will’s going to win again?” her father asked, as he opened up the television cabinet he’d had installed specifically for their Monday night dinners. He’d been talking about Will all last week, the bartender from Texas who’d been on a winning streak. “I bet you a lollipop he does.”
Nina unpacked the food and spooned it into the dishes Irena had laid out on the table. They’d been betting candy on the results of the game show for as long as they’d been watching it together.
“I don’t know,” Nina said. “Most champions don’t even get to day four. The chances he makes it to day five are slim. How about
a Hershey bar he doesn’t?”
Nina’s father laughed. “Playing it safe, I see. You’re not taking into account the Ken Jennings principle that some people are just smarter and can keep a streak going for a while.”
Nina put the empty cartons in the take-out bag and tossed them into the kitchen trash. “Ken Jennings is one in a million,” she said.
“Maybe Will is, too,” her father replied, picking up his soup spoon.
Alex Trebek came on the screen, and Nina and her father ate and watched, until one of the contestants chose the Daily Double.
“Three Tootsie Rolls she misses this Daily Double,” her father said. The category was circus equipment, and the Daily Double was behind an $800 clue.
“No way,” Nina answered. “Two Hershey’s Kisses she gets it. She’s answered three questions right in this category already.”
Joseph Gregory shook his head. “But she hasn’t gotten one $800 clue yet. Her knowledge is limited to the $600 level.”
Her father insisted that Jeopardy! clue amounts were tied to difficulty, though Nina wasn’t quite sure that was the case. He used the analogy in real life, too, when assessing people. Nina wondered sometimes what level he thought her knowledge was limited to, but she was afraid to ask. For her whole life, whenever Nina did something that her father found unimpressive, he would tell her: You’re smarter than that. Those words always made her try to be better, to work harder, to think things through. But they hurt, too. And made her wonder if she really was smarter than that, or if her father was expecting her to be at the $2000 level, but she was only at $1600.
“I believe in her,” Nina told her father.
She took a bite of her moo shu vegetables as the contestant, a woman named Zoe, wagered all her money on the Daily Double.
And then a video clue filled the screen. “A version of this apparatus was developed by the same man who popularized the one-piece outfit acrobats wear while performing on it,” the person hosting the video said.
“What is a tightrope,” Zoe answered.
Nina and her father groaned. “What is a trapeze!” they both said at the same time.
“I’m sorry, the correct answer is what is a trapeze,” Alex Trebek replied. “And the man who developed it was Jules Léotard, who popularized the one-piece leotard.”
“We really should audition,” Nina told her father, covering up her disappointment that he’d been right. Zoe missed the question.
He laughed quietly. “No question we’d win if they let us play as a team,” he said. “And I think you owe me some Hershey’s Kisses.”
Nina smiled, even though her heart ached. “Just add them to the balance sheet,” she said. Her father kept meticulous track of who owed whom which candy; the last time they’d paid off their candy debts was when Nina left for college. Jeopardy! Mondays had been put on hiatus until she’d moved back for business school at Columbia. The newest balance sheet had been going for ten years now.
“Acrobats are remarkable,” her father said, as he watched Zoe choose the next clue.
Nina thought about what it would be like, flying through the air, unfettered, ungrounded, and she shuddered. “I couldn’t ever do it,” she said.
“My careful Nina,” her father replied. “You should face your fears, though.”
She sighed. It was something her father had been telling her all her life. “You can’t be a good businesswoman if you’re risk averse,” he’d say. And maybe it was true. But sometimes being afraid seemed smart. Besides, he was the one who’d made her fearful—fearful of what people would think, fearful that she’d disappoint him, that she wouldn’t live up to his expectations.
“You know,” he said. “I’ve always tried to protect you.”
When Nina looked over at him, his face was more serious than she’d expected. “I know, Dad,” she said.
“Whatever comes,” he said, “I hope you’ll remember that.”
She wondered what he meant, but then the moment passed, and he was wagering a Hershey bar on a $1000 clue. Nina wrote it off as her father being her father, worrying what people would say about him after he was gone. But she couldn’t help the impression she got that he was trying to tell her something more.
12
Ever since that car ride to the Norwood Club, ever since they’d bumped into each other at the coffee shop and his touch made her blush, Nina had been self-conscious around Rafael. When they were in the same room, she found herself hyperfocused on what he was doing. She noticed tiny things, like how he sometimes bit his lip when he found something funny. How he ran his right hand through his hair, just above his ear, when he was about to say something controversial. And how his eyes often slid to hers in a meeting, as if asking for confirmation on a decision he just made.
But they hadn’t been alone again, until they found themselves together in the elevator in mid-June.
“I think we got an express,” Rafael said, as they passed floor after floor without stopping.
“Rare during lunch hour,” Nina replied. And then she cringed. Rare during lunch hour. What a stupid observation. If she weren’t so self-conscious around him now, she would have said, “I’ve always wondered why someone hasn’t figured out the technology to create a smart elevator that knows when all the floor space has been taken up.”
And then Rafael probably would have told her about a scientist he brought over to the United States on an H-1B visa who was working on something similar. And they would’ve had the kind of conversation Nina loved. But instead, there was dead air between them.
“So where are you headed?” Rafael asked, breaking the silence.
“Probably the salad place,” she answered, looking up at him. “I haven’t decided. What about you?”
“Well, my lunch meeting was canceled last minute,” he said, leaning casually against the elevator wall. “And I snuck out before Jane could give me something else to do. So I figure as long as I stay away from the office, I can get a quick breather. The diner seems appealing.” He paused and ran his fingers through his hair. He was going to say something controversial. “Any chance you want to join?” he asked.
Nina knew she shouldn’t. She had work to do. But there was something about being near him. . . .
“No pressure,” Rafael added. “I know you’ve got a lot on your plate.”
The elevator stopped at the lobby.
Rafael stepped aside so she could exit first.
“I’d love to,” Nina found herself saying. “Thank you.”
The two of them walked to the diner at the end of the block and grabbed two seats at the counter.
“Isn’t it nice to eat at a counter?” Rafael said, after they’d both ordered. “I just put in a breakfast bar in my apartment. Sonia hated the idea, but I love it, eating up high like this.”
Nina was surprised he’d brought up his ex-wife. But maybe he felt safe talking about her with Nina in the same way she felt safe talking about her dad with him. She wondered if she could ask more, ask why they’d gotten divorced. The rumor was that one night they went out for dinner and a helicopter ride around Manhattan to celebrate their third anniversary, and the next morning, she told him that she wanted out, that she hadn’t been happy for a long time. In looking at him now, Nina couldn’t figure out what about Rafael could make a woman unhappy.
“It is kind of nice,” she said. Though it meant they were next to one another instead of across a table. More of a chance for their elbows or thighs to accidentally touch.
“I’m sorry you won’t be able to make it to the Lancers’ event,” he said as their food arrived. “How’s your dad doing?”
Nina shrugged. “He’s mostly okay,” she said. “But I keep noticing things. Small things. And I know there are going to be more and more of them. That it’ll snowball until . . .” Her throat felt full. She wouldn’t cry in front of him again. Esp
ecially not in the middle of a diner.
Rafael had picked up his sandwich, but put it back on his plate, uneaten.
“Do you read poetry?” he asked her.
Nina swallowed the lump in her throat. “Not much,” she said. “But a little. When I was a kid, I memorized Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky,’ for my dad.”
“He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought—” Rafael quoted.
“So rested he by the Tumtum tree and stood awhile in thought,” Nina finished.
Rafael laughed. “You’re full of surprises,” he said.
You too, Nina wanted to say. But instead she just smiled. “Why did you bring up poetry?”
“Well,” Rafael answered, stretching out the word. “I took a couple of poetry classes in college, and I’ve come to think of life like poetry. It’s my own theory, but it makes me feel better about things.”
“What do you mean?” Nina asked, hoping that whatever he was about to say would be comforting.
“I think of people like poems,” he said. “Maybe someone’s a haiku, or a villanelle, or a cinquain, a sonnet—our length and form are predestined, but our content isn’t. And each form has its own challenges, its own difficulties, and its own beauty. Your father’s poem is coming to an end, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful or worthwhile or important.”
Nina felt her eyes brim with tears and blinked hard. Instead of letting them out, she picked up her grilled cheese and took a bite, focusing on its flavor, how it felt on her tongue.
“Did you pick poems for people at the office?” Nina asked, after she’d swallowed, her tears gone.
“Hm, not really,” Rafael said, taking a bite of his own sandwich. “But I think Jane is probably a limerick. A bit of rigidity, but also funny and irreverent and predictably unpredictable.”
Nina laughed. “What about Mac?”
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