Ruthless Rival (Cruel Castaways)

Present

While the city slid into a colorful spring, a vast black hole formed in my parents’ penthouse.

No word went in and no word got out. The Roths had vanished, disappeared from the face of the earth.

My mother was the one I tried repeatedly. I felt compelled to look after her, now that I knew my father had emotionally abused her. She was unreachable via phone, email, or text messages. As for my father, I never tried to contact him again after the string of scathing text messages he’d left me the day he’d gotten convicted. His ability to cancel his emotions toward me like they were a streaming-service subscription proved that said feelings had never really been there.

Finally, after seven days of radio silence, I made my way to the Park Avenue penthouse. As I took the elevator up to the last floor, a tug of worry pulled at my stomach. I realized they might not even be there anymore. What if they’d moved? My parents owned the property, but there was no way they could keep it with the amount of money they had to pay after losing the case. I had no idea what the stipulations were. How much time they had to come up with the money. I suppose Christian could’ve given me answers to all these questions, but I couldn’t ask him. Couldn’t make any contact with him. My defenses were already spent, my mental core raw.

After stepping out of the elevator, I knocked on the door leading to my childhood home. I didn’t know why, but for some reason, I did the secret knock Dad and I had used when I was a kid.

One rap, beat, five raps, beat, two raps.

There was silence from the other side. Maybe they weren’t there. I could probably call one of my mother’s country-club friends and ask if they’d given them a new address. I was about to turn around and leave when I heard it, coming from the other side of the wooden barrier between us.

One rap, beat, five raps, beat, two raps.

Conrad.

I froze, willing my feet to move. The traitorous things had taken root in the marble floor, refusing to cooperate. The soft click of the bolt unlocking chimed behind my back. A chill ran through my spine. The door opened.

“Ari. My sweet.”

His voice was so syrupy, so placid. It transported me back to my childhood. To playing tic-tac-toe in front of a pool in Saint-Tropez. To him butchering a braiding job, making my hair look like I’d gotten electrocuted. To us laughing about it. The memories flowed like a river inside me, and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard I tried.

Dad wrapping an arm around me, kissing my head, telling me it would be okay. That we didn’t need Mom. That we made a great team all on our own.

Dad dancing to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” with me.

Dad assuring me I could get into any college I wanted.

Dad buying a baseball bat when I turned sixteen and got pretty overnight, because “you never know.”

Crumbs of happiness, littered in a lifetime of pain and longing.

“Arya, please look at me.”

I spun on my heel, staring at him. There were so many things I wanted to say, but the words wilted in my throat. Finally, I managed to say the one thing that had burned in me since this nightmare had started.

“I will never forgive you.”

No more being on the wrong side of history.

I’d done this to Nicky. I would not do it again.

My father dropped his head. All the anger and wrath that had burned inside him were gone now. He looked defeated. Shrunken. A shadow of his former self.

“Why did you do it?” I demanded. “Why?”

As a woman moving in corporate circles, I’d always wondered what made men feel invincible. It wasn’t like greater, more powerful men than them hadn’t been caught. It seemed silly to think it wouldn’t happen to you. The truth had a way of catching you with your pants down. In my father’s case, also literally.

“Come in?” His face twisted, begging. I shook my head no.

He let out a sigh, dropping his head to his chest.

“I felt lonely. Very lonely. I don’t know how much your mother has confided in you. I noticed you two have gotten close over the past few weeks—”

“No. Don’t you dare try to manipulate me. Answer my question.”

“I’m not shying away from responsibility over what happened in our marriage. We both did terrible things to each other after Aaron died. But the truth of the matter is, I didn’t have a wife in all the ways that mattered. So I started looking for things elsewhere.

“At first, it was just sex. Always consensual. Always with women I knew from work. I was young, good looking, and climbing the career ladder. Conducting short affairs wasn’t hard. But then my needs expanded. I wanted emotional support too. And once you seek emotional support, you are expected to give it too. That’s what happened with Ruslana. She wanted the fairy tale, and I wanted to have the faux feeling of going back home to someone every day. Someone who’d rub my feet and warm my bed and listen to me. You had me, and I had Ruslana.”

“You told her you would leave Mom for her.”

He looked up at me, smiling sadly. “I told her whatever I needed to say to keep her. And when I realized she was going to go to your mother and tell her, I lost it. I still love your mother. Always have.”

You just have a weird way of showing it.

“Ruslana died very unexpectedly.”

I had to be careful with what I said to him. He didn’t know Christian was Nicky or that I’d seen the death certificate. No matter how I felt about Nicky’s betrayal, I was never going to hand him over on a silver platter to Conrad. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

“Yes, she did.”

“Some would argue it looks like a planned accident,” I poked.

My father’s eyes enlarged, and his bushy eyebrows dropped in a frown. “No, no. Ruslana did that to herself. She had a lot of financial problems. I had nothing to do with her death. I swear.”

“Remember when you told me she decided to quit randomly and move to Alaska? What was that all about?” I didn’t let it go.

My father bristled. “Yes, okay. It’s true. I knew she’d killed herself at some point, but I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to hurt you. I felt bad enough about what happened to her without the burden of knowing your heart would be broken too.”

“And Amanda Gispen? The dick pics? All of that?”

He blew out air, closing his eyes, as if bracing himself for the worst.

“Sometime through my ongoing affair with Ruslana, we started having . . . issues. Beatrice-related issues. I wanted to make a point. That she was not the only one. That there were others. She had no right to ask all those things she asked me for. I started seeking out other women. Conducting affairs. But it wasn’t as easy. I wasn’t the same young man I was when you were a kid. There were other hedge fund executives, more attractive, and more willing to splurge, putting their mistresses in nice apartments, handing them their Amex cards when they sent them to the French Riviera. I wasn’t one of those men. Amanda was my last mistake. But these other women . . . they all gave me mixed signals, Arya, I swear. Giggled one day and acted cold the other. I didn’t know what to do with them. I got cocky. I thought if I stayed persistent, they’d cave in.”

“You harassed them,” I said quietly, tears running down my cheeks. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t cry. But this had the anatomy of goodbye. It was final and painful and cleansing and unbearable. It cut through my bones to simply look at him.

“Yes,” Conrad said, looking a lot like that man with the pale, sweaty expression I’d met at the Cloisters shortly before everything had unfolded. “There was a lot of pressure to be there for you. To keep your mom in check. I needed an outlet.” This was the way he constructed it in his sick mind. That he had to keep my mother on a leash and be both my parents, so he had the right to abuse others. He continued, “And when you found out . . . well, it was too much. You were the one person who always looked up to me and the one woman I actually cared about. I didn’t want you to witness everything I did. I pushed you away. Amanda’s lawyer was a great excuse.”

“He had nothing to do with this,” I said hotly. I wondered if there would be a time when I wouldn’t defend Nicky like my own life depended on it.

My father smiled. “Sweetheart, I know.”

“Know what?” My pulse escalated, my heart hiking up to my throat.

“Who Christian is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I straightened my spine.

“My PI, Dave, was onto him shortly after the trial had started. There was something about him. A hunger I recognized. Those damn blue eyes.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “You kept asking what made him act the way he did.”

Conrad shrugged. “I stopped the minute Dave came back with the information.”

“But . . . but . . . if you knew, you could’ve . . .”

He looked away, at the floor. “And then what, Arya? Nicholai would get disqualified, disbarred, and his story would come out. The story in which I ruined his life, detailed and time-stamped. It would have looked even worse for me. He was just another victim of mine. Amanda and the rest would have gotten another lawyer, and I’d still be found guilty. All paths led to the same destination. And it had to be said”—he grinned sardonically—“I appreciated his coming full circle. He did good, that kid. If I went down, I wanted to go down in style, and he delivered. It’s why I told Terrance and Louie not to file an appeal.”

“You wanted to ruin his life,” I repeated, dumbfounded. Even at our worst, the year following what he’d done to Nicky, I’d thought my father had anger-management problems, not that he was malicious. “Why?”

“Because he touched the only pure thing I had in my life,” he said simply. “You.”

“You can never tell anyone,” I warned, feeling every nerve in my body on fire as I took a step toward him. “You hear me? No one. Promise me. Promise.”

He stared at me intently. “You never stopped loving him, did you?”

No. Not even for a moment.

I stepped back, pulling myself together. But he knew. In that moment, he knew. He pressed his forehead to the doorframe. Behind him, I could see the apartment was only half-furnished. Someone must’ve taken most of the stuff out. I waited to feel the pinch in my heart, but the truth was, home had never been a place for me. It was a feeling. A feeling I’d only ever felt with my father before what had happened, and with Nicky.

“Will you ever forgive me?” His eyes were screwed shut as he spoke against the doorframe.

“No,” I said simply. “You took the one person I loved more than anyone else in the world, and you ruined him for me. You need to leave the city. It’s for the best.”

“I am.” He gave me a little nod. “Next week.”

I didn’t ask where to. I didn’t want to know. Didn’t trust myself not to contact him again.

“Goodbye, Dad.”

“Goodbye, honey. Stay safe and take care of your mother.”

“She is never going to answer me, is she?” I smashed my phone against my desk, barely containing my rage. “It’s absolutely like her to go MIA after the ship has sunk. Classic Beatrice Roth for you. I wonder what she’s going to do, now that she doesn’t have the penthouse and the funds. She’s too old to get a sugar daddy.”

Jillian eyed me over the edge of her teacup, her pointed look telling me I’d forgotten to tuck my crazy in this morning. I’d been told you stopped giving a crap about what others thought about you when you turned forty. Maybe I was an early bloomer, because I just didn’t care.

“Ever considered she might not want you to fix her problems this time?” Jillian suggested. “She knows that if she answered you, you’d go into damage control mode and fix it all. I mean, you always were the grown-up in that relationship.”

“I didn’t even have a relationship with her until a month and a half ago.” I stood up and began shoving items into my bag. It was half past seven, and I’d made Christian wait long enough outside my building. He came to see me every day now.

“Yes, that’s true, but my take is you’ve never had a relationship because you intimidated her and she disgusted you,” Jilly explained, walking over to the kitchenette to pour herself more tea. “So my guess is she’ll resurface when she is ready, and when she has a plan.”

“She’s never going to have a plan.” I flung my bag over my shoulder. “She’s been cruising through life, counting on my dad to fix all of her problems.”

Jillian smiled, adding a teaspoon of sugar to the antique teacup I’d gotten her for Easter at a thrift shop. The scent of peppermint filled the air. “We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

“You sound like you know something I don’t.” I narrowed my eyes.

Jillian laughed. “I know lots of things you don’t. Let me start by pointing out the most important one—it’s not just your mother you are worried about. You are petrified of Christian, or Nicky, or whatever you want to call him today. You’ve been barricading yourself in the office every day until eight o’clock since you found out he was waiting for you each night.”

“It’s stalker behavior.” I stomped to the door to make a point. “I’m trying to discourage it.”

“You’re so deeply in love with the guy I’m embarrassed for your soul. Why aren’t you giving him a chance?”

How had we gotten from the subject of my mother to this? I rolled my eyes, plucking my lip gloss from my bag and reapplying it absentmindedly. “Because I’ll never trust the man again, so there’s really no point.”

“You keep telling yourself that, sweetie.” She came to pat my arm on her way back to her desk.

I frowned. “What are you doing here, anyway? At least I’ve had a reason to stay late these past few days, but you didn’t.” I paused. “Or did you?” I grinned.

Jillian got back to her seat, grabbed a hair clip, and tossed it in my direction. “Leave now!”

I dodged the hair clip, laughing. “What’s his name?”

“Out!”

I straightened back up. “Hmm. Out. That sounds cute and eccentric. Are his parents environmentalists? I don’t know, I like Woods or Leaf more.”

“I swear to God, Arya . . .” She waggled her finger at me. “By the way, you remember our meeting tomorrow, right? With the woman from Miami? Nine thirty?”

“Yes.” I made a face. “I’m still not sure how we can help her. Her business idea sounds solid, but she hasn’t even incorporated the company yet.”

Then I was out the door, giggling my way to another encounter with Nicky.

Only he wasn’t there.

For the first time in a week, Nicky didn’t lay siege outside my office.

Disappointment flooded me. I hated the side effects of not seeing him there. The weak knees, the way my heart dropped and my shoulders sagged. I willed myself to stand taller and maneuvered my way to the subway, plastering a deranged smile on my face. This just went to show that Nicky wasn’t reliable. He’d given up on me in less than a week.

But then you did chide him and ask that he never contact you again, a voice inside me reasoned. Numerous times, in fact. Furthermore, you were a complete bitch when he pointed out he quit his job for you.

Logically, I knew I had no right to be mad at him for not waiting outside my office door for three hours. And also logically, it was true that he hadn’t had to quit his job. He could have carried on with his life, safe in the knowledge I wasn’t going to hand him over to the authorities. He’d chosen to repent for his deception. But maybe my issue wasn’t about trusting Nicky. Maybe my issue was with trusting myself. After all, he was the height of everything. The desirable, ultimate, unrequited love. Had been for so many years.

Maybe I just didn’t want to hand over the remainder of my heart to the man who’d stolen it nearly two decades ago and never given it back.

I spent the train journey mulling over my thoughts on the situation with Nicky. The kid he had been. The man he was today. When I arrived at my building, I saw a figure loitering at the stairway. My pulse kicked up.

He’s here.

My feet moved faster. But as I drew closer, I realized that it couldn’t be him. The person waiting outside was too short, too slight. My stride slowed until I came to a complete stop.

“Mom?”

The figure swiveled its head and looked up at me.

She looked exhausted, ten pounds slimmer, but still extremely put together. She patted herself clean of invisible dirt, like her mere presence in a zip code that wasn’t Park Avenue dirtied her up.

“Hello, darling,” she chirped brightly, her plastic smile unwavering. “Sorry I’ve missed your calls. I had a few things to tend to. Is this a bad time? I can come back tomorrow if you’d like.”

I shook my head slowly. “No. Right now is fine. Come on up.”

I kicked off my heels and threw my keys into the ugly bowl by my door upon arrival, realizing this was the first time my mother had ever been to my apartment. I flicked the coffee machine on, pulling out two cups.

“Take a seat. How’ve you been?” I asked, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. She’d done it again. Gone MIA on me. After a few weeks when she’d actually resembled a mother, albeit from afar and only if you squinted to really put it into focus, she’d just bailed. Again. I should’ve known. Should’ve expected it. Then why did it hurt so much?

Beatrice perched herself on the edge of my green velvet Anthropologie couch, occupying as little space as possible. “Well. Everything considered, of course.”

“Coffee okay?”

“Oh, just lovely, thank you.”

“Cream? Sugar?” I asked. It was wild that I didn’t know such a trivial thing about my mother.

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t usually drink coffee. Just put what you normally do in your coffee. I’m sure I’ll like it.”

I dumped two spoonfuls of sugar and extra cream into her cup. I had a feeling she needed the extra calories. I carried both our coffees to the living room and sat on a recliner in front of her. She took a careful sip. I found myself watching her closely. Her face relaxed after the first sip. Maybe she’d thought I’d poison her.

And if this were ten years ago, maybe I would have.

“That’s actually good.”

“Coffee is the nectar of the nine-to-fivers.” I sat back. “So why are you here?”

My mother put her cup down on the coffee table, turning toward me fully. “There’s a reason why I haven’t taken any of your calls, Arya. I spoke to your friend, Jillian, about it, but I asked her not to tell you.”

I almost dropped my coffee midsip. It was unlike my mother to get involved with any of my friends. In fact, I’d had no idea she was even aware of Jillian’s existence. Mom licked her lips fast, her words measured and well rehearsed. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently. I know I haven’t been the best mother. Or any sort of mother at all. I take full responsibility for that. But when things with Conrad began to unravel, the last thing I wanted was to become a liability to you on top of losing everything that I had. So . . . well, I got myself a job.”

My eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets. “You’re going to start working for us?”

My mother shook her head, laughing. “See? That is exactly why I wanted some time to pull myself together. No. I will not be taking a position with Brand Brigade. I found a job independently. Well, more or less.” She scrunched her nose. “You’re looking at the new administrative and marketing assistant for my country club! Granted, a country club I can no longer afford, but the offer is great and the health insurance is quite good, or so I’m told.”

A strange feeling swept over me. Like I was under warm water. Elation. Pride. And hope. So much hope.

“Mom.” I reached to grab her hand, squeezing it. “That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.”

Her eyes shone, and she nodded, taking another sip of her coffee. “Yes, and that’s not all. I filed for divorce yesterday. It’s over, Arya. I’m leaving your father, and he is moving to New Hampshire to live with his sister and her husband.”

“Oh, Mom!” I flung myself over her, burying my face into her shoulder. It took me a few seconds to realize I was sitting in her lap. I was a good five pounds heavier than her at this point, but when I tried to stand up, she pulled me back down, cupping my face with both her hands. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I couldn’t help it. They just kept coming. But they felt good. Cleansing.

“I’m so sorry, Arya. All this time I’ve ignored you. Overlooked you. Gave myself excuses. That you and he had each other. That I was just standing in your way. That is all over, now. I have a new apartment, a new job, a new life. I know it’s late, but I hope it is not too late to be your mother.”

I shook my head sharply. “No. No.” I sniffed, pushing my head against her shoulder again. “Just don’t do that again. The thing where you disappear for days and weeks at a time. Even if you tell me things that I don’t want to hear. Even if it’s to tell me to back off and not butt into your business. Parent me, Mother.”

“I will, honey. I will.”