When Bobby told him about their first kiss, Nick was certain that he was lying. When Gina told him about having feelings for Bobby (in the same way one would tell a girlfriend, with a hushed smile and giddy whispers), Nick felt his heart crack like one of his mom’s fine crystal bibelots. When it became clear they weren’t just seeing each other, but in a freaking committed relationship, Nick didn’t leave his room for a week.
Hope, the insatiable tease, had returned to him on the night that he still thinks of as the best of his life. The cold spring night when he and Gina not only kissed, but that she gave herself to him. After they made love, Nick had expected Gina to confess her love for him. Maybe her relationship with Bobby was nothing more than a misguided attempt to give into her desires with someone who was identical to Nick, at least physically. Bobby would be upset, of course, but Nick would help him find another girlfriend. He would get over Gina because Gina was never really his. She belonged to Nick.
But weeks later Gina announced she was getting married to Bobby, and Nick felt his heart evaporate from his chest. He no longer felt anything. After sitting for his final exams, he graduated in absentia and left the country, vowing never to return.
At one point, in the twelve years he spent away, Nick determined he was healed. When he met Alice, he assumed he’d be able to love again. They’d both been beaten up by life—Nick by his broken heart, Alice by the jackass professor who’d assaulted her. They bonded over their love of traveling and healthy sex drives. When they found out she was pregnant, he’d been happy.
He had the best of intentions when he suggested returning to Alma.
Nick saw a new future unfolding before his eyes: he would return to Alma as a father and a husband. Gina would be his sister-in-law and nothing else. He had practiced greeting Gina with an aloof smile, but when she leaned in to hug him, some traitorous part of him was blissful to see her and he felt the familiar emotions invade his heart as aggressively as when he first befriended her. She was even more beautiful—being a wife and mother agreed with her. She still wore his necklace, even after all these years. Most painful of all, she seemed utterly happy. It had taken him over a decade to be able to close his wound and only seconds to have it ripped open again by her bright eyes and cascading laugh.
He spent his first months in Alma plotting his escape. He begged his dad to buy him out, pleaded with Bobby to agree to a sale to Souliers, but it was a dead end. Bobby said that if it were up to him, he’d buy Nick’s shares, but their mom would never forgive him. Nick knew he was their mother’s favorite—and now he was being punished for it. Tish wouldn’t let him leave. She held that Nick should be in Alma because he was a Dewar and that was what a Dewar did.
“You’re heartless,” he once told his mother. “Can’t you see that living here is torture for me?”
“You’ll get used to it,” Tish said.
“I’ll tell him,” Nick had threatened.
“No,” she said. “You won’t.”
She was right. He would never tell Bobby, and not just because he loved his brother, but because he loved Gina and he would never purposefully hurt her. He made peace with the idea that he’d have to live in Alma, just like he had made peace with the fact that the love of his life had a love of her life who wasn’t him. But while Nick adjusted to living in Alma, Alice never did. She hadn’t seemed to mind Alma too much when he was still trying to get them out, but when it became clear that he was enjoying being back in his hometown, she began to obsess about leaving.
Nick had believed that with time she would learn to love small-town living, the sense of community and history surrounding the town, the name recognition that came with being a Dewar, the never-ending stream of celebrations. He had thought that being a mom would make up for the fact that her career had been abruptly—and unfairly—snatched from her. Or that she’d be more realistic about her job prospects.
Before the jackass professor, Alice’s career had been like a supersonic rocket: fast, impressive, and destined for greatness. She was used to the very best: Ivy League education, the prestige and name recognition that came with a top-tier financial institution like JP Morgan, being at the top of her class at Wharton. But her circumstances had changed. Her options had dwindled, shrunk. It was unfair, of course. But it was reality. And instead of adjusting her expectations, instead of setting her sights on a smaller, more modest role at a smaller, more modest operation—one that wouldn’t impress her Wharton classmates but that would, at least, give her a sense of purpose—Alice had sulked in the anger of defeat. She refused to settle—she was stubborn; determined people are always stubborn. Nick watched, guilt-ridden, as Alice slipped into a permanent state of misery and disconnect. He had noticed she drank every day, and that she constantly criticized everything remotely related to Alma. Even Allegra didn’t seem to bring her joy.
Allegra. Nick feels a warmth spreading inside him as he thinks of his daughter’s cherubic face, far more angelic than any of the representations inside the cathedral. She is his biggest love, the light of his life. The decision he has to make—and he has to make it, there is no escaping this—will affect her. Nick
