“Doesn’t it?” I asked softly.
He cast me a meaningful look before changing lanes to pass a truck. I kept my eyes firmly forward.
“I don’t think so. I mean…” He shrugged. “I can’t pretend it didn’t sting that you didn’t tell me sooner about Olivia. Or about your involvement in Calvin’s business. But today I thought, why would you? What did I do to deserve that kind of honesty?”
“Oh, Matthew, don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“I’m not,” he said shortly. “I just think that’s an unfair assumption most people make. They think secrets are something that should be freely offered. But secrets are precious. They’re earned. That’s how you know someone really loves you, I think. They confide the things they wouldn’t have told anyone else.” His mouth, so beautiful and full, twisted into a sardonic half-smile. “I like to think that’s when you knew you loved me, Nina. You had to tell your honest-to-God truth. Otherwise, how do you know the person really loves you back?”
I sat there quietly, ruminating on his words. I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap, and for a moment, saw a ring of bruises play around my wrist.
I hadn’t told him everything. I wasn’t sure I ever would. For one, there was a part of me that worried about what he would do if he knew every side of my marriage. Matthew had a protective side. More than protective, really. Matthew looked at me like I was whole. There was no pity in his eyes, the way the people who knew even bits and pieces of what Calvin did—my housekeepers, my assistant, Caitlyn—looked at me, like I was a wounded animal who would be better put down than forced to live. I couldn’t bear it if he thought of me like that. Like I was ruined.
Even so, if what he said was true… If my secrets were a gift, why wouldn’t I want him to have them all? Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I’d never know he truly loved me until he knew them all.
“Will you tell me one of yours?” I said. “Something you’ve never told anyone else. A trade, if you will?”
Matthew glanced at me. “I’ve told you secrets. Like Iraq, remember?”
His gaze darkened. I didn’t press. The memory of him on his knees, sucking blood from my finger after I had pricked myself on the sharp pin on his Navy Cross, would stay with me always. I had listened to him tell a story that was less about the valor for which he had been honored, and more about the deep guilt he carried from the horrors of that day.
Was that when he began to love me too?
“Well, that’s one,” I said. “But you have two of mine, or you did before I gave one to your boss. You owe me another.”
He shot me a quick, green gaze, then turned back to the road. “What if it’s something you don’t like?”
“It’s fair to assume I won’t. That’s why we keep them, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe sometimes it’s to protect others, not ourselves.”
He looked at me again, and this time, we were both thinking of Olivia. Of my family. Again, the ghosts of bruises throbbed on my wrist. And my jaw. My ribs.
Sometimes I wondered if I would ever know how to let go of them completely.
Well. I was trying, wasn’t I?
“I haven’t spoken to my mother in over twelve years,” Mathew said after he passed a slow-moving Fiat. “Not since I got back from Iraq.”
“That’s a long time.” I knew that Matthew was estranged from his mother, but I didn’t realize it had been over a decade.
“Some scars really are permanent.” His hands squeezed the steering wheel. “I was just getting out of class, on my way to Envy. I had just started law school, working nights at Jamie’s bar like I am now. And I got a call from Joni. She was trying to live with Mom at the time—during one of her sober periods. Joni’s the baby, you remember?”
I nodded. Joni, Matthew’s effervescent youngest sister was full of life and naïveté that even the city hadn’t beaten out of her yet. She was easily the most effusive of all his family members. I had liked her at once.
“She always had a soft spot for our mom,” Matthew continued.
“The baby of the family usually does,” I concurred.
He grunted. “Anyway, it was seven o’clock at night, and Joni was stuck at this high school in Trenton after a soccer tournament or something. Mom was supposed to pick her up, but she didn’t show. So poor Joni, this eleven-year-old kid, is alone in a terrible neighborhood, scared as fuck and without any train fare.” He scoffed, like he still couldn’t believe it. “She just fuckin’ forgot about her. Fell off the wagon for maybe the third or fourth time.” He shuddered. “I hate to think what would have happened had she actually tried to go to Trenton.”
“Why is that?” I wondered.
“Because she was the one driving when my dad died. Not that it mattered. They were both lousy drunks, so it could have been either of them who crashed the car. I told you that too.” He looked at me as if to point out that he didn’t actually have to be telling me a secret at all. He didn’t owe me confidences.
“Yes,” I agreed. “You did.”
“Anyway, I went to pick Joni up. And by the time we got back to Belmont, I was fuckin’ livid. Because I get home, and Tino, a family friend, calls us from his restaurant. Mom’s at the bar, singing ‘All Night Long’ with the jukebox before she passes out across a couple of stools.” He shook his head with disgust. “That was it. I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt like I was the one who was eleven, not Joni. Forced to be the grown-up, getting ready to take it
