“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I asked.
“You’re about to swing us right off this porch,” he said, and I noticed for the first time how much air we were catching. My body had a very definite reaction to this Melissa. Dragging a foot, I slowed us down to a normal pace.
“Sorry about that. You and this Melissa—I mean, you and Melissa—exclusive. Go on.” I forced my foot to just barely graze the porch every so often.
He did. They dated for months, she met everyone he was close to, she was welcomed thoroughly into the family. A junior partner at an accounting firm, she was knowledgeable in many areas of finance, and could hold her own in most conversations. She could kill it at a cocktail party, he said, and he was proud to have her on his arm.
But as the economic recovery was still struggling, Leo began to voice some of his concerns over the practices that not only the Maxwells were employing, but the banking world in general. “She’d encourage me to speak up, share my ideas, but I began to notice that she’d always add in something about it not being the right time, or to maybe keep some of it to myself until the climate had shifted, things like that. She knew I was unhappy with things at work, yet when we’d talk it out, I’d always come away feeling more confused than I was before, unsure about my position and how vocal I should be.”
He suddenly looked into my eyes, intense and a bit haunted. “Have you ever gotten so totally thrown by someone, you have no idea how it could have happened?”
“Honestly? No.” I paused, chewing on my lip. “But that’s because I never let anyone get close enough.” Very dramatic gulp. “Until you.”
We stared at each other, the emotion between us shimmering in the air in giant waves of ohmygodthisguycouldwreckmeforalwaysbutImightbeokaywiththat until a noisy jaybird startled us.
Lifting one corner of his mouth in that adorable way, he went on. “Well, until Melissa, I’d been the same way. But she snuck right on under the fence, under everyone’s fence—and my entire family was born with a gold-digger alarm.”
“No,” I breathed, and he nodded.
“Oh yeah. She was so good, I didn’t even see her coming. I continued to waffle back and forth about how involved I wanted to get at work, whether I wanted to make a shift into a different division, try something new—and then we spent a weekend up here in Bailey Falls. I hadn’t been up to the farm in years, but we both wanted to get out of the city for a long weekend, and she seemed fascinated by all the properties my family owned, and away we went up the Hudson. She seemed impressed by the overall size of the house, and the grounds of course, but a bit disappointed in the state of things up here. Especially since no one had lived on the farm full-time in years, things were a bit rustic.”
“Rustic as all grand old country homes can be,” I said in a simpering Upper East Side accent, and he grinned.
“Exactly. Anyway, three very important things happened during that trip. One, I visited a nearby organic farmer, a farm that I’d been read about in The New Yorker, about how he was doing amazing things with an old property. That Saturday morning while she was still asleep, I took out the old caretaker’s Jeep and ran around our property all day, following the old fields and seeing possibilities with the land I’d never seen before.” His face lit up as it always did when he spoke about the land, and the way he tended to it.
“And the second important thing?” I asked.
“I heard the end of a conversation Melissa was having with her mother, bragging about how big the house was, but also how rundown everything seemed to be, and what she’d do to it if given the chance to be a Mrs. Maxwell.”
My nose wrinkled, and my lips pursed together. Once more, he nodded in agreement.
“So did you tell her to pack it on up and take her big but rundown ass back to the city?” I asked, rolling my eyes when he shook his head.
“No, but I did tell her the beginnings of the idea that became Maxwell Farms,” he said ruefully. “She wasn’t too keen on the idea.”
“I can imagine,” I huffed, knowing already who this woman was. She seemed exactly like Mitzi St. Renee and the gaggle of size-zero assholes whom I used to cook for in Bel Air. But I was also seeing Leo in my mind’s eye—younger, more citified, standing right on the edge of becoming the fantastic guy I knew, doing exactly what he loved, making the world a little bit better, and a lot sexier. “So, what was the third important thing that happened?”
“Right after I told her she shouldn’t worry so much about how rundown the house might be, she told me she was pregnant.”
The swing stopped so suddenly I almost pitched forward onto the porch, not realizing for a second or two that it was my own foot that stopped it.
Leo reached out to catch me, then set a comforting hand on my shoulder as I reeled from the news he’d received almost eight years ago.
“You’re shitting me,” I said through my teeth.
“I’m not shitting you,” he assured, rubbing my back in soothing circles. “Although I said something similar.”
“Do you think she planned it? To get pregnant I mean, or is that too rude to ask?”
“It’s not rude, and it’s also the same question almost every person I know asked at one point. Whether she did or not, it almost doesn’t matter.”
“I suppose not,” I answered, leaning into the circles he was painting on my back, which turned into an entire arm around my shoulder. I leaned into that, too.
“Anyway, we tried for a while to make it work, considered getting engaged, but my eyes were wide open now, and I knew it was just a matter of time before it all went to hell. What I didn’t know was that it was also a matter of money.”
“What does that mean?”
“We tried to make things work between us because we were having a kid. But it became clear very quickly that ‘things working’ wasn’t going to be in the cards for us, and we began to fight constantly. Which made me nervous, because I knew all that stress wasn’t good for the baby. But when I made an off-hand comment one night about giving her a bag of cash to just give me the baby after she was born, she jumped all over it.”
“No, oh my God, no,” I whispered, horrified.
“I couldn’t believe it, either, but she was dead serious. Turns out all her contacts in Manhattan were a little shady. She wasn’t nearly the big swinging dick she thought she was at her firm, and for an accountant, she had a terrible spending habit. So having a Maxwell baby?” He spit out the words, two red spots burning high on his cheekbones. “That was a payday she was pretty excited about.”
“Leo. I’m so sorry,” I said, turning in his arms and resting my head on his chest, wrapping my arms as tightly as I could around his waist.
“It’s all good, Sugar Snap. Because I got that fantastic kid out of the whole deal.” He held me just as tight, his chin resting on the top of my head, where he now dropped a kiss affectionately. “It was a mess for a while, sure—the gossip columns were brutal, and I wouldn’t wish that hell on my worst enemy. But once the lawyers got involved and a settlement was reached, it was a done deal. She had the baby, she held Polly exactly three times, and we haven’t seen her since. My accountant tells me the checks are still cashed monthly, and that’s the only contact I have with her.”