“I spoke to Mom today.” I was tired of the meaningless small talk. “She told me the real reason for your divorce.”
“She did, huh?”
“How could you do it?” The whiskey wasn’t fueling my anger—I had more than enough before I’d picked up the phone—but it was definitely loosening my tongue. “We were a family. Mom loved you.”
“I loved your mother, too,” he said in a low voice. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Then make me understand. What about Jasper? He was your best friend.”
“I was in love with Celine before she met Jasper,” he shouted, leaving me stunned. “I’d been in love with her for over thirty years.”
A heavy silence passed between us, and I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not proud of what Celine and I did. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but until you’ve loved someone with every cell in your body, you won’t understand.”
Unfortunately, I did understand. That was exactly how I felt about Jasmine, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. No matter how much I loved Jasmine, I could never do what my father had done. He tore apart two families for a teenage crush. For a split second, I imagined Jasmine married to someone else, raising another man’s child. The thought made my chest tighten, but I couldn’t excuse my father’s behavior.
“That’s no excuse.”
“I know that. I tried to move on. I left the country. I met one of the most beautiful, intelligent, and funny women in the world, and I married her. My life was perfect.
“Then Jasper reached out to me through some alumni group, and we had drinks. It was like we were in Princeton again. I loved Jasper as much as I loved Celine. We were like brothers. I missed him. I thought I was over her, but I was wrong.
“Fifteen years went by. Things were fine. I knew my feelings hadn’t completely gone away, but I was older and wiser. I thought I was stronger, until one night I wasn’t. One night became two, and before we realized it, two years had gone by.
“Two years?” I scoffed. “This went on for two years?”
“Once I started lying to myself, it became easier and easier to lie to everyone else. Celine wanted to end it. She wanted to rededicate herself to her marriage. I’m ashamed to say that Ididn’t want our affair to end, but she was right. I had my chance, but I missed it. It wasn’t just about us anymore. We had families and the business.” He heaved a deep sigh. “None of that mattered, because your mother discovered what we were doing. You know the rest.”
My anger hadn’t abated. If anything, I was more angry. I was still angry at my father for what he did, but now I was also angry at myself because I understood why he did it.
“What do you regret more,” I asked, “not telling Celine how you felt when you were kids or waiting until you’d built a family with someone else to do it?”
Another long silence passed between us before he answered.
“Derek, I don’t even know how to answer that question. I still think about what my life with Celine could’ve been, but hurting your mother and you boys was the worst thing I could’ve done. I just don’t know if presented the chance again… I don’t know if I would have done anything differently. Like I said, unless you’ve loved someone like that, you wouldn’t understand.”
I didn’t know how I expected to feel after learning the truth about my family’s rift with the Morgans. Maybe I thought if I learned that Jasper and Celine Morgan were deceitful monsters who stole money and defrauded the company that I would feel better about my breakup with Jasmine. Instead, I felt like an idiot. My parents’ marriage ended for the same reason amillion other marriages end, and it had nothing to do with me or Jasmine.
My father destroyed his life because he was consumed by a love he was too stubborn to fight for. After the way I treated Jasmine in Miller’s Cove, I was destined to follow in his footsteps.
The package from Miller’s Cove was sitting in the same spot on my foyer table as it had been when I’d opened it a few days ago. I still had no desire to open the padded envelope containing Jasmine’s rings, but I took a closer look at the stack of papers that accompanied them. I sat on my sofa.
Jasmine had said she’d spent the morning at the library trying to find a way to save Miller’s Cove. From the look of the documents I was flipping through, she had been telling the truth.
“You said we would always trust each other. You said that we weren’t our parents.”
Jasmine had been right the entire time. She’d been right about everything. I should have chosen her. I should have trusted her. I told her that we would face whatever obstacles came our way together, and the first time things got hard, I abandoned her… again.
I got up to make myself a drink, and when I returned to the couch, Tora was lying across the cushions, covering all of Jasmine’s photocopies.
“Up, boy!” shouted and giving him a tap on the rump. “Get down.” Tora scrambled off of the couch bringing most of the papers down with him, scattering them across the floor.
I had bent down to pick them up, knowing that it was gonnabe a bitch to get them all back in order, when something caught my eye. It was a page of a contract signed by all three founders. There were other agreements in the pile, each signed by one of the three founders, but this was the only one I’d seen so far that had all three.
It took me an hour to sort through all the papers to organize the documents. Then I spent another three hours reading them. At around one in the morning, I woke up the smartest attorney I knew to help me make sense of what I found.
“I can’t believe you woke me up for this,” Chris mumbled.
