Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Which brought to mind…
“And that’s another thing, Nora. Why did I get that envelope?”
“We can ponder that later,” she decreed. “The next point we must discuss is addressing and assessing why did you call Tom Pierce?”
I’d considered this at length for the rest of the morning after he left, the afternoon and into the evening.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Or lied.
“Mika, please,” she drawled.
She knew I was lying.
“He’s in tennis. Winston was a pro player. They were on the circuit at the same time. And Tom told me years ago that he’d keep an eye on him. I wanted to know if he’d seen or heard anything from back then to corroborate what was in that envelope.”
“Is what was in that envelope in question?”
I shook my head. “It seems thorough. I obviously haven’t called any of the women, but there were copies of emails, transcripts of phone calls and interviews. Bank transfers. Signed NDAs. If it isn’t real, I can’t begin to imagine why someone would create such an elaborate ruse, or why they’d drag me into it. Unless they had it in for Winston. However, that still doesn’t explain why they’ve gotten me involved. But I do know Winston is of that bent. I know because he’s done it before to a friend of mine.”
She nodded, and noted, “Now, let’s explore why you’re so personally affronted by Tom Pierce straying from Imogen Swan.”
“I thought he was a good guy,” I pointed out.
“There are too few of those, as we know,” she commiserated. “But Mika, you’re aware I rarely tread cautiously, however, I promise you I am when I say…he’s right. What happened between him and his wife is not really any of your concern. Am I unaware of you having a close friendship with Imogen Swan?”
I shook my head, my stomach pitching, because I’d already processed this.
And I knew she was right.
“I haven’t even met her.”
“Then what does it have to do with you?”
“I liked him,” I explained. Lamely.
“So did my mother. She called him The Bee’s Knees, and if you didn’t read the capitalization of that title in how I said it, please take note. She adored him. She’d never let him know that because that was her way. I was her child and she never let me know it, except for the day she took me aside and said, ‘Dearest, I’ve changed my will. You’re getting my Fabergé egg. I’ve noticed how particularly drawn to it you are.’ And up until that point, I hadn’t known she’d noticed she’d borne and birthed me. I thought she thought I was our housekeeper’s daughter who kept getting underfoot.”
I started laughing again because that was pure Eleanor.
Though, she’d loved Nora to pieces.
Eleanor had two zones. She’d be fascinated with you, and show it, and she was actually fascinated with you (how she was with me). Or she’d openly disdain you, and the more disdainful she was, the more she adored you (how she was with Nora, and back when she introduced him, Tom).
She often said about Nora, “That child does me in. She’s just too much.”
And she did think Nora was too much, all of it good.
Nora was not unaware of that.
It was an odd way to show affection, but affection was shown. I knew this because Nora was the same way with her mom and her kids. She loved her mother, and when Eleanor passed, Nora was inconsolable.
On the flipside, when Eleanor acted like she liked you or she was polite to you, that was when you should be wary. In those cases, she either thought you were not worthy of her time, or you were a walking abomination and she’d eviscerate you behind your back.
Again, in that, Nora was just like her mother.
“She would not have blinked at him straying from his wife. It wouldn’t change her feelings for him in the slightest,” Nora continued.
“Her generation was taught to ignore men’s indiscretions,” I pointed out.
“She still had opinions and was far more unforgiving and judgmental than even me. I know” —she closed and opened her eyes slowly while she dipped her chin humbly—“hard to believe. But it’s true. But no man, or woman for that matter, is made by one thing they did or one mistake they made. Charles Lindberg did something considered at the time outrageously heroic. But later, when he opened his mouth on matters of grave import, he proved he was not. Neither of these instances made him, and depending on your viewpoint, if you don’t take in the whole, one or the other could define him, when they do not. Is Pierce a serial philanderer?”
He’d said he’d “fucked up” and he had to own that. He was open about it, honest to the point it was raw.
But the way he said it made it sound like a one-off. Not “I’d been fucking up” or “I’d been taking my marriage for granted” or “I’d spent years betraying my wife” or anything that would make it seem like it was an ongoing thing.