After so many poor choices today, what’s one more? So I go for indignation. “I don’t see how that’s—”
“How long?”
I know a lot of people in this office find me intimidating, but they have never been grilled by Harpreet when she’s upset. She is the real one to watch out for.
“Most of the summer.” With every word and every passing second, my brain feels as if it’s slowly being unspooled out the back of my skull, like dental floss being tugged out of its plastic casing. Brady is getting farther and farther away, taking his anger and hurt with him, and every second I don’t go after him is another second in which I’m sure I’ve lost him.
Harpreet groans, and even Doug looks surprised.
“He could sue us,” she says. “You know he could sue us for something like this. And we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
“He’s not an employee. He doesn’t work for me. He won’t sue,” I say. I couldn’t stand it if he did. Another man I cared for, now shielded behind lawyers and paperwork.
“Employee or not, we still pay him,” Doug says.
“They could pull our funding.” Harpreet’s working herself into a lather now. “If this got out. A lawsuit would kill us. You’d have to quit. No sponsor would fund us if we had a sexual harassment suit on our books.”
“Brady wouldn’t do that,” I say. He said he loved me. Telling Harpreet that will not remedy the situation, but he did. And I love him too, but loving him isn’t fair. Because I was kidding myself when I said we’re at the same place in our lives. We aren’t, and we never will be, and using him to make myself feel better after my divorce was inexcusable.
Brady needs to find someone he can build a life with, not someone who already has a life he will need to find a place in. He’ll have to squeeze between teacher conferences and homework, in the seconds when we’re both not working and I’m not being a dad. I won’t be able to give him the time and attention he deserves, and I can’t be there when he realizes I’ve disappointed him too.
Harpreet is still catastrophizing. “We should be ready to talk to a lawyer. Even if nothing has happened yet. We should be ready in case it does.”
“Calvin probably knows someone,” Doug says.
“Oh God, no, we can’t tell your fiancé.” Harpreet shakes her head. “What if the bank pulls their sponsorship?”
“Hey,” I say, though the word is strangled as the mental image of Harpreet’s worst-case scenario continues to grow. Damn, I’ve been an idiot. I hurt Brady, and I hurt the festival, and for what?
“Calvin would understand. We’re getting married. That’s practically a conflict of interest.”
“No, it’s not the same, it’s—”
“Hey,” I say again, a little more loudly. Doug and Harpreet both freeze as their attention swings back to me. I let out a long breath as I gather my thoughts. I spoke without thinking with Brady and look where that got me.
“First, I want to apologize. I’ve been extremely unprofessional. And inconsiderate. I was only thinking about myself, not about the wider implications for the festival.”
“Nash.” Harpreet’s voice has dropped about an octave, reaching for the same soothing energy I’m trying to convey. “I know the divorce was hard, but—”
“Second,” I say patiently. “Brady and I are both adults, and what happened between us was completely consensual, if maybe ill-conceived. He’s angry with me as a person, not with me as the festival director.”
“But he quit.”
My hands are shaking, but I pull my crumbling composure together for the sake of the two people in the room whose trust I have also broken. “Brady leaving is unfortunate, and we will have to see if we can get him back. He can deal with you and Doug from now on. But I promise you”—I’m about eighty-five percent confident on this last part—“he’s not going to do anything to hurt the festival. That’s not what this is about.”
Harpreet eyes me like she wants to say more, but Doug nods thoughtfully and says, “Let’s hope you’re right.”
I am. What it’s about is me. And him. And Dominic and the boys. I’ve been careful to keep all those worlds separate, instead of doing the hard work to find a way to fit them all together. I thought that division was important and relatively straightforward and, for a while, it was. When Brady and I were two people having sex, believing that he could exist outside the demands of my job and my kids was easy. But he’s right when he says we were becoming more than that, and that I knew it too.
“Nash, I love you.”
He did. But Dominic loved me and I let him down. And I let Jacob down. And Karter, even. Loving me is not enough to get a happy ending.
The last week has been chaotic. Jacob is stressed, which means Karter is stressed. Dominic keeps asking these weird open-ended questions like, “What will we do?” and “What does this mean for Jacob?” and the teachers at this new school he’s so keen on keep talking about milestones and outcomes and how much better students with strong parental support do. The email I supposedly never check is now full of articles Dominic keeps sending me. Some of them from news sources, but a lot are actual research papers that talk about different approaches to supporting kids with challenges like Jacob’s. It’s like he wants to drown me with a firehose of information. I haven’t had a minute to think for myself before he’s calling again, telling me about something new he read.
And, as I spent hours going over it all, I realized I couldn’t ask Brady to do this with me. He didn’t sign up for this. And he has enough going on. We’ve been dreaming airy, pie-in-the-sky dreams about dates and nights spent together, but how are we ever going to make that work? That day at his apartment, when he told the client he couldn’t help right away then sat in my arms while his face went blank and his breathing got ragged...I can’t put more on him. We have both been on the edge of balance for so long. I’ve fallen, but I don’t have to take Brady with me.
But I handled it badly. I try to reach him. I call on Wednesday and Thursday. Hell, by Friday, I show up at his apartment, but he’s not there. Or, at least he won’t answer the door. I even consider going to his office, only to realize he never actually told me where it was, and the address on his invoices is a PO Box. That’s how self-absorbed I’ve been this summer. Supposedly, I love him, but I don’t even know where his office is.
