Page 94 of My Favorite Bad Decision
“Eventually Maren will realize that she’s been glorifying a relationship she really didn’t understand at all, and she will find the sort of man whocanmake her happy. And when she finds herself happily married, and probably producing loads of badly behaved children, and you’ve lost the man you should have been with, will it have been worth it then? Will it have been worth everything you gave up?”
He isn’t wrong. And I think Maren already understands, to some extent, that she’s been glorifying that relationship. But it doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be deeply hurt if she learned the truth.
I blow out a breath. “If she was your biological daughter, you’d be far less calculating about this.”
“I love Maren as if she’s my own,” he argues. “I just don’t entirely respect the decisions she’s made.”
My mouth opens to rush to her defense, and he holds up his hand, nearly upsetting his wineglass in the process. “To be fair, I don’t entirely respect a lot of yours either. But Maren has always seen beauty where there’s none and convinced herself it’s real. She could probably do something amazing with that if she put it to use in the right way. Unfortunately, she’s put it to use by seeing what’s not there with the wrong men. And you shouldn’t be the one who pays the price for that.”
I almost believe him. The problem with my father, however, is that he’s slightly too good at putting disparate facts together and making them look as if they’re puzzle pieces that have fallen into place. It doesn’t mean he’s right. He’s just good at selling a story.
“Did you ever wonder why I forgave him?” my dad asks.
I glance up from the steak I can’t manage to eat. “Yes, I wondered it nonstop for the first three days of the trip. I finally assumed he’d just charmed you into it.”
My dad tips back in his chair and smiles. “I’ll admit that it was hard to stay angry at him, but no, that’s not it. There’s only one excuse for what he did to Maren that I’d have accepted, and it happened to be the excuse he gave me. He did it for you.”
I stare at him. “Forme? How did it benefitme?”
He swirls his wine in the glass. “Your sister is a lovely girl, but there are men in the world who prefer a woman with a little spine. Or in your case, a lot of spine. An unreasonable amount of spine, some might say?—”
“You can stop now.”
He smiles. “And Miller, to his credit, is among them. So the minute he realized he was in love with his girlfriend’s seventeen-year-old sister, he did the most responsible thing he could, and left. Because he knew you were too young, and extricating himself as fast as possible was what would serve you best.”
I think back to that moment in the kitchen in Starfish Cay. I’d thought it was simplymyfantasy, a reenactment of that day in the Hamptons, taking the things I’d wanted for a decade.
But maybe it was his too.
That’s what was going on, wasn’t it, that whole summer? Bickering is foreplay for me and Miller. I was too young to realize it at the time…and maybe he was too young to realize it as quickly as he should have.
But when he did, he left, because what else could he possibly do?
As I put it together, none of it surprises me. Miller, above all else, is a good man. He wouldn’t want to hurt Maren, and he wouldn’t want to hurt me, and the way to minimize the damage was to let us both believe that he’d suddenly turned into a selfish dick, which he continued allowing us to believe for another decade. All while changing routes in Tanzania to protect me, and giving up his safari to keep me from getting sucked into a tragic mistake. He’s been giving and giving in the ways that were available to him for years while I’ve been...flipping him off from across the room and accusing him of stalking me at the start of our climb. I press my face to my hands.
Oh, God. I don’t want to cry here. In public. With my mother’s society friends watching us from across the room, with at least a dozen people here who’ve got a gossip columnist on speed dial.
“It would always be weird, though,” I say quietly, once I’ve pulled myself together. “I mean, if I dated him, it could never go anywhere. Think how awkward every family event would be. And people would gossip.”
“Indeed,” he says, nodding. “It would be very awkward for a very long time.”
We both sit in silence for a moment. He eats, and I push my food around. Nothing he’s said is wrong—I’m not taking something from Maren, and men like Miller are once in a lifetime. But it could mean fucking up so many other parts of my life to make it happen. And it would definitely mean hurting her.
“You know, when you were a toddler,” he continues, “we bought this book for the nanny.Controlling Your Strong-Willed Child. You couldn’t even read yet, but you got the gist of it, I guess because she’d open the book and then quote it to make you behave, so you attempted to flush it down the toilet. And for a long time, you remained that same kid. You entered every room and every conversation primed for battle, but it also turned you into someone who had to get everything right—and you fell apart when you didn’t.”
We exchange a look. He’s talking about Rob.
“You haven’t been happy for a long time, and you also stopped fighting to correct course until you got back from Africa. That’s where you regained a little of that spark. You wouldn’t have run off before the proposal if you hadn’t. You wouldn’t have told off your mother at the hospital, the way Charlie claims you did. So fight for the things you want. Be willing to hurt some people so that you don’t hurt Miller or yourself. It’s time to become the kid who flushed a book down the toilet again.”
I look around the expensive restaurant, at all the people who don’t seem happy—staring at their phones rather than listening to the person across from them. How many of them are like that because they gave something up, because they settled for an okay ending instead of a happy one? They are Tuesday people, just like I’ve been now for years.
Going for the things I want most isn’t guaranteed to turn out well. Miller and I might not last; Maren might never forgive me.
But…I know I’d get a life that held more Fridays and Saturdays than mine does now, until it ends.
And even if it doesn’t work—even if it’s woefully brief—I’m willing to fight for a few more of them with him.
* * *
