“Favorite flavor of ice cream.”
“Peppermint, but it can’t be green. It has to be white. Real. With crushed up red and white peppermint candies in it. There was this little ice cream shack on the water near my childhood home in Connecticut. My brother, James, used to walk me there when I was a kid. The. Best. Peppermint ice cream. Ever.”
Emma remembered the place clearly—Half Shell. It was where they’d been headed the day she was taken. She didn’t know if he saw something in her face, but his next comment stunned her.
“There are some photos... I don’t... here, come with me.”
Nathan took her hand and led the way into a spare room. Inside the sparse, clearly unused bedroom was a walk-in closet, and inside that were stacks of banker boxes: files from the look of them. He pulled a small box from a shelf.
“I don’t want these used for the story, but it may help you... paint a picture. Be right back.”
It was a true testament to the size of the closet that her anxieties hadn’t kicked in. She started flipping through pictures thrown haphazardly into the box. There was no order to them at all, but she knew she would find photos of herself. They were together all the time as children; mainly because she was glued to his hip. She followed him everywhere, but he never seemed to mind. The thing Emma did find surprising as she moved through the box was the lack of photos of his father. Nathan’s father had been the CEO of Knightsgrove-Bishop and a political kingmaker until his death two years ago. Emma once caught her own father muttering to himself about Henry Bishop, calling him an ‘ugly drunk’ despite the fact that they had been neighbors, and Emma assumed friends, for years. She had a vague recollection of peeking around a door in the Bishop house and interrupting Mr. Bishop shaking Nathan by the shoulders, but the memory wasn’t clear. As a child, she’d just thought he was mean.
Nathan’s mother, Seraphina, was the daughter of British nobles and looked the part. Emma thought she was a princess, and neither her father nor Sera Bishop herself discouraged the notion. She actually had a crown—well, a tiara—and sometimes she would let Emma wear it as she sat on her lap at her dressing table. She would try different pieces of jewelry on Emma and tell stories about meeting the queen or attending a royal ball. Emma loved her. She had no mother of her own, so she sort of adopted Seraphina. About two years after she was rescued and started her new life, Sera made the family’s Belgravia home in London her primary residence while Henry remained in Connecticut. With Nathan’s brothers out of college and Nathan away at boarding school, the time was ripe to flee a bad marriage. Nathan spent his downtime throughout college with his mother and even worked in London over the summer while in business school. Sera had this lovely lilting voice that Emma still remembered clearly. Occasionally in interviews, she could pick up just the slightest hint of the British influence in Nathan’s upbringing. He never said “lift” or “telly,” but if he was annoyed with an interviewer, he would finish a comment with a rhetorical—and slightly pejorative—question. It’s fairly obvious when you think about it, isn’t it? Very British indeed.
About twenty pictures in, she found one. He was fishing off of her family’s dock in Nantucket. If you didn’t look closely, you wouldn’t even notice her. She was curled at his feet, playing with her toes as he focused on the water. She couldn’t have been more than three. They seemed completely oblivious to one another, but completely content.
She gazed up at the ceiling of the closet to clear her emotions when another box caught her eye. It was sitting on a rack above a row of empty hangers and it read simply, Webster. The shelf was a white metal grid rather than solid wood. She stood and reached up through the squares of the rack that held it to try and inch it forward, her hands squeezing through the open squares. She was about to touch her fingertips to the bottom of the box when a large hand gripped her wrists. She turned, still tangled in the shelf and came face to face with a stoic Nathan. She looked up at her hands and her mind started to slip. She heard him say, “Are you snooping, Emma?” but he sounded far away. She blinked and saw his expression turn from amusement to concern as she drifted.
Two little hands poked through the top of a cage—like a dog kennel—and a man held them. Ah ah ah, little one. I will cut them off.
Her mind was flashing like a slideshow, and her body was shaking.
Her little hands reaching through the metal grid. A large hand squeezing them in warning, a tattoo on the soft skin between his thumb and index finger.
Then, nothing.
Emma looked up and realized she was sitting on the closet floor. Correction, she was sitting in Nathan’s lap on the closet floor. He was stroking her hair, bringing her back. She stared up at him with unguarded emotion: fear, gratitude... love. He searched her face. Emma saw his relief. She felt calm. Safe.
“Where’d you go?”
Panic seized her. What the fuck had just happened? She had never had a flashback of her captivity. Never. She’d never seen a face that reminded her of anyone, a room that brought on anxiety, a smell, nothing. Being with Nathan had triggered something, and she needed to get the hell away. She pulled herself up and stood next to him. He looked up at her calmly, knees bent, palms flat on the floor behind him.
“I... sorry. I haven’t eaten today. I think I just got dizzy.”
“I know what that was, Emma. I’ve seen it.”
She didn’t want to engage in a debate or try to convince him it was a harmless dizzy spell. She just needed to go. She turned her back on him and spoke to the empty guest room.
“Can we pick this up next week? I’m sorry, I lost track of the time. I’m late for something.”
“Emma.”
She grabbed her bag and notes and moved calmly to his front door. She could hear him stalking behind her but keeping a safe distance. She turned and confirmed their next appointment.
“Wednesday, noon?”
He seemed to know she wasn’t there, and inexplicably, he knew what she needed. He pulled the door open, stepping back a safe distance.
“I need to have Andrew drive you home. Okay?”
This was for him. He was calm, quiet, but he needed the reassurance that she was safe.
“All right.”
“There’s that word again,” he muttered.
Despite her acquiescence, he seemed dismayed. He sent a text and walked beside her the ten or so steps to the elevator in his front hall.