Nathan Bishop was a scoundrel. A pig. A shark. A wolf. A fox. A dog. He was the entire zoo. And Emma had been in love with him since she was a child. They had been next-door neighbors in Connecticut, and he was her first real memory. When Emma was four, she’d gotten stuck in his treehouse. She had climbed the rickety ladder and was too afraid to come back down. She’d sat up there, balled up in a corner until she’d smelled something strange. When she looked over the edge, Nathan was sitting under the tree smoking a huge cigar and coughing. He was nine.
“Nave.”
Her little voice scared the shit out of him, and he threw the cigar into the dirt and frantically looked around. Panic gave way to confusion. Then he looked up and saw her.
“Jesus, Em-em, get lost.”
“Nave?” she repeated. A fat tear hit him on the shirt.
He looked up again. This time, he smiled.
“You’re stuck, huh?”
She nodded. He climbed up and sat with her for a second. He pulled the sleeve of his Henley down over the heel of his hand and wiped her nose and cheeks.
“Climb aboard.” He patted his shoulder, and she climbed on, her small legs dangling down his back, arms around his neck. Slowly, he took her down. “Okay, you’re safe on the ground. Don’t go up there again, though. It’s really old. It might not even hold your ten pounds.”
She nodded at him and pushed at a loose tooth with her tongue. He was just so safe. He reached two fingers out, and she took hold of them. “You going back through the hole in the fence?”
She nodded, wide-eyed. He knew all her secrets.
“Okay, get going. Mariella is probably already wondering where you are.”
She released his fingers.
“Nave?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t smoke again.” And with that gentle scolding and a reminder that she knew some of his secrets too, she ran across the lawn and slipped through the hole in the fence.
She saw him all the time. Their families spent holidays together and summers in Nantucket. She would wait for him to come home from school, and he would let her sit in his room sometimes while he studied. Their parents used to joke that they would get married, but a comment like that to a ten-year-old boy about a five-year-old girl was, well, ridiculous. To that five-year-old girl, though, it was heaven.
All of that changed the summer she turned nine. Emma hadn’t seen him since.
Back at her desk, Emma flipped through article after article on Nathan. He had so much media exposure, it was staggering; he deliberately wanted to put himself in the spotlight, which was not like the boy she remembered. These articles painted a picture of a man she didn’t know and didn’t particularly care for. He was on the cover of Rolling Stone after Knightsgrove-Bishop funded a huge multi-use stadium in Dubai. In the photo, Selena Gomez was shining his shoes, and Ariana Grande was filing his nails as he sat reclined in a spa chair; both women wore white lab coats with neon lingerie peeking through. New York Magazine did a feature on his arrest record: two counts of public indecency, one count of assault, one count of public intoxication. And of course, there were the women. There were stories of kink, infidelity, broken hearts, and public catfights. Models swore they were engaged to him, a movie star left her husband for him, a royal had claimed to be pregnant by him. All the stories were sourced through the women; Nathan had never once commented. On any of them.
Coming a close second to his sexcapades were his adrenaline rushes. He rode mountain bikes in Chang Mai, parachuted in Odessa, did a survival hike in Afghanistan, climbed K2, raced camels. His extracurriculars read like a rich playboy bucket list. As she scrolled down the posts, the man painted on the page felt wrong. Was this vapid, live-for-the-moment, roué what Nathan Bishop had become? Why? The thought made her feel... empty.
When Emma was eight, Nathan left for his first year of boarding school. She realized now that he was young to be going, but with his British mother and his much older brothers, it was understandable. That, and his mother had left his father shortly after, so she could only assume his departure had been calculated. None of that factored into the thoughts of an eight-year-old, however.
She was playing in the backyard—dolls were lined up, and she was teaching them state capitals. Nathan walked up and gave her an exaggerated wave.
“Nave, what’s the capital of California?”
He scratched his head and pretended to think.
“Is it Disneyland?”
She fell over laughing.
“No, silly. It’s Sacramento.”
“Sacramento? Okay, I will have to remember that. Em-em, I’m leaving for school.”
A frown marred her face. Something wasn’t right.
“It’s a new school.” He had a look on his face that spoke volumes. He should have prepared her. “I have to sleep there.”