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If there was one thing Heidi had never really expected, it was that phone call.
She didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID, but it was from within D.C. and she really didn’t think twice about picking up the receiver and cradling it to her ear as she answered, “hello?”
“Heidi.”
She nearly dropped the phone when she heard that voice. One she knew intimately well, one she had loved for a long time but hadn’t really thought she would hear again. Not if it wasn’t from a news broadcast.
“Heidi,” he repeated. “It’s me.”
As if she could ever doubt it.
“Nathan,” she blurted out after another startled beat. “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, and she was startled to hear him laugh. Not quite, it wasn’t entirely genuine, but she wasn’t sure she’d heard that sound in… over a year, at least. Not a real one, not one he meant. She’d rarely even seen him smile since the night of the car accident. “Listen, I know you probably don’t really want to hear from me. But please, Heidi, just listen.”
Those were the words that reminded her how she was supposed to feel about him. Or, at least, how she wasn’t supposed to feel about him anymore. He was right; she didn’t really want to hear it. She didn’t want to go through everything he had done to her again.
But she really had loved him, before, and maybe a part of her still did. And she had seen some of what he’d been through. She couldn’t hate him, even after everything and even for all of his flaws. So while she did let the silence hang over the phone line for a moment, she broke it eventually with an “I’m listening.”
“Thank you,” he surprised her by saying. He sounded oddly relieved. “I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes, Heidi, and I can’t ask you to forget any of that. But I miss the boys, I miss you. Probably the worst mistake I’ve ever made was taking any of you for granted.
“I know I’m not supposed to come around to see the boys, but you have to understand. I need to see them, after everything.”
Heidi closed her eyes at some point while he was talking, listening to him carefully. It wasn’t an apology, not quite, but the sentiment was more or less the same. She’d been married to the man for a decade, she had learned her way around his words. Nathan was a kinder man than most gave him credit for. That didn’t change the fact that he was completely right—he had made more than his share of mistakes, and she was far from the only person who had been hurt by them. She chose her next words carefully.
“We shouldn’t talk about this over the phone,” she told him after a moment. “Maybe we should meet and discuss the boys in person.”
There, that would be her olive branch. No promises to see their sons, but he could see her and she could work on deciding if he deserved to see Simon and Monty again.
“Alright,” he agreed carefully. He knew his way around her words as well. That was why they had worked together; they both knew how to craft their words and they both knew how to read between the lines. “How about coffee then?” he asked. “I can pick you up; we can go somewhere to catch up.”
“Coffee sounds fine,” Heidi said carefully, nodding slightly to no one. “Tomorrow afternoon? The boys are going to be out, so I’ll have some time.”
“Sure,” he said, and before she knew it they had agreed on a time and place and she was hanging up. She had to question if it was a good idea or not. It was hard to forget all that Nathan had done to her—good and bad alike.
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It didn’t take long after they were seated for Heidi to start relaxing somewhat. It was strangely familiar and strangely nostalgic, just talking with him. Both of them were completely aware of everything beneath the surface, everything that the pretense of friendly conversation was covering up. But it was nice, at least for a little while. The way it had been when they were young and in love, though those days were nothing but ghosts of the past.
“I’m glad for you, Heidi,” Nathan said after some time of ultimately pointless conversation. Both of them should have cut to the chase, but maybe she had missed him too. “It sounds like you’re doing well for yourself. You and the boys.”
“Thank you,” she replied through a thin smile. Worried that maybe he was surprised somehow. “But I should be saying the same to you. You’re a senator now, Nathan. You’ve achieved quite a lot for yourself.” Since you left your family, came the afterthought. But that wasn’t fair to him. She’d been the one who left, even if he had forced her hand.
“It’s been a challenge, but one I’ve been prepared to face.”
And just like that they were two politicians sharing a meal to talk business. All of the old camaraderie shattered in an instant.
Nathan cleared his throat politely as he set his coffee mug down. Heidi went in for the first word.
“I understand how much you miss the boys,” she declared, straightening up and moving on the offensive immediately. “And I see that you regret losing out on them. But I took the legal action that I did for a reason, Nathan.”
“I’m aware of that.” For a moment it seemed defensive but—being Nathan—he quickly shifted gears. “But circumstances have changed, Heidi. That’s why I want to appeal your decision.” She nearly sighed for how quickly he shifted into impersonal terms. “I’m employed again, I’m clean. I can do right by Simon and Monty this time.”
She found she doubted it at the moment, but she didn’t want to say it. Instead she asked, “what made you decide to do this now, Nathan? It’s been months since your appointment, even longer since any of us heard from you. Everything we know about your recent life has come from the news.” It was more than she wanted to say but she added, “Do you know what it did to Simon and Monty to see you shot on national television?”
Nathan was quiet for an unnaturally long moment.
“I couldn’t come back to you until I had everything in order,” he told her.
“And you do now?”
“No. Not really—I think it’s worse now.” She frowned to match his own, concerned by the tone. A year or two ago, she never would have expected to hear something like that from him, at least not without pulling proverbial teeth. But that was before she’d seen him depressed and saw him turn to alcohol for comfort on a regular basis. “I haven’t felt entirely like myself lately, Heidi. It’s been more and more difficult to feel connected to you, Simon, Monty. Like I don’t quite remember any of you anymore.”
“Nathan?” she prompted, brow furrowing in worry for her ex-husband. She wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, really. Like he couldn’t remember them anymore? His own children? She didn’t like to think they were that far from his mind. He had underestimated them countless times, kept things from them, but she had always believed his care for them was honest. For all his faults, she had never doubted his capacity to care about the people close to him.
Maybe she had been wrong.
“I just need to see them again, Heidi. I feel like I might lose them if I don’t. I don’t even have anything left that really reminds me of them anymore, no mementos about time spent together. Was I really that absent?”
“No. No, you still spent time with them. Not as much as you could have, but they both knew you loved them. They kept everything—that’s not why we left, Nathan, you know that.”
“I still do.” She paused, uncertain, but he quickly clarified, “I still love them. It’s not the past-tense, Heidi.”
“I know,” Heidi said carefully. “We know that, Nathan. But we’re talking about the past. You know things are different now.” She sighed and said, “you still have photos of them, don’t you? I could get you some new ones, they did school pictures recently. And Simon’s baseball team has a photo, if you’d like me to print a copy for you.”
“No.” The word came out strong and hard, and for a moment it alarmed her how forceful it was. For all that Nathan had the potential to be a dangerous man, ruthless and cold, he was not actually an aggressive one. Even in his drinking, he’d never been violent. Angry, yes, but he lashed out and hurt them only with his words. That was how he’d driven them away. They’d never had cause to worry about what he would do to them—only what he was doing to himself.
So why did that one single word strike a chord of fear in her?
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Heidi asked him, straightening her back defensively. “Nathan, I’m offering you a starting point. You know I can’t just let you right back into their lives like that.”
“No,” he repeated, and some of the chilling force behind the word seemed to thaw and fall away. She dared to let herself relax, waiting. “No, you don’t understand. It has to be them. Something with them, not just copies. I can’t just have—” Nathan stopped short all of the sudden, pressing the heel of a palm to his eye, as if a sudden migraine had spiked in his temple. “They have to be real, with their memories and all of them. Otherwise it’s just… a piece of photo paper with an image reprinted. That’s all.”
Heidi was surprised again; she had known Nathan to have his rare moments of sentimentality, but this was a level of romanticizing that she had never really known from him. He had never been one to insist so much on the genuine. A close approximation was enough, so long as it was faked well enough to get the job done. The authenticity wasn’t as crucial as whether something served its purpose convincingly.
What in him had changed him so much?
The gesture was almost cautious, but she slowly reached out a hand to take Nathan’s in her own; it was a loose, light touch but she hoped it was enough to show that she did not intend to hurt him with this. It wasn’t about him so much as it was about their children. She was protecting them, and she would continue to do so even if it was from their father.
“Alright,” she said. “I can see about that. I could get you some of the family photos we took when we moved to Washington. They’re not as recent, but is that a start?”
Nathan started to nod, but then stilled, staring down at their joined hands before he pulled his away, oddly careful. He turned colder eyes up to her.
“You don’t understand,” he said again, harder, starting to reach for her hand that time. “I need to see them, Heidi.”
She felt nervous again, drawing her hand back from his attempt to take it. But she frowned and stood her ground. “I can’t do that right now, Nathan. You have to at least let me talk to the boys and then see what I can arrange.”
“You don’t trust me, do you? You don’t want me to see them.”
The question startled her somewhat, though she was not unused to her ex-husband being direct. She cleared her throat, trying to parse out her words to be as tactful as possible. “That’s not it, Nathan. I know you mean well and I would like them to see you. I trust you but I can’t make the decision for either of them; they’re too old for that now.”
For a brief moment, Nathan seemed to be shocked by something; the faintest jolt in him, though his eyes didn’t reflect whatever alarm it was. He slowly turned them down toward his hands, staring at them as if he couldn’t recognize them or whatever it was that had just happened to him. He looked back up at Heidi slowly again, his eyes still cold, almost unrecognizing. His voice dropped low and deep, the timbre shifting enough that she wouldn’t have recognized it as Nathan speaking if it weren’t for the fact that she was staring right at him as he said it. He spoke with absolute, dead certainty.
“You’re lying to me.”
The cold feeling crept up her spine again, something unnerving in the way he was looking at her.
“No. I want them to see their father, but they need to make that decision for themselves.”
“You’re lying,” he repeated, something almost menacing in the way he said it. “You don’t want me to be with them. You don’t trust me.”
A part of Heidi knew it was true; she had trusted him completely, once, but he had betrayed that in more than one way. What would seeing him again do to their sons? That might have been the reason why she stood suddenly.
“I’m not going to deal with this right now, Nathan. I’ll talk to the boys and then I’ll call you once we’ve decided what we want to do.”
“Stay here.”
The voice was no longer so chilling, having turned almost into a plea for her to listen. She saw him reach out to her, like he wanted to catch her before she could leave. But that wasn’t why she sat back down and stayed.
She suddenly felt something clamp down on her arm, though she stood alone. The grip pulled her down, forced her back into her chair. She tried to move again, but something stopped her, an invisible hand pushing against her.
It was only then that the panic started to seep in.
“I need you back in my life, Heidi,” Nathan insisted once more. His voice was completely back to normal, and that was almost more disturbing than before. It was the old Nathan, in spite of whatever was happening to her all of the sudden. He spoke completely normally, as if nothing was wrong, when he told her one last time.
“I can’t let you leave.”