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Chapter Twenty-Six
Ben
“Come in,” I say, not looking up from my desk.
“Morning, sir. I just wanted to drop off the new batch of intern applications. I put a few good ones on the top.”
“Thanks, Cynthia, you can leave them here.”
In the six weeks since I came back to the city, my life has settled into a nice little routine. Not at all like the routine I used to have though.
On the plane ride home, instead of just working, I took some time to think about my life and myself and what I really want. What do I want the last half of my life to look like?
The guys were right about me neglecting myself and my own needs, and I want that to change.
During my extended vacation, I started thinking my life would include a certain dark-haired beauty, but even without her, I still want more for myself.
I just about gave my assistant a heart attack when I called to tell her to cancel my weekly standing grocery order. I went to the store myself and picked out food for the week. I’ve been cooking for myself and listening to music in the kitchen. The other night I went out for dinner and drinks with some old friends.
In other words, I’m living.
And it feels good. I may still know more or less what's going to happen each day, but I’m automating less of it. Getting more hands on. Who knows, I may even start cleaning my own house here soon.
Well, let’s not get carried away.
I’ve got a new lease on life. I can see it. Everyone around me can see it as well. My time on Merit with Victoria changed me. And even though I didn’t get the fairytale ending I’d started to allow myself to believe was possible, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this opportunity to have more joy in my life go to waste.
Speaking of which, I glance at my watch, it’s about time to clock out to be in Brooklyn in time to meet Ainsley for dinner. He’s preparing to start his first semester at Columbia, and I couldn’t be prouder. We went apartment hunting together last week and found him a nice one bedroom close to campus.
It’s all very different from the life I always planned for him—brownstone in Cambridge, Harvard law—but now that I see him here in the city, picking out his books and preparing to start his degree in environmental health engineering…well, it all looks so right.
When I ask him about what he wants, what he’s interested in instead of just telling him what to do, he opens up to me.
I’ve learned more about my son in the last two weeks than I have in the last ten years. He’s kind, funny, and cares deeply about underprivileged communities. Where my upbringing and fortune created a wall around me that I always hid behind, Ainsley had the opposite reaction. He wants to reach down to bring others up.
It makes me want to do the same.
I think a lot about the conversation I had with Victoria on the patio of the Merit house, where she told me that if I really cared about the future of young people, I’d be setting up college scholarships for kids who actually needed them, instead of chasing my own kid around the globe. Obviously, she was right. The woman was right about a lot of things.
Even if she was wrong in one very fundamental way.
I’ll probably never know if she planned on telling me about her past with Ains, or if she actually felt the things she seemed to be feeling for me. She had to have known it would end just like it did, so what was she thinking? That we could just live in a bubble forever? That I would never find out?
The hard truth of it all is that she spent the whole of our short relationship knowing it had an expiration date in the near future. She knew it would end.
And I didn’t.
While I’m holding myself back from making any comparisons to my only other relationship in this life, the similarities are there. Breanna was taken from me so suddenly, without notice, after a decade of thinking she’d be with me forever. I planned on it. I had our whole lives mapped out, and Ainsley’s. We were going to follow the plan together. And then she was gone.
I haven’t let myself enter into planning like that with anyone since…until Victoria. Even though we never talked about the future, the reason why being obvious now, I was still building one for us. We would move back to New York, Victoria would go to college to become a physical therapist or even a doctor. We would live on my estate and play our scary, sexy games forever in perfectly contented bliss.
Yeah, yeah. I hear it.
Just another snow globe life I dreamed up. And when reality didn’t fit into my carefully constructed mold, I bailed.
But how could I have done anything different? How could I live with myself knowing that I stole my partner from my nineteen-year-old son?
I know that’s a bit dramatic. Ainsley has tried to tell me plenty of times that they weren’t a couple in any sense of the word, although I tend to shut those conversations down.
