Page 489 of Manhattan Bossholes

13

NATALIE

“Okay, this is way better than the subway,” I said as I slid into the black sedan idling outside Christopher’s building. “Thanks again for the offer.”

James nodded at the driver and got in next to me. “Traffic won’t be too bad now, and it’s no problem at all.”

“Yeah, but Brooklyn has to be way out of your way.”

“Sure,” he agreed with a shrug. “But I’ve got my phone and my laptop—I’ll be able to get work done on the drive home. It’s the same thing I’d be doing if I got home earlier.”

I wanted to say something about how it wasn’t healthy to be such a workaholic, but it felt kind of rude to pick at him when he was doing me a favor—especially when he had a lot more reason to be upset with me than I did with him.

“So, you’re not mad at me for reaching out to your brother?” I glanced over at him nervously, because for all I knew, he’d been secretly stewing about me infiltrating his family the entire time.

“At first? Yeah, I was. But now I see that it’s probably good for him to be tangentially involved in the business. He needs to keep his mind engaged. And I can tell that it makes him feel appreciated to get a little hero worship from you.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and watched the world pass by outside. I wanted to know more, though. To learn why this exceptionally gifted man had closed himself off to the world. Bad breakups could do that to you, sure, but what Christopher had gone through definitely seemed like much more. The relaxed post-meal vibe in the car made me realize that this was my chance to find out exactly what had happened. I wanted to get the full story so I could be the best support possible for him, because I really liked him.

“He told me a little about his ex,” I offered gently, hoping James would take the bait.

“Amanda.” He rolled his eyes. “I wish he’d never met her. The woman is still making his life hell.”

“How bad was it?” I asked, crossing my fingers that he wouldn’t shut down or tell me to mind my own business.

We hit a bump, and our knees were jostled together for a moment. Strangely, neither one of us pulled away immediately.

James moved back to his side slowly and sighed. “If you’re going to keep working with him, you should probably know, just so you won’t accidentally trigger him.”

James hit a hidden button and a solid partition slid up between us and the driver. It took him a few moments to begin.

“Christopher fell head over heels for a woman who was totally wrong for him,” James began. “Amanda is very image-conscious. She wanted Christopher to be a part of the see-and-be-seen crowd. Tons of events, parties, openings. He wanted her to be happy, so he went along with it, but it really wasn’t his scene. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but my brother is kind of an introvert. He’s great in small groups, but he hates big events where he has to be ‘on’ the whole time. He can fake it when he has to, but he gets depleted pretty quickly.”

“I wasn’t sure if that was due to what he’d been through or…”

James shook his head. “No, that’s who he is, so you can imagine how impossible it was for him to go partying with Amanda. And she refused to give him any leeway. She always got what she wanted. I hated what it did to him.” James paused and when I glanced over, his eyebrows were drawn together. “He was so exhausted, so wrung out that he, uh…he turned to pills.”

My heart dropped at the revelation. “Oh no!”

“Yeah. He saw it as his only option to get his job done during the day and keep his energy up at night. And he made it work for a while, but then everything turned upside-down. He wanted to start a family, but Amanda refused. She wasn’t honest about not wanting kids before they were married. Christopher had always wanted to be a dad, and for the longest time he thought Amanda would come around. But no matter what he promised, from hiring a live-in nanny to offering to buy her mother the apartment below him so she could help too, nothing changed her mind. She was adamant that she would never be a mother.”

I watched his face, illuminated by the neon signs outside the window.

“Christopher took even more pills to help himself cope with the way his life was turning out, and he became addicted. And as you might imagine, everything spiraled. He became erratic at work, and the quality of his projects took a serious downturn. I’m ashamed to admit how long it took me to realize what was going on. He always had plenty of excuses to cover for it in our personal interactions, and it got overlooked for a while at the office. Bernie had started stepping back ten years ago, after her first heart attack, and a lot of the company reviews she used to do herself got split up and delegated among a bunch of people. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, and no one put the pieces together that there was a real problem in the creative department. But it all came to a head three years ago, when Bernie had the second heart attack and I took over as CEO. I had no choice but to step in and get him into rehab. Let’s just say the intervention was messy.”

“His wife didn’t help?”

James snorted. “Amanda didn’t care. She was still getting everything she wanted thanks to his bank account, and that was all that mattered to her.”

“So that’s what he meant…” I trailed off again, finally putting the pieces together. “He was vague, but I get it now.”

“He doesn’t like talking about it,” James said, fiddling with his watch. “No surprise there.”

“So, I’m guessing Amanda wasn’t waiting for him with open arms when he got out?”

His harsh laugh filled the car. “She filed for divorce while he was in rehab! Talk about for better or for worse, huh?”

“Oh, poor Christopher,” I whispered. How could anyone be so cruel? I didn’t know Amanda, but I hated her anyway.