I nodded with a smile. “Okay, thanks, Marvin.”
A little while later, Merrick and I borrowed Kitty’s car and headed to the airport. He drove while I looked out the window, feeling a lot of emotions. When we came to the Buckhead exit, I pointed. “I would be living somewhere out there if things hadn’t derailed between me and Christian.”
Merrick’s eyes slanted to me before returning to the road. “You were going to live down here?”
I nodded. “Christian is from Atlanta. I think I told you we met when we were both students down here. We moved up to New York so he could work for a few years at his family’s corporate headquarters, and I did my internship there. But he wanted to move back after our wedding. His company has a huge research-and-development facility down here that he was being trained to run.”
“Is that what you wanted? To live down here, I mean?”
I shook my head. “Not really. I like it down here, but I love New York, and I wanted to be near my sister. I always imagined we’d have kids at the same time and they’d grow up together.”
“Yet you were going to move anyway?”
I shrugged. “Christian hated New York. He hated apartment life and not having a big yard, and he absolutely loathed public transportation and busy sidewalks. Both his parents are originally from Atlanta. They divorced when he was five, and he mostly lived with his mother after that. His father relocated to work in the family business in New York, so he went back and forth. I think part of the reason he hates the city so much is because of what it represents to him—his family being torn apart. It’s easier to blame something other than your parents.”
“How long were you two together?”
“Three-and-a-half years.”
Merrick nodded.
“What about you? Did you always live in the city?”
“I spent a week every summer down here with Kitty and my mom. But yeah, born and raised in New York. My mom went to college in the city and never came back. She was one of the few women on the trading floor in her day. She passed away six years ago of breast cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“What about your dad?”
“He retired to Florida last year. Never remarried after my mom. My sister lives down there and has kids, so he moved not too far from her.”
“You were…engaged once, too, right?”
Merrick’s eyes flashed to me quickly before returning to the road. His lips pursed. “You like to dig around, don’t you?”
“It’s an occupational hazard. I ask questions and try to fit the pieces together to see the whole puzzle.”
“Oh yeah? What pieces have you managed to put together about me?”
I didn’t want to mention the comment Will had made—that his fiancée had annihilated him—so I was vague. “I’ve heard around that you were engaged to your business partner and it didn’t end well.”
Merrick stared at the road. I thought maybe that was the end of our discussion, but then he cleared his throat.
“You’ve shared a lot about your life, stuff that wasn’t easy to live through. Yet you seem to have found a way to make peace with it. I have a harder time talking about things.”
I nodded. “We all handle things in different ways. That’s okay. I didn’t mean to pressure you into discussing something you aren’t comfortable talking about.”
Merrick went quiet for a long time. It surprised me when he started to talk again. “Amelia and I started the business together, though she didn’t want to be an equal partner and didn’t want her name on the door.”