Page 66 of The Honest Affair

“I don’t know. Maybe sometimes it’s to protect others, not ourselves.”

He looked at me again, and this time, we were both thinking of Olivia. Of my family. Again, the ghosts of bruises throbbed on my wrist. And my jaw. My ribs.

Sometimes I wondered if I would ever know how to let go of them completely.

Well. I was trying, wasn’t I?

“I haven’t spoken to my mother in over twelve years,” Mathew said after he passed a slow-moving Fiat. “Not since I got back from Iraq.”

“That’s a long time.” I knew that Matthew was estranged from his mother, but I didn’t realize it had been over a decade.

“Some scars really are permanent.” His hands squeezed the steering wheel. “I was just getting out of class, on my way to Envy. I had just started law school, working nights at Jamie’s bar like I am now. And I got a call from Joni. She was trying to live with Mom at the time—during one of her sober periods. Joni’s the baby, you remember?”

I nodded. Joni, Matthew’s effervescent youngest sister was full of life and naïveté that even the city hadn’t beaten out of her yet. She was easily the most effusive of all his family members. I had liked her at once.

“She always had a soft spot for our mom,” Matthew continued.

“The baby of the family usually does,” I concurred.

He grunted. “Anyway, it was seven o’clock at night, and Joni was stuck at this high school in Trenton after a soccer tournament or something. Mom was supposed to pick her up, but she didn’t show. So poor Joni, this eleven-year-old kid, is alone in a terrible neighborhood, scared as fuck and without any train fare.” He scoffed, like he still couldn’t believe it. “She just fuckin’ forgot about her. Fell off the wagon for maybe the third or fourth time.” He shuddered. “I hate to think what would have happened had she actually tried to go to Trenton.”

“Why is that?” I wondered.

“Because she was the one driving when my dad died. Not that it mattered. They were both lousy drunks, so it could have been either of them who crashed the car. I told you that too.” He looked at me as if to point out that he didn’t actually have to be telling me a secret at all. He didn’t owe me confidences.

“Yes,” I agreed. “You did.”

“Anyway, I went to pick Joni up. And by the time we got back to Belmont, I was fuckin’ livid. Because I get home, and Tino, a family friend, calls us from his restaurant. Mom’s at the bar, singing ‘All Night Long’ with the jukebox before she passes out across a couple of stools.” He shook his head with disgust. “That was it. I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt like I was the one who was eleven, not Joni. Forced to be the grown-up, getting ready to take it on the chin from my old man while my mom just watched, half passed out on the couch.”

At the thought of it, I found my own hands balling up, ready to do their own damage to anyone who had hurt this beautiful man. Yes, I understood his protectiveness very well. There was more to love than just secrets.

“I wish I was more forgiving,” he said. “But I’m really not. Not to those who hurt the people I love, Nina. And she did that. Again and again and again, she did that. So I wasn’t going to stand by and watch her do it to my sisters like she did to me. I didn’t care if she got back on the wagon or stayed there. She was out of luck.”

“So what—what did you do?” I wondered.

“Told her if she contacted me or the younger girls again—Joni, Marie, and Lea were all still minors at that point—I’d file for a restraining order. I said I was done, and I meant it.”

We sat there for a moment, thinking about the story. Matthew wished he was more forgiving? Until now, I had really considered him the soul of mercy. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“My sisters don’t know any of this,” he said. “They know Mom and I don’t speak, but not why. And not about the legal threats. Frankie doesn’t talk to her either for her own reasons, but the younger ones do now that they’re grown. And because supposedly Mom is sober. Lea sees her on birthdays and holidays. Sometimes Marie and Joni tag along. Things like that. Lea knows the whole damn family on that side.”

“Your mother is Puerto Rican, isn’t she?”

Matthew nodded. “Half, yeah. Her dad was from Santiago, but he went back before I was born. My grandmother died when I was a kid, so I didn’t know either of them, and they only had the one child, my mom. But sometimes we’d see distant cousins and stuff.”

I thought of the day at the Cloisters, when we had run into one of the cousins from that side and his wife. A whole side of his family that Matthew had given up because of this anger. I almost argued that enough time had passed. That if she was sober and trying, didn’t she deserve a second chance just like anyone else? If his sisters could do it, why couldn’t he?

But there was a steely resolve in Matthew’s eye that was utterly unwavering. And considering that I had hardly spoken to my own father in years, I wasn’t in a position to argue.

“Everyone wants to believe in unconditional love,” he said. “But you know…you’re right about one thing, baby. Love as sacrifice ain’t real love. We all have to have our limits. Our parents are supposed to teach them to us, but when they don’t, we have to find them for ourselves.” He sighed, clutching the steering wheel hard. “She crossed the line. There was no going back after that.”

He didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and I let him be, content to remain lost in my own thoughts as the Tuscan countryside sped by, blurring my past along with the winter farmland.

But my thoughts kept circling back to one constant refrain. I was glad that Matthew had worked so hard to assert his own safety in a world that damaged so many. Knowing him, witnessing that strength, had given me the courage to draw my own line in the sand. To say enough was enough, and take back freedom and dignity that I knew I deserved.

I just hoped that by the time this trip was over, I wouldn’t have crossed Matthew’s line myself. I didn’t think I could bear it if he ever looked at me and, after all the things I had done, all the secrets I’d kept, decided that in the end, I wasn’t worth his mercy.

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