She couldn’t stay with him, nor him with her. Nina had a family to return to, and so did he. Two daughters and a wife, all waiting for him in their apartment near the edge of the city. A life that in her heart Nina knew could never be hers, but that she had wanted badly, nonetheless.
She pressed a hand over her stomach, over the remainder of that dreamlike farewell.
If only.
“Hey, lady! Get out of the road!”
Nina opened her eyes just in time to stop herself from falling into the street. Two cars and a taxi blared loudly as she stepped backward on a sharp breath and bumped into someone else.
“Oh my! I’m so sorry,” she said to an elderly Asian woman taking small, solid steps.
“Need some help, sweetheart?”
A warm hand steadied Nina’s arm, and she looked up to find a pair of dark, kind eyes twinkling with interest. A delivery worker, stopped mid-shift, unloading boxes of produce into the basement of a Dominican restaurant. He was handsome in that way some of her friends liked—the ones who engaged in short-lived affairs with their doormen or cleaning crew members, trying to avoid (or maybe provoke) their parents’ ire.
Such affairs never lasted, and, to be honest, Nina found them distasteful. The way her friends used men like these as objects, not people. And the way they used them back, like trophies, not women. They lasted a few weeks, a month or more. If there was any trouble, money took care of it. And if there wasn’t, even better.
Nina had managed to avoid those sorts of things, instead allowing her cousin Eric to act out enough for both of them. Truthfully, she had always enjoyed the way he goaded their grandmother, the matriarch of their great New York family, whenever she forced them through another etiquette lesson or dance class together. But while Eric was like a brother, he was also the dashing heir to the de Vries family fortune. His boyish misbehavior was chalked up to strength of character. Permitted, even if not fully condoned. Nina, on the other hand, couldn’t leave the house with a hair out of place.
Rules were always different for women.
Even so, Eric wasn’t always the golden boy. Nina remembered his face the first time Grandmother had told him that Penny, his Greek girlfriend from a working-class neighborhood, was utterly inappropriate for him. She remembered his stubbornness when he had kept seeing Penny and even brought her with him to Dartmouth the following year. She remembered the fiery defiance when he had announced their engagement last Christmas, just a few months before his graduation.
“He won’t get away with this,” her grandmother had said privately to Violet, Nina’s mother, once the couple had left.
Five months later, days before Nina had arrived back in New York, Eric had found the girl lying in the bathroom of their apartment, both wrists slit to her elbows. This after months—no, years—of harassment and embarrassment, courtesy of the de Vries family and their friends. So the rumors went.
Nina had never needed her cousin more than she did now. For, truthfully, she had never been more terrified of her own kin. Of what they were capable of.
But Eric was gone, done with the lot of them.
She couldn’t blame him.
But she did wish he were here.
“Oh, no, thank you,” Nina said, pulling away from the man’s warm, if slightly greasy touch. “I know where I’m going.”
“Well, try not to get run over, honey,” he replied with a cheeky grin, then disappeared underground with his box of limes.
“Yes,” Nina murmured. “I’ll try.”
Pulling her cap farther over her face, Nina turned around, looking at the street signs to get her bearings. The corner was overwhelmingly green—not from plants, but from the green iron castings of the elevated train tracks and the green-painted entrance to the Roosevelt Street subway station, which spanned nearly the entire block. It took her a moment to figure out where she was—she didn’t dare bring out her phone. Most people in this neighborhood didn’t seem to have iPhones yet. Nina didn’t want to bring attention to herself, if at all possible.
She crossed the street, sidestepping cabs and people, and all the other forms of life here in Queens. She turned a corner and made her way down a quieter street, grateful that her hat shaded her face from the suddenly glaring sun.
One block, two. And then, there it was. The address on the slip of paper. A nondescript brick building with graffiti on the bottom and a simple glass door marking the clinic’s entrance.
God, was she really here? Her of all people? Standing in front of this grungy building?
Nina wasn’t stupid. She had taken enough history and women’s studies classes to know exactly how common abortion was. Women had been trying to figure out how not to carry unwanted children since the beginning of civilization. What made her any different?
But that was the problem in a nutshell. Was this child really unwanted?
No.
Nina’s vision blurred with sudden tears. This had been happening more and more over the last few weeks. Pregnancy hormones, according to the internet, meant a lot of uncharacteristic crying along with sensitive nipples, morning sickness, and general all-over puffiness. She had told Grandmother she’d picked up a parasite in Italy, and the old woman seemed to believe her. For now.
Nina turned suddenly and tripped over a large crack in the sidewalk.
“Shit,” she muttered as she pulled herself upright, leaning against the crumbling brick. The word felt strange in her mouth—Nina never swore, following her grandmother’s edicts to a T. “Oh, damn.”
She stared at her heel, which had broken clean off. Even in jeans, even in a cap, Nina hadn’t completely been able to eschew her clothes completely. With an extra three inches that made her taller than most men in the city, heels made her feel powerful. Even ones like these, purchased at the same ninety-nine-cent store as her hat.
She could just hear Grandmother now: “Cheap is as cheap does. We get what we pay for, my girl, do we not?”
“Nina?”
Nina’s head jerked around in a panic, though her vision was still blurred with tears she now swiped at viciously.
“Nina Astor, is that really you?”
As he approached, the stranger became slightly familiar, but his name eluded her. In all honesty, the man himself wasn’t particularly memorable. Everything about him was average. In heels, she topped his height by several inches, which meant he was likely no more than five foot six, five-seven at most. His light brown hair was thinning at the temples, cut slightly too long so a few thin strands waved in the hot summer breeze. His body, clothed in a poorly fitted beige suit, had the sagging look of a man who spent too much time behind a desk and not enough at the gym.
But it was his face that was most mediocre of all. Nina thought of the one drawing class she had taken as part of her art history major. They had learned about the composition of bone structure, how to identify the lines in a face that gave a subject its foundations. This man’s face was perfectly round, with two small eyes, a thin mouth, and a weak chin lightly dusted with graying stubble. He reminded Nina of an oatmeal cookie that had too much butter. The kind that, when baked, could not retain its shape, but would simply melt outward on the pan.
“Calvin Gardner,” the man helpfully supplied as he reached Nina and held out a hand. “I was with Craig and Jeffries Fund, helping your dad with an investment. Or trying to. Christmas Eve, 2003.” He winked. “I made you laugh by the punch bowl, remember?”