More than that: she was going to marry Michael. She was going to continue on her career path and even outpace him. She was going to take back her power.
She was fine with the other option when it was her choice, but when it felt like Michael’s decree, it was unacceptable. She was not one to follow orders. Like it or not, in order to preserve her fundamental sense of self, Nirupa had to subvert her earlier vision of herself. She was going to become a mother.
She just wished it wasn’t going to make Catherine so damn pleased.
13
Chapter 12: NATHAN
At eighteen, Nathan Fell still walked with a pronounced limp.
He was irritated by it with every lurching step he took. He didn’t intend to give himself a lifelong limp when he launched himself off a swing at the age of six. He didn’t do it to punish himself, he did it to punish his brother—even back then, he knew the best way to hurt tenderhearted Howie was to do damage to someone Howie loved. That would wreck Howie, especially if Howie thought it was his fault.
It had worked, but the younger Nathan’s calculations were off when it came to the fall itself. He was aiming for a sprained ankle, not a snapped fibula. A temporary inconvenience, not a permanent impediment. But at least the experience had taught him a valuable lesson: We can’t always control the outcomes; that’s the real risk of anything worth trying.
Nathan finished high school at sixteen, having convinced his mother it would be best for everyone if he went to college at the same time as Howie. He wished they’d gone even earlier, maybe at fifteen and seventeen, but for some reason, Howie was unhurried. He took all four years at high school, and all four years to get his undergraduate degree. Of course, in high school, while Nathan broke academic records and avoided all social interaction, Howie broke hearts and won homecoming king. He enjoyed himself.
Nathan was mildly jealous of Howie’s social aptitude, but he was less interested in humans than he was in their building blocks. Unraveling humans’ genetic codes, exploring the potential for merging man and machine—that was infinitely more interesting than voting on “Paris in the Spring” vs. “Caribbean Beach Party” for prom theme.
Both Fell boys transitioned easily from high school to college. By sophomore year, they were titans on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Howie maintained his high school reputation as a smart, good-looking flirt who always stayed friends with girls after breaking their hearts. Nathan, meanwhile, was famous for his shocking youth and brilliance. He was slight of build and steely-eyed, but alluring in his own way—a lone wolf who limped around campus dreaming up new ways to change the very landscape of science. He was a man of mystery, attracting the attention of many a girl and even a few sharp-eyed intellectual boys, who wrongly thought they had guessed his closeted little secret.
Thanksgiving, sophomore year: Howie and Nathan drove from Cambridge back to Ann Arbor, barely speaking as they sojourned from one college town to another. They rarely interacted on campus, and had little to discuss. They would have to put on a show and chat with each other when their mother was there to observe them—better not to waste the small talk on the way there.
Lila Golden Fell still lived in the house where the boys grew up, which was too big for her. She claimed she couldn’t sell it because she’d never get what it was worth, and she liked her neighbors, and it would take so much work to get it cleaned up enough to go on the market. Her sons knew it was because their father lived there and died there, and so would their mother.
Lila never remarried. If Nathan were the sort of person to feel remorse, he would feel guilty about his mother’s solitude. After all, he accidentally killed her first husband and then ran off the only man she ever came close to dating after becoming a widow. That pasty preacher. But Nathan feeling guilty would do nothing to better his mother’s situation, so why bother?
Nathan was a calculator, an assessor; not malevolent, nor spiteful, but absolutely against prioritizing emotion over evaluation. This had come up recently, when he caved to pressure and went out on a date with a classmate named Linda.
Nathan and Linda went to a Thai restaurant just off campus. Nathan ordered a simple curry dish. Linda ordered an appetizer, a bowl of soup, and Pad Thai. When the bill came, Nathan took nine dollars out of his wallet—the cost of his curry, plus tax and tip—and handed it to Linda.
“What’s this?” Linda asked, baffled.
“My share of the bill,” Nathan said, wondering if Linda was an idiot.
“I sort of figured…” She hesitated, like she was going to say one thing, and then said instead: “…we’d just split it. Like down the middle. Dutch treat.”
Nathan blinked. “Your total is twice as much as mine. I’m not covering that.”
She gaped. “Do you have, like, Asperger’s?”
“I don’t know,” he said, setting his nine dollars on the table and leaving.
The exchange sent Nathan down a research rabbit hole, and in the end he decided that he probably did, in fact, have Asperger’s. He felt no need to have it confirmed by anyone beyond himself; he was certain he was correct, and appreciated the insights and strategies his diagnosis yielded him. Nathan liked being able to appropriately categorize things, himself included.
The Fell boys arrived at their mother’s house on Thanksgiving Day, late-morning, having driven overnight. Lila gave Howie a hug, and nodded her hello to Nathan, before helping them unload all the laundry they’d crammed into the back of Howie’s rusty old Toyota Tercel.
“Millie and the Reverend should be here in a few hours,” Lila told her sons after the first overflowing load of laundry was thumping around the old washer in the basement. “I told them Thanksgiving dinner will be at three this year.”
“Mind if I pop by the D’onofrios to catch some of the Lions game?” Howie asked.
“Sure, sure,” Lila said. “Just be back in time to help me set the table. Nathan, you going to go watch the game, too?”
Nathan did not look up from his book. “No.”
Lila chuckled. “That was a joke, kid. Howie, hop in the shower before you go to the D’onofrios. I love you, but you stink. Nathan, come read in the kitchen, keep me company while I chop onions. You know it’s gonna make me cry and I’ll need you to hand me a napkin.”
Howie obediently hit the shower, then bounded over to the neighbors to watch terrible football players play their stupid game. Nathan hauled himself and his book into the kitchen. For the next few hours, there was peace in the Fell home.
And then the Reverend and Millie arrived.
They arrived an hour earlier than they had estimated, which was exactly when Lila and her boys had expected them to arrive. They were always an hour earlier than their estimates. (“That’s how you know your father’s family isn’t Jewish,” Lila had said once. “Always early to dinner, never hungry.”) The household was ready for their early arrival. Howie made it back just before they knocked on the door, in time to hold it open for them with his big grin.
“Happy Thanksgiving!” Howie crowed, echoed softly by Lila.
“Happy Thanksgiving!” Millie chirped back.
Nathan and the Reverend just nodded their acknowledgment of the occasion.
Nathan generally appreciated his grandparents. The Reverend was stern, serious, and seldom spoke; all qualities Nathan admired. Millie never shut up, but she slipped him a lot of cookies back when he was small and valued such currency. She thereby cemented herself into