And it became a thing between them, a ritual. The badly voiced Bearbook and Victoria came to understand that being loved was not about being good at things. It was about somebody letting you keep trying to do the voices even though you were bad at them. It was about there being a place for you at a wobbly table with sauce on the ceiling. It was she finally understood about the refrigerator.
She did not move them out of Queens. Nathan wouldn't have it and she wouldn't have wanted it. Lily's school was there, and Lily's friends and the whole small, warm world Nathan had built with his own two hands, and Victoria had spent enough of her life in beautiful empty spaces to know that the wobbly table was worth more than any penthouse. But slowly, over a year, over two, the three of them built something in the middle. Not his life, not her life.
A third thing, a new thing, a thing that had spaghetti night, and also had sometimes on quiet evenings, Victoria teaching Lily about how a business worked, drawing little diagrams on construction paper. Because it turned out the kid had a frightening head for numbers, and Nathan would watch the two of them bent over the paper and have to leave the room to get himself together. Nathan kept working. That surprised people who didn't understand him. The ones who found out eventually who Victoria was and assumed he'd quit quit and live off her.
Why wouldn't he? But Nathan Walker had spent his whole life being the man who fixed the broken things without expecting praise. And he wasn't going to stop being that man just because he'd fallen in love with a billionaire. He liked working. He liked being good at a real thing with his hands.
He liked coming home tired to a kid who ran to hug him. He didn't need Victoria's money and he made that as clear to her as she'd made it clear that she didn't need him. And it became strangely one of the truest things between them that they were two people who did not need each other at all and who chose each other anyway every single day freely out of want instead of need. He did eventually let her help send Lily to a better school because that was for Lily, not for him. And doing right by Lily beat his pride every time.
But he kept his job and he kept fixing broken things and Victoria loved him more for it, not less. They married quietly eventually. No 400 guests, no vendors, no magazine, no power couple photograph. A small ceremony in a park with chainlink fences, the same park, in fact, where a billionaire in borrowed sweatpants had once watched a 7-year-old score a goal and cheered with her whole chest. Marcus Webb came and cried and told anyone who'd listened that he'd known before either of them did.
Mrs. Alvarez came and sat in the front and squeezed Nathan's arm the way she had the night he'd asked her to sit with Lily at midnight. And Lily, 9 years old by then, and still always a menace, was the one who walked Victoria down the makeshift aisle holding her hand, because she'd decided years ago that her job was to hold both their hands so nobody got lost, and nobody had ever given her a reason to stop. At the small reception afterward, someone, a cousin of Nathan's, a little drunk, a little tactless, did exactly the thing Nathan had feared. Looked at the two of them, the maintenance man and the billionaire, and did the math out loud.
Said something with a laugh about how Nathan had done all right for himself, hadn't he landing a woman like that. And before Nathan could even stiffen, Victoria set down her glass, and she smiled the smile that had ended a hundred boardrooms. And she said, "Clear and warm and absolutely lethal. You've got it backwards. I'm the one who did all right.
I had every powerful man in this city and every one of them wanted something from me. " This man drove through a rainstorm to get a stranger home safe and asked for nothing. Do you know how rare that is? I built an empire and I still couldn't buy it. I had to be lucky enough to have a flat tire on the worst night of my life and find out the only person who'd answer was the one who never wanted a thing from me. She lifted her glass.