“We were lucky. We knew the president of the local bank and were able to get her moved back into her original loan, but she lost a ton of her savings to do so.” I stopped swinging. “Was your family involved in that kind of banking?”

“My family is involved in all kinds of banking. My family is banking.” He looked stricken.

“So, yes then.”

“Yes. Of course yes. Did you know there are probably less than twenty people in the world who can actually explain the clusterfuck that happened, how many arms and legs that entire mess had, and the effect it had on literally everything? The statistics of it, the advanced mathematical theories that need to be employed to truly understand what happened, and how truly fucked up it was, are staggering.”

“I don’t need to understand the math to know it was fucked up. My mother was considering moving into the diner. I get it.” I started to swing again, my foot angrily kicking at the porch, keeping up the pace.

“I started to think twice about the family business, how thoroughly linked it all was, and what it stood for. And around that time, as I was beginning to question my place within the company, I met Melissa.”

It’s amazing how quickly an opinion can be formed. All I knew about this woman was her name, and I was instantly on guard. I had an almost physical reaction to another woman’s name on Leo’s lips. And that told me more about my own feelings that I cared to admit, at least for the moment. I kept up the swinging, needing the rhythm.

“At first, she was just another girl, one of many. Melissa had just filtered into the group I was running with at the time, a friend of a friend, and as she began to be at the same places I was, an attraction happened. And other things happened. But as I got to know her, she seemed . . . hmm,” he paused for almost the first time in his story, seeming almost lost in thought. “Different. She was different from everyone else. She came to New York from a small town in Wisconsin, she wasn’t at all concerned with money and last names and who everyone was or might become one day. Anyway, we started dating, and then dating more seriously, and just like that, I was head over heels. I introduced her to my parents, stopped dating anyone else, and we became exclusive.” He paused to look at me carefully. “You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I asked.

“You’re about to swing us right off this porch,” he said, and I noticed for the first time how much air we were catching. My body had a very definite reaction to this Melissa. Dragging a foot, I slowed us down to a normal pace.

“Sorry about that. You and this Melissa—I mean, you and Melissa—exclusive. Go on.” I forced my foot to just barely graze the porch every so often.

He did. They dated for months, she met everyone he was close to, she was welcomed thoroughly into the family. A junior partner at an accounting firm, she was knowledgeable in many areas of finance, and could hold her own in most conversations. She could kill it at a cocktail party, he said, and he was proud to have her on his arm.

But as the economic recovery was still struggling, Leo began to voice some of his concerns over the practices that not only the Maxwells were employing, but the banking world in general. “She’d encourage me to speak up, share my ideas, but I began to notice that she’d always add in something about it not being the right time, or to maybe keep some of it to myself until the climate had shifted, things like that. She knew I was unhappy with things at work, yet when we’d talk it out, I’d always come away feeling more confused than I was before, unsure about my position and how vocal I should be.”

He suddenly looked into my eyes, intense and a bit haunted. “Have you ever gotten so totally thrown by someone, you have no idea how it could have happened?”

“Honestly? No.” I paused, chewing on my lip. “But that’s because I never let anyone get close enough.” Very dramatic gulp. “Until you.”

We stared at each other, the emotion between us shimmering in the air in giant waves of ohmygodthisguycouldwreckmeforalwaysbutImightbeokaywiththat until a noisy jaybird startled us.

Lifting one corner of his mouth in that adorable way, he went on. “Well, until Melissa, I’d been the same way. But she snuck right on under the fence, under everyone’s fence—and my entire family was born with a gold-digger alarm.”

“No,” I breathed, and he nodded.

“Oh yeah. She was so good, I didn’t even see her coming. I continued to waffle back and forth about how involved I wanted to get at work, whether I wanted to make a shift into a different division, try something new—and then we spent a weekend up here in Bailey Falls. I hadn’t been up to the farm in years, but we both wanted to get out of the city for a long weekend, and she seemed fascinated by all the properties my family owned, and away we went up the Hudson. She seemed impressed by the overall size of the house, and the grounds of course, but a bit disappointed in the state of things up here. Especially since no one had lived on the farm full-time in years, things were a bit rustic.”

“Rustic as all grand old country homes can be,” I said in a simpering Upper East Side accent, and he grinned.

“Exactly. Anyway, three very important things happened during that trip. One, I visited a nearby organic farmer, a farm that I’d been read about in The New Yorker, about how he was doing amazing things with an old property. That Saturday morning while she was still asleep, I took out the old caretaker’s Jeep and ran around our property all day, following the old fields and seeing possibilities with the land I’d never seen before.” His face lit up as it always did when he spoke about the land, and the way he tended to it.