Part 7

I start out by asking Nick to meet me for lunch at the Pub. Then Gabi asks Nick if she can meet him after lunch to study in the park, so we have his whole afternoon blocked out.

He looks so pleased to see me- and is probably even more pleased at the prospect of an afternoon with Gabi- that I'm tempted to abort the whole plan. It takes all of my willpower to remember that Nick does not act toward the rest of the world the way he acts toward Gabi and me. The choice to do something about Nick isn't mine any longer. EJ forced my hand because Nick forced his hand.

We spread out, just as planned, the two of us in a booth meant for six. Our lunchtime conversation is ordinary enough. Nick asks about my trip and I tell him that I decided to stay in London. He asks about Chelsea and Max and what I did and saw. I ask what he's been up to, and of course he tells me that he hasn't been doing anything but working and visiting Gabi when she's willing to see him.

As paranoid as Nick is, it's lucky that he doesn't notice that the Pub is systematically emptying out and that a "closed for family event" sign appears on the door.

When we've finished eating, right on cue, Max and Chelsea jump over the back of the booth to join us: Max beside me, Chelsea beside Nick. For a fraction of a second it's just the way I imagined our lives would be when I was a teenager: the four of us paired off and friends forever.

Max drapes his arm around me protectively, but now isn't the time for me to revel in it. What's more important is the sheer fear on Nick's face. We'd choreographed Chelsea and Max jumping over the back of the booth so that Nick would eventually end up sandwiched between Chelsea and Gabi. (Gabi is still breastfeeding and not much for jumping over things, so we had to leave the edge of the booth open for her.) It hadn't occurred to us that you just don't sneak up on someone who is suffering from personality-altering PTSD after being raped in prison.

Nick is staring fixedly at the table in front of him and I don't think he's even breathing.

I'm not sure Chelsea is breathing, either. Obviously she and Max were watching Nick and me from behind the bar, but this is her first time seeing Nick up close since the day he went to prison.

"Nick?" she whispers. Hesitantly, she puts one hand on the back of his neck. When he doesn't move, she uses her other hand to take his pulse, which makes him smile the tiniest bit.

"You stayed with the therapy program?" he asks weakly. "You're Dr. Chelsea now?"

She doesn't answer the question. "I'm sorry, we shouldn't have snuck up on you. We thought it would be funny. Nick, your heart, it's still pounding." She looks at me and I can see her pleading with me to call this whole thing off. I shake my head the tiniest bit. We have to hurt him a little now to keep him from hurting a lot later.

"I'm fine." Nick shrugs away from Chelsea's touch. "Just surprised. You know I was always the loser of this little group, right? Can't take a joke, that's me."

The intonation sends a chill down my spine. It looks like Max and Chelsea are about to have their first encounter with Bad Nick. Under the table, I frantically text Gabi to get in here posthaste.

"Max and Chelsea came back from London with me," I tell Nick brightly. "For Will and Sonny's wedding."

"Of course," says Nick.

"And to see everyone else, too," says Chelsea. "When Abigail showed up in London it made me realize how much I missed everyone. My grandma, and Hope and Ciara, and… you."

Nick flicks a dubious glance at her from under half-closed eyelids.

I text Gabi again just as she bursts through the front door out of breath and with her coat misbuttoned. "Nick!" she exclaims. "I thought I was late. But I see you have lots of company."

She does a decent job of appearing to wonder who Max and Chelsea are. I suspect that she took an acting lesson or two during her modeling career.

Nick moves to slide out of the booth. "Well, it's been nice seeing the two of you, but Gabi and I have plans-"

"Noooo!" Gabi whines. She plops into the booth, hard, shoving Nick against Chelsea. "I want to meet your friends. Abigail, introduce us, since Nick isn't going to."

I smile. Again, for a second, this feels like something that should be real. It is real, in its way. I love all of these people, and all of them love me. And all of us want the best for Nick. "Gabi, this is Chelsea Benson, Bo Brady's daughter. She was my best friend in high school. Chelsea, this is Gabi Hernandez. She is one of my very best friends now."

The shake hands across Nick's chest. Nick looks a little weirded out, but not like he's going to run out of the building.

"And I'm Max Brady," Max adds. He shakes Gabi's hand, too, and holds onto it a second too long. "Abigail told me you were a model, but I still wasn't prepared for how pretty you were."

"Max is a world-renowned flirt," Chelsea tells Gabi.

"There's nothing wrong with that," says Max. He runs his fingers through my hair. "Abigail doesn't complain when I flirt with her."

"She's just had so much practice over the years that she thinks it's normal," says Chelsea.

"Tell me about that," says Gabi eagerly. "Tell me about all those fun times you had back then before I knew Nick and Abigail."

"They weren't that fun," Nick tells Gabi.

"Nick kind of got stuck pulling our irons out of the fire," Chelsea says. "We'd get into trouble and he'd get us out of it. There was this time my brother Shawn's psycho ex-girlfriend Willow burned down our father's house. She stole my hairbrush and left it there to frame me. So I begged Nick to steal it from the lab before they could prove that the hair was mine and…" Chelsea sniffles. "The statute of limitations is up on this, okay? But even though he knew it could cost him his job, could compromise his morals, could open him up to being blackmailed, he did it for me. Because that's who Nick is."

"A pushover," says Nick.

"A protector," corrects Chelsea.

"There was this creep at the hospital," I break in, figuring that we should paint Nick as a hero in a less ambiguous way. "Dr. Rebert." Chelsea shudders at the name. "He would have raped Chelsea if Nick hadn't been there."

"Yeah, Nick was a hero." Max rolls his eyes. "But there was one time we were all in Vegas and somehow he ended up married with two little kids calling him Daddy. Artemis and DeMarquette. You should have seen how scared Nick was." Max looks at Gabi conspiratorially. "Scared of these two sweet little kids. I said I could handle kids and I would help him, and he hugged me so hard I didn't think I'd be able to get him off me. See, the story the woman- China Lee- gave us was that Artemis and DeMarquette would end up in foster care while she went to jail for 30 days if Nick didn't take care of them. But it turned out, I kid you not, that those boys were some kind of princes in their own country. The kidnapper kept coming after them."

"And Nick saved them," chimes in Chelsea. "See? Nick always turns out to be the hero."

Max makes a face like he's lost his argument. "I did look them up on Facebook the other day when I was thinking about them," he admits. "They're in high school now, and they wrote a note. They wanted me to give it to you when they found out I was going to see you."

Max removes a folded paper from his pocket, and I'm beyond impressed. All I'd done was ask them to be ready with a story that showed how much they admired Nick and how much he meant to the people around him. I hadn't expected Max to go so far. I hadn't been in Salem during the Artemis and DeMarquette fiasco, anyway, so I would never have thought of this.

I'm flooded with love and admiration for Max as he begins to read.

Dear Nick,

We were very happy when Max contacted us and told us that he was going to see you and deliver a message from us. Please don't think that because we haven't seen you means that we don't think of you. We think of you often, and with gratitude. You stepped into our lives when we had no one. Very few people would have shown us the love and kindness that you did.

We hope to see you one day. If you ever wish to visit our country, you are most welcome. We will be sending you a formal invitation to Artemis' elevation when he attains the age of majority the year after next. Please mark your calendar.

With love and respect,

Artemis
DeMarquette

"Want to see their picture?" Max asks. He pulls out a posed, formal portrait of two boys, a few years younger than JJ but radiating wisdom and maturity.

"I'm glad they're doing well," says Nick.

"Since I helped you out, I get to come with you to the elevation ceremony. Whatever that is," says Max.

"Sure."

Nick is almost relaxed, and I text Will and Sonny to come in. I'm impressed that Sonny has waited so long without crashing the party, as mistrustful as he is of Nick and my whole plan.

I don't entirely want Sonny here, but better him than Kate or EJ or, God forbid, Sami. Someone who doesn't love Nick and can't be swayed by him needs to be here. Besides, I couldn't very well ask Will to exclude Sonny. After all, it is Sonny's wedding that Nick threatened to destroy.

"Hi, Gabi," says Will casually as he sits next to me. Sonny grabs a chair and pulls it up to the edge of the table, facing down the six of us. "You're picking Ari up this evening and you forgot the extra diaper bag." He hands it over. "Good thing you were still here."

"We were telling our favorite Nick stories," Gabi informs him.

Will cocks his head as if in thought. "You know, my favorite Nick story isn't much of a story. It was the day of my parents' wedding."

"Which one?" taunts Chelsea.

"The last one,"
says Will with exasperation.

"So is this one of the times they were marrying each other?"

"You were the maid of honor. I guess Mom had alienated everyone else in her life so you had to do it."

"Actually, her sister Belle was on the run. Abigail and Nick and I helped her sneak across the border into Canada. See, another hero Nick story."

"Whatever," says Will. "Anyway, the photographer bailed at the last minute but I had the coolest new camera to take the pictures myself. It had all the bells and whistles and attachments and nobody but Nick appreciated how awesome it was."

Nick doesn't answer. He doesn't respond at all. His face has gone blank.

"Nick?" Gabi and Chelsea ask simultaneously.

Will and I exchange a glance to share how surreal it is to see them together.

"What is this?" Nick asks, and he's asking me, not the concerned current love of his life or the concerned former love of his life.

"This is a group of old friends and new friends and family sharing stories."

"Funny you should say old and new. Will didn't look surprised to see Max and Chelsea. He just went right into bantering with his cousin, right? As far as I know Sonny has never met either of them. But he didn't react either. At least Gabi pretended to need to be introduced. And you made a point of putting me between Gabi and Chelsea because I'm not that likely to shove either of them out of the way. So, tell me, Abigail." He leans across the table, his eyes locked on mine. "What is this?"

I hold his gaze, and it's one of the hardest things I've ever done. My ears are ringing and I can't feel Max and Will close beside me hip to hip. "It's an intervention."

He laughs. "An intervention? What, you think I'm a drug addict?"

"No. Just a blackmail addict."

"How could I be blackmailing anyone?" he asks. "I would have to know things, right? Someone would have to have done something they didn't want the world to know about."

"Most of us do something like that at some point in our lives."

"You've been blackmailed, Nick," says Chelsea.

"Yeah, by your grandmother. And I didn't see anyone holding an intervention to tell her that she should stop."

"Grandma Kate is kind of beyond help," Will pipes up, and Chelsea giggles.

"Do you really want to live Granny Kate's life?" asks Chelsea. "She has no real friends and all of her children have had to run away to the other side of the planet to keep her from screwing up their lives."

"Except my dad, but he has co-dependency issues," says Will. "Plus, his own kids are in Salem so he doesn't really have a choice."

"And what's her legacy going to be? She made a lot of money in business? Since when do you want that?" continues Chelsea.

"Plus, sometimes she has to get in bed with Stefano. Literally," concludes Will with a shudder.

"There are worse things than getting in bed with DiMeras. Don't you think, Abigail?"

I take the risk of ignoring his warning one more time. "Being Kate's grandchild is a thing, isn't it?" I ask Chelsea and Will instead. "Do you guys have support group meetings?"

"You should hear our parents get together and talk about having her as a mother," says Chelsea with hushed reverence. "Uncle Lucas and my mom have this argument about whether it was worse to be abandoned by her or raised by her. Granny Kate always cries, but she's always pissed them off so bad that they don't even care."

"It's not any weirder than when you and I get together and talk about being Horton," says Will. He smiles kindly at me, but I know the kindness is really directed at Nick. Not for the first time, I think that Will is amazing. Bad Nick has done more to him than to anyone else, but Will is here throwing his whole heart into saving whatever vestiges of Good Nick remain. "The Hortons are sort of too upper crust to admit that there's pressure. We're so perfect that we would never tell our children to be perfect because then we wouldn't be perfect, and don't criticize us, we never said we were perfect."

"You're supposed to fall in love with the right person, right away and sometimes it feels like you can't so there's something wrong with you."

"You're supposed to be kind and nice and decent and sometimes it feels like that's not going to get you anywhere."

"You're not supposed to end up in prison, even though that's totally where Grandpa Bill met Julie's Doug for the first time."

"Has anyone ever told you what Grandpa Bill was doing there?"

"No! And at this point you'd think they'd tell me if I asked nicely."

Nick smirks unpleasantly at us, not at all amused. "It was for killing his sister in law," he announces. "Uncle Tommy's wife, Sandy's mother. She was blackmailing him because she knew that he was your Uncle Mike's father, not Uncle Mickey."

Will and I stare at each other and simultaneously decide that that fits with the pieces we knew.

"In my branch of the Horton family, we tell each other things," Nick announces. "We're good at telling secrets."

He's starting to wear me down and I'm about to say that in that case he ought to tell his own parents what he's been through in the last few years. But I know why he doesn't. Jessica, his mother, is fragile (multiple personalities because her real personality is so shy she can barely speak). Marie, his grandmother, is fragile, too (mental breakdown when she accidentally fell in love with her amnesiac brother, as one does). Nick is in Salem because it's the rest of the family that might be strong enough to fix his hot mess.

And with that, I get another rush of strength.

I'm choosing one more shot at reaching Nick over my own good name.

What is my family going to do if they find out about me and EJ, anyway? Scream and roll their eyes? At least no one will die, and if they weren't already aware that I can make mistakes, they'll just have to learn.

"Go ahead, Nick." My hands are flat on the table; so are his. We've reached the end of the poker game and I'm going to call his bluff. "Between us, Gabi and I know everything that you're using." I'm not sure that that's true, but I think it probably is. "We're both okay with you screaming it from the rooftops. We'll just tell everyone ourselves if that's what it takes to get you off this collision course."

I catch Gabi's eye and she nods. I'm doing the talking, but she's all in, too.

I inch one hand closer to Nick's so I can touch it, just barely. "Our love is stronger than your hate."

"I'm sure everyone's listening, Abigail," says Nick. He's right, too. You could cut the tension with a dull butter knife, you could hear a pin drop, and every other cliche in the book.

"I was involved with a man I shouldn't have been involved with. An older man. A man who was taken." I'd gone this far with both Chelsea and Will. It gets easier every time. "He's pretty well known. His fiancee will be furious when she finds out, and so will her family. The affair is over, but Nick has pictures. He threatened to distribute them at Will and Sonny's wedding."

Will and Sonny both scowl. I hadn't prepared to go this far, so I hadn't told them what to expect. I'm scared again. I don't want Will mad at me over what I've done to his mother. I don't want Sonny to be furious because I've hurt Will. I don't want Max to be disgusted by me, not that he has room to judge after the laundry list of women Chelsea told me about.

"The reason that would ruin the wedding, the reason that gave him power, was-"

"You know what, stop," says Nick. "If this is all about the wedding, that was a bluff. I told you I wouldn't use those pictures, Abigail."

"That's not enough. You need to leave town before someone decides to shut you up permanently. You need to go to therapy. You need to-"

"No."

"Why not?"

"My family is here."

"Julie and Doug have a place in London. They just got back from their cruise, and they will take you there with them. You could be with family."

"The hospital where I work, I can get you into treatment there. You could deal with what happened to you," says Chelsea. "And there's a lab where you could get a job. We could get together for lunch every day, you and me and Max."

"That's so sweet that you planned out my new imprisonment for me," says Nick, his voice laden with sarcasm. "I remember that you said you would visit me when I went to prison the first time, too."

"My mother was in an accident and I had to get to London. I never wanted to abandon you. I never thought… I thought you'd get help, not…"

"Not what? You can't even say it? I'm disappointed, Chelsea, you never used to be at a loss for words. Lucky me that I moved on in life and met Gabi."

It's a bit ironic, as quiet as Gabi has been all day.

"You don't want me to go to prison, do you, Gabi?" Nick prompts.

"It's not going to be prison," mutters Chelsea irritably. She's gone from horrified to aggravated, not because Nick is treating all of us like garbage but because he's looking at Gabi like he used to look at Chelsea.

"I love you," says Gabi, and her voice is shaking and everyone in the room knows that she means it. A part of me wishes I'd followed through and called EJ by name. Our relationship never could have succeeded, but my feelings are real and they should see the light of day. "Everyone at this table loves you, except maybe Sonny, and he's never met the real you so that's different," Gabi rambles. "I mean, they'd all have to love you to listen to the rotten things you've been saying and still be sitting here. But I love you more than I love everyone else in the world except one person."

"Ari," says Nick. "But I-"

"It doesn't matter if you love her too. You tried to cut her father out of her life over and over again, and that isn't good for her. You made it so I have to choose between you and her. And so I choose her. And because I want the best for you, I have to send you thousands of miles away with your gorgeous, sophisticated ex-girlfriend."

I steal a glance at Chelsea. She's not so irritated anymore. I'm amused that the woman EJ saw as a trashy socialite, Gabi sees as gorgeous and sophisticated. Gabi, the one everyone accuses of being just a little dim, is closer to the truth.

"All those stories they were telling about you?" Gabi asks. "They were about you taking care of people. That's why they want to take care of you now. You know, I was glad when I didn't get my turn when we were telling stories about you. I have too many stories to tell, and too many of them would make me cry." She's crying anyway, of course, but her voice is clear and she's hitting Nick where he lives with every word. "I think I would have talked about the first time we really talked. I said I'd heard that you were a genius mad scientist. You said that one of those things was true."

"And you guessed mad."

"And you said scientist. Is that who you are now?"

"I'm making a lot of money for Kate's company. I shouldn't have had to blackmail her into giving me that job anyway."

"I don't think you answered my question. The day I gave birth to Ari, you told me that you didn't love me-"

"I was wong-"

"You said that you didn't know who you were so you couldn't love. Do you know who you are now, Nick? Because if you can tell me, I'll walk away from this little intervention and let you destroy what's left of yourself. But if you can't, I'm going to beg you to get on that plane…"

I'd asked EJ those same questions. They repeat and repeat in my head and I can barely hear what Gabi's saying. I hear my own voice instead.

"I'm just trying to figure out one thing, EJ. Between all of the lies and the manipulation and the walls that you put up around yourself, do you even know who the real EJ is? Because I don't."

And suddenly I'm so dizzy that I need to put my head down at the climax of my own brilliant plan.

I don't pass out all the way. I'm aware of Will sliding away so I can get more air and Max whispering that he's got me. I'm even aware that Gabi has switched over to Spanish. I don't know how much of the language Nick knows, but he doesn't need to know the language to catch her meaning.

Mi amor. Mi corazon. Ayúdame. Ayúdese.

When I'm back to myself, Nick is crying, too, and he hasn't even noticed that I almost checked out of my own party. He doesn't seem to notice that it's Will, not me, who has him signing documents resigning his job.

But by the time we all escort him home to pack so he can get on the next flight to London with Doug and Julie, I almost feel normal again.

At the airport, I see EJ watching us from the shadows.

Just as soon as Nick's flight takes off, EJ joins us.

TBC