I look around the event which is full of executives in suits, affluent locals in cocktail attire, and quite a few Cal-Mart employees in less expensive clothing they obviously bought from our store. It’s a nice mix and a lot less boring than many of the seven-plus figure parties I’m usually invited to when I’m in Arkansas. I even notice another interracial couple. A guy in a motorcycle jacket and tie with a much smaller and very pretty black woman.
Of course, my father is also here, glaring at me because I have not only been avoiding him, but I also refused to accept the attractive news anchor he attempted to foist on me via Della for tonight’s event. But if he thinks he’s mad now, wait until I give my welcome speech. If I give my welcome speech. It’s been delayed so long, people are beginning to leave.
That’s why I finally give in to Sylvie’s request. “Fine,” I say, heading in the direction of the Japanese Garden.
Once I’ve moved past the boundaries of the main event, I can see Sylvie waiting for me in the distance. She looks like a painting, standing beneath a huge fall moon in a shimmering dress and velvet wrap. And she takes my breath away. Still.
Which makes me even more determined to quell her protests about becoming my wife. But just as I’m closing the distance between us, a weasely looking man in a cheap suit runs toward me.
“Mr. Calson! Mr. Calson!”
“Hey!” Yahto says, stepping between us before the smaller man can reach me.
“Mr. Calson, I’m Kyle Drinnen from the Arkansas Sun,” the man says, straining to see me past Yahto’s hulking body. “I’m the one who filed that story your people sent us about the Ixtapa trip with your son. The Sun sent me here when your PR person, Della, called to ask for coverage of tonight’s event.”
I stop, Della’s constant reminders to stay on brand—especially with the press—stirring in the back of my head. “Listen, you can have five minutes, but after my speech.”
“That’s fair, sure. But let me ask you one question. Just one.”
I mentally roll my eyes, impatient but figuring this is the best way to make the guy go away. “Okay. Ask your question,” I tell him.
Yahto steps away, but continues to glare down at the little man.
However, seeming not to care, the reporter takes his time adjusting his rumpled suit before saying, “This big speech you’re about to make? Does it have anything to do with the half-black love child you’ve kept hidden for ten years?”
Chapter Forty
SYLVIE
I have to tell him about Barron. I don’t know how…but I’ve got to do it.
As I stand on the bridge, watching the koi fish swim beneath the garden’s fairy lights, I envy them. Their only care is food, and visitors to the gardens happily push quarters into a machine at the end of the bridge to get handfuls of pellets for the fish to gobble up. Their lives are simple. They don’t have secrets. Or an ex-boyfriend who wants to marry them because he has no idea about those secrets…
Holt might have been a druggie and a drunk, but he had one redeeming quality. I never had to worry about turning into my sister because he always used a condom. It is like it has been built into his muscle memory somehow. Even when he was high. Even when he drunk. I never had to remind him. He wrapped up every single time.
Until the night he didn’t.
I thought he would be asleep when I came back to our bedroom after cleaning up the mess from our disastrous “wedding announcement.” He was face down on the bed as was his habit whenever he passed out. But when I changed out of my stained sundress and climbed tiredly into the bed next to him, Holt suddenly animated as if my presence alone was like a vial of smelling salts to his senses.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling me into his arms and kissing my neck. Calson’s don’t apologize. Unless they’re wasted, I’d discovered over the summer. And it was only a little past eight, but he reeked of alcohol.
“You need help,” I said quietly. “I love you. But Luca is right. You need more help than I can give you.”
He snorted, laughing like I’d made a joke. Then mumbled, “No, babe, all I need is you. I don’t need help or food or air, just you…”
He kissed me so slow and sweet that I forgot about the alcohol on his breath and the broken dishes and my stained dress…and…and everything else.
Afterward, I would ask myself why I stayed so long. Why I didn’t call Prin or fight harder to move back home with my parents where I belonged. The answer would always come not in words, but in a memory of how he kissed me when he was high. Soul kisses, so deep and slow I often didn’t realize we were having sex until an orgasm began to build inside me. As so often happened when we made love while he was high or drunk (or both), the orgasm slow burned inside us both until it would explode like a beach bonfire with too many sticks.
We came together that night. This was the part I usually liked best, but there was something different this time. And I found out what it was as soon as he rolled away, leaving something wet and sticky between my thighs.
“Holt, you forgot to put on a condom,” I whispered, horrified.
There was no response. He’d passed out, on his back this time. As if the smelling salts of sex lost their effect the moment he came.
Oh, mercy, what am I doing?
It was my voice that asked the question in my head now. Not my mother’s, who had blared the first three weeks I was with Holt but eventually quieted as the summer wore on.
I missed my mother’s nagging voice.
Missed both my parents even more.
But I must have matured in those last few months, because I didn’t dwell on my parents much. Just hugged myself when I fell asleep. Beside Holt, but still lonely in his bed. And as sleep overtook me, a line from that old Mamas and Papas song floated through my mind. The darkest hour is just before dawn…
Except in that case, it wasn’t.
That night, I fell asleep in darkness but woke to something far worse—the sound of a gurgling cough…
And when I rolled over, I found Holt jerking like he was being electrocuted. His skin had taken on a blue cast, and though his eyes were wide open, he wasn’t saying a word.
“Holt? Holt!?” I called, pulling and pushing with all my might on his shoulders until I turned him over.
That should have done it because in those days, these situations were all too common for Holt. He was choking on his vomit and he needed me to turn him on his side or belly. But even after some watery vomit spewed from his mouth and his shuddering stopped, he still wasn’t responding to my voice. Even more frightening, Holt’s body had gone limp, and his skin stayed an unnatural blue.
Though I had never before seen such a thing in real life, my heart stopped in instant recognition. Holt was overdosing. The love of my life was at death’s door…
“Sylvie?”
Holt’s voice yanks me out of the past, and I whip around to see him walking toward me on the bridge.
He strides with such purpose that I’m immediately reminded of all the reasons why he should not be judged by the same standards as the boy who showed up white-knuckling a bottle of Grey Goose one week after his overdose, reeking of alcohol and insisting we had to be together.
“Holt, I’m sorry…” I say. “I know you want to rush forward now that you know some of the truth, but—”
He cuts me off. “When is Barron’s birthday?”
I blink. I have never heard anyone other than my Jamaican relatives call Barron by his given name. Then the implications of what Holt is asking me start to surface…
“When is his birthday?” he demands again.
I stop, thinking hard about what to say next. But in the end, I am tired of running, tired of lying, and I let the truth drop from my mouth like I am finally dropping a heavy bag to the ground after a long, long journey. “May 17,” I answer quietly. “Barron’s birthday is on May 17.”
Holt shouldn’t be surprised. Someone must have told him something or he would not have asked me this in
the first place. But he jerks back as if I have punched him in the face.
“What do you mean?” he demands, his voice cracking like a whip across the otherwise quiet evening. “What are you trying to say, Sylvie?”
“Holt, I never wanted to hurt you,” I reply. Then I take a deep breath, prepared to finally admit the truth. “I—”
He interrupts me. “You thought you could keep this from me?” His expression is a mixture of rage and deep hurt. “How long, Sylvie? How long did you plan to hide him?”
My answer sticks in my throat. Because the truth is too terrible to say aloud.
If not for his unexpected marriage proposal. Never. I would never have told him. Because of what is happening right now. Because of how he would respond. Not just respond, but retaliate.
I had lived with that fear ever since Holt unexpectedly walked into my life back in August. I’d had nightmares, so many nightmares…and now they were all coming true on this beautiful moonlit Japanese bridge.
I say nothing. I cannot bring myself to speak. But Holt seems to get all the answers he needs from the look on my face.
“I will destroy you for this,” he informs me, his voice low and menacing.
“Holt! Please, please try to understand—” I begin.
“Don’t you dare tell me to understand!” he roars. “There is no understanding what you have done!”
Oh, mercy…
Holt is less than interested in hearing my explanations of why I kept Barron from him for ten years, but I keep trying. I must keep trying to make him understand. “Holt, calm down. Please listen to me…listen! I need you to—”
“Do you really think I give a good goddamn what you need from me?” he asks on a coarse snarl. He eyes me up and down, and the blue gaze that had been so tender the night before is now filled with hot disgust. “After what you have done? Save it! Anything else you have to say can go through my lawyers.”
And with that he turns and walks away.
“Holt, please!” I call after him, desperate to explain myself, to make him see. “Holt!” I yell again.
But the only answer I get is the sound of his heavy footsteps fading as he disappears around the first bend of the path.
I watch him go. Nearly hyperventilating with the implications of everything he said. He’s going to hit me with a battery of fancy lawyers and take away my son...
I haven’t cried since Lydia’s funeral when I held my sobbing mother under one arm while throwing white petals onto my sister’s casket with my free hand. All of that only a few weeks after losing Daddy. That was the last time I saw my mother cry. The fierceness drained out of her by the time the dirt was shoveled on top of my sister and unborn niece’s grave. A few days later, when I finally told Mommy I was pregnant by the boy I’d turned to when she kicked me out—her response was…less than expected.
“Okay, daughter. Okay…I will return to Connecticut. Get on with my life. You…you stay here with your aunties and other family. They will be better for you than I can be.”
In a way, she was right. Two funerals in less than two months—something died inside her. I understood. I know why she left me with the others. It was a way to distance herself from my possible death and protect me and my unborn child from her heartache. It wasn’t as if she knew what I had done to get that “charity check” for Daddy’s bills. And I would never tell her. But still…
I was there for her, but she was unable to be there for me. In some ways, being left behind by my mother felt worse than my fear of getting pregnant and being put on that plane back to Jamaica by my parents like Lydia had. I had failed to be the perfect daughter, so in the end, my mother decided not to be anything at all to me.
This baby is all I have left—that is what I remember thinking after my mother left me. I could not handle the idea of my child being claimed by that entitled boy who had run up on my house stupid drunk only one week after his overdose. Or worse, taken away by that boy’s horrible father…
No, I didn’t tell Holt. And I might never have told him if not for this weekend.
But now he knows. And like my mother, he reacted exactly as I thought he would. For a moment, I am overcome by all the emotions I’ve been trying to hold back since being all but physically forced onto that plane to Connecticut.
I cover my face with both hands, shoulders hunched, and for many, many minutes all I can do is weep. For myself. For Barron. And for all I would lose because Holt Calson responded exactly as I thought he would when he discovered I’d been hiding his first-born son from him.
I weep and weep and weep some more…until I hear voices in the distance, coming toward the bridge.
Without thought, I run again. Back toward the main entrance, in the opposite direction of Holt.
This is a nightmare.
This was standing in a bathroom after you just sent away the love of your life, and staring hard at the plus sign on a pregnancy test, knowing what his father would do if he ever found out.
This was trying to look the boy up six months after the birth of your son, and finding his New York Herald wedding announcement at the top of the search page.
This was getting on with your life only to have it completely disrupted because, as it turns out, the only child your son has ever befriended turns out to be his half-brother.
So yes, I ran. I had to get Barron. I had to empty my account and get us a flight back to Jamaica. I had to…
“Don’t you ever get tired of running, little rabbit? You’ve been running from the start of our relationship. It is as if running is your answer to everything. Is there a problem? Time to scurry!”
Holt’s cold words slice through my fear and panic, all but grinding me to a halt…and shoving me back into my right mind.
I can’t run, I realize. Barron is Holt’s son, the one I kept from him for ten years. And Holt is one of the richest people on Earth.
I cannot run.
In fact... I take a deep shuddering breath. Now is the time for me to finally do what I had never dared do to Holt before. Fight.
Fight back. Because the thing is, Holt may have changed a lot over the years, but so have I.
I haven’t been a nothing girl for a long time. And I will never again let another person put me on a plane I don’t want to get on.
With shaking hands, I drag out my phone and call the one person who knows everything—including the identity of Barron’s father.
Proving how much she has changed over the years, Prin picks up immediately. “Sylvie? Sylvie, what’s wrong?” she asks worriedly.
Her response makes me want to break down crying all over again. But I don’t. I have to be strong. For Barron, I have to be strong. So instead of crying, I answer her in a voice that is no longer soft and tentative.
“Prin, listen…I need your help.”
V
Stamford
Chapter Forty-One
HOLT
When I return to the house in Greenwich just a few hours after my confrontation with Sylvie, Ender is gone along with any sign he and his duplicitous mother ever lived there.
Mika, who has no idea I am Ender’s biological father, figured I wouldn’t care that she let Ender’s “Aunt Prin” onto the estate, or allowed Ender to leave the premises with her. After all, Ender’s mom texted Mika to explain that she’d forgotten her best friend would be swinging by later that night to pick him up, for a promised trip to Six Flags Hurricane Harbor. And she’d told Mika to allow Prin to bring her car around to the guest house—ostensibly to help Ender pack his overnight bag.
I am not surprised by this move at all. Sylvie has always excelled at running. But if she thinks I will let her get away this time, she has another thing coming.
Within an hour of my arrival, Allie and I have an elite team of former hackers who now make a living as “security consultants” assigned to Sylvie’s case. And just a few hours after that, I am told they’re in. Bank accounts, credit cards, email—even Sylvie’s Waze app. She wo
n’t be able to so much as withdraw money for coffee without me knowing about it, much less buy a plane ticket out of the country. This time there will be no place on Earth the little rabbit can run.
Less than a week later, I arrive at the New York offices of Meier, Swath, & Crane, the law firm our family has used for personal matters since my first-born aunt married a Cal-Mart executive who was handpicked by my grandfather.
“You have a strong case,” Gil Meier III, the son of the man who originally signed the Calson’s account, tells me when we meet privately in his office. “But are you sure you want to sue for full custody?”
This is third time he’s asked me some variation of this question during the course of our initial meeting. I get the feeling he is used to most fathers trying to figure out how to pay the mothers of their illegitimate children to go away without a fuss.
But in my case, I want to destroy Sylvie. Take everything from her, like she took everything from me.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I answer. “I won’t settle for anything less than full custody.”
Gil’s shoulders slump as if he hoped I would give him a different answer. “In that case, perhaps we should consider the proposal Ms. Pinnock’s lawyer sent over…”
My head jerks back. “She’s already lawyered up?” I ask.
Gil replies with a somewhat consternated nod. “Not only that, but a rather…sassy legal intern hand delivered a proposal for arbitration to my assistant this morning. If it had not been for one of the security guards recognizing her as the daughter of some rapper from a reality show he used to watch and assuming she was one of my clients, she would never have made it to this floor. But turns out she’s an intern for the lawyer who is representing the mother of your…ah…child. The lawyer is licensed in New York, with special privileges to work in Connecticut. But I have never heard of her, and according to my initial research, she doesn’t have much custody experience or experience with sighted clients for that matter. You see…”
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