by Jess Bentley
“Do I have to swear you to secrecy?” I ask, trying to make a joke.
Annie looks like I slapped her, though. “I would never — ”
“Sorry,” I say again. “Bad joke. I’m… not right, at the moment. Um… I met a guy, obviously.”
That, at least, gets a small chuckle from her.
“Jake Ferry… Reginald Ferry’s son,” I say, quietly, like there might be other people listening.
Annie’s eyebrows go way up at that. “The… billionaire Ferry? The one that opened up Ferry Lights?”
“Don’t judge me,” I beg her.
“I would never,” Annie says, God bless her cotton socks. “Wow. That’s… something.”
“A gross oversight and lapse of judgment?” I suggest. I don’t need her to confirm it. “I should have used protection, but you know the doctor told me that I wasn’t likely to be able to have kids after the ovary operation I had when I was eighteen. Still, I should be on birth control for fuck’s sake. I just… never thought it would be an issue… you know, I’m busy all the time. It’s never been an issue.”
“Does he know?” she asks me, tentatively, like I might bite. In fairness, I’d be just as worried in her shoes. I am not in a good mood.
My cheeks get hot, and I can’t quite say anything. Which for Annie is enough of an answer.
“Okay,” she breathes.
“If this gets out, if I tell him and… Annie, I’ll be the laughingstock of social media. People will say I slept with him and got knocked up on purpose to get a shot at his daddy’s money and after what he… I can’t be with him. I can’t.”
Christ, I never cry. What the fuck is happening to me? Is this what it’s going to be like for the next nine months? I need to be on my game, on point, for the next phase of Red Hall and…
Gloria. Jesus, that twit can’t keep her mouth shut about what soda I drink, much less that I’m pregnant. How long before I start to show? I can feel a clock ticking away to my self-destruct moment.
“Calm down,” Annie says, putting a hand on my back. I’m hyperventilating. “Deep breaths. In, and out… in… and out. Okay. Let’s take it one step at a time. We’ll get the test done, and go from there. And Janie?”
I look up at her, my eyes hot and puffy from crying.
“Whatever happens, you’re going to be okay. Everything happens for a reason.” She leans in, and kisses my forehead. “I’ll be with you every step of the way. Now come on, I’ll take you to the hospital. That’s the only way to be sure.”
Thank God for Annie Nealson.
“Please let it be ovarian cysts. Please let it be ovarian cysts.” As painful as it would be, and as much as I hate the idea of going under the knife, the doctor tells me it’s the other possibility when I stupidly tell him I’m not sure if I’m pregnant or not. Apparently there are a number of options, but most of them are worse.
If anyone up there is listening, I promise I will live a good and noble life of piety and celibacy if I can just not be pregnant with Jake Ferry’s baby.
The doctor returns with the test results. Annie looks like she’s preparing herself to handle my meltdown. It was too fast, wasn’t it? Is that it? I try to peek at the other side of the clipboard like it would make a difference while the doctor makes a few marks.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Hall,” he says. “You are approximately three weeks pregnant.”
“It’s ‘Miss’ Hall,” I say, because it’s all I can think to say.
“Oh,” the doctor says, and is that the tone of someone judging an unwed mother? I open my mouth to shut him the fuck down but Annie swoops in before I unleash the titan.
“Thank you, Doctor Miller,” she says quickly. “You can bill my office. Lorna has all the information. Come on, Janie, let me get you back to the office.”
Outside, I finally break down, and Annie holds me while I sob into her shoulder. I can feel myself getting sucked straight down into a monumental depression — I know, because I’ve been there before. Not now. I can’t do this now, not again, not ever, not with so much on the line.
Annie takes me back to her office, and we schedule out the appointments. I’ve sent her so much high-profile business that she doesn’t even talk about what it will cost. She doesn’t come cheap. I love her more in that moment than I have ever loved another woman, and strongly consider marrying her. If only I could become a lesbian.
By the time I make it to the car, maybe her bullshit herbal tea is actually doing something, because I’m a little calmer. I can think clearly for a little while.
I will not go back into that hole. No ma’am.
I will do what I did back then. Hurl myself headlong into work. It’s not like I’m in short supply.
It’s also just about the only way I’ll be able to keep myself from finding and murdering Jake Ferry.
Jake
Not another word from Janie. I’m pressed between two brick walls. On one side, Reginald expects me to be making some kind of progress on that front and I haven’t told him yet that she’s cut me off. On the other, she’s cut me off and there’s a vise clamped around my heart from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.
More than once I consider going to Red Hall during dinner. I know she’ll be there and there’s a part of me that knows she won’t make a scene; not after Martin, and not after I seemingly foiled a robbery. That would be cheap and manipulative, though, and that’s exactly why she cut me off in the first place.
The only positive to come out of it all is that I’m finally ready to get out from under Reginald’s thumb. If I can get Janie to hear me out, to forgive me for being the worst person on earth, it’ll be worth it. That, and somehow finagle the kind of cash that I can start a business with. Maybe if I do that — if I pursue my own dream — it’ll show her that I’m serious, and that I want to change.
I mull that over for days. Paranoia has me looking over my shoulder every time Reginald is nearby. I can’t shake the feeling that he knows what’s going on, that he knows what I’m thinking. That’s how he made his fortune, after all. Subterfuge is Reginald’s air, water, and food.
He starts keeping me close, for one thing. Oh, he acts like he’s just taking me along, introducing me to all the movers and shakers that I’ll need to know to work more closely with him. A golf game? Really?
I’ve always hated golf, for one thing, and for another Reginald has never taken me anywhere for anything.
Suddenly, though, we’re a father and son team. He praises me in front of his buddies, and I’m expected to make friends with their sons — a lineup of carbon copies. Maybe it’s Reginald’s way of pointing out who he wants me to be. Fall in line, kiddo. All the other billionaire boys are doing it.
And around every corner we turn together, he’s needling me about Janie. I’ve started leaving for a day or two, going up state to the bar on the beach, just to make it look like I’m off securing his plans for Red Hall.
“How’s Janie doing? She let you put it in her ass yet?” He laughs like he made a joke.
I laugh as well, even though it makes me want to vomit, and I shrug helplessly. “Not yet, but soon.”
Another time he wants to know intimate details. “Did you have to train her to suck a dick right?” or “How tight is that pussy? Type A girls have the tightest pussies.”
I manage to avoid answering those questions with counter jabs. “Jealous you couldn’t get into her pants yourself?”
“No,” Reginald says to that. “I could have. I wanted you to do it so I could see what you’re made of.”
His eyes are searching; he’s testing me. All of his questions are tests. I’m under examination and I know it and I’m running out of answers to his questions.
When I’m around him, which is more and more often, I can’t show any weakness. I can’t be myself, and I can’t wear my feelings on my sleeve or anywhere else. So I suffer inside, stuffing it all down because the longer I’m in the dull gray light of purgatory, the more
I miss the sun. Janie’s smile. The smell of her. The feeling I had for just a little while when I could be myself and open up to someone.
By the time Reginald drags me off to a “gentleman’s dinner” — a lavish, obscenely expensive affair wherein the shareholders and some prospective business partners all get together to eat endangered species served on platters by women wearing pasties and loin cloths, who dance when they aren’t bringing food or drinks — I can feel a tear down the center of me.
I can’t do this much longer. It makes me feel sick, but I have to know how and when I can see her alone, so I carefully funnel some money into a friend’s business on the back of a few big-ticket purchases to get some cash to hire someone who isn’t a part of Reginald’s detail to follow her. No pictures, nothing incriminating. I just need to know what the right opportunity will be.
Within an hour of hiring the PI, I realize that this is exactly what Reginald would do in my situation. Looking in the mirror now, I can see more and more of him in my face. People always told me I was the spitting image of my father, but I never really saw it.
After a visit from his barber, and his personal shopper in advance of another bullshit excuse for him to interrogate me around his buddies, though… there it is. Those are my father’s eyes. That’s his jawline. Hell, I’ve even got his hairline with that little bit of widow’s peak.
It’s all I can do not to take the mirror off the wall and hurl it across the room. The sound of shattering glass feels like it would wake me up somehow, like this is all just a nightmare that I can wake up from if I shock myself out of it.
But it isn’t.
“Where are we on the Janie Hall situation?” Reginald asks me later, after he’s paraded me around like a prize pony. “It’s been weeks. I haven’t seen a whisper about the two of you.”
“She’s stubborn,” I tell him. “She wants to be sure I’m serious, so I’m being serious with her. You want me to run her off?”
His eyes bore into me. Any second he’s going to call bullshit and announce to the room that I’m no longer his son.
Please do that. Please see through me.
“Do whatever you need to,” he finally growls. “Propose, for all I care. Knock her up. I don’t give a fuck about the consequences. Are we clear?”
“Crystal,” I tell him.
I’m beyond fucked.
Janie
I’m in my office ignoring the discomfort that now hovers in my stomach. Who knew being pregnant was so much like having chronic acid reflux? Not me, that’s who. Checking and rechecking the ledgers, there’s five hundred dollars missing and I desperately hope that Gloria is stealing from me, because that would be the only good icing on my towering shit cake. It doesn’t look like it, though, dammit — I missed an order last week because I handed it off to Chester.
He told me, and I even made a note about it in my phone. So why didn’t I enter it? Because I’m currently losing my goddamn mind, that’s why. On the up side, I have the most perfect skin I’ve had in my entire life.
My eyes wander across the desk for a moment, taking a break from the computer screen, and settle on the test results from the hospital. “You’re going to have one hell of a story, kid,” I mutter. “Maybe I’ll make up something. Somehow I think the truth would just piss you off. It would piss me off. Hell, it’s already pissing me off.”
The baby is the size of a raisin or something; she, or he, can’t hear me. But I’ve been doing that lately. I’m determined that this is going to be the snarkiest baby ever to walk the world, and right now I have sarcasm and nihilism in spades.
There’s a knock at the door to the office that makes me nearly jump out of my skin.
It’s Gloria. She looks like she just spotted the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, and she isn’t looking at me. “Oh, my…”
Clearing my throat, I stand up and snatch the test results off the desk, stuffing the papers into my purse. “I’ve got to go out,” I tell her. “Chester’s in charge, you need to — ”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Gloria says, more gleefully manic than I’ve seen her basically ever. “This is too good. You don’t get to just brush this one off, Janie. Holy shit. You’re fucking pregnant?”
Hearing it from someone else’s lips shocks me, even though it isn’t exactly news. Hearing it from Gloria’s lips is potentially enough to make me miscarry. Can unbridled rage cause a woman to lose a baby? I suspect I’ll find out if I spend enough time around this woman.
“I don’t have time for this, Gloria,” I tell her. “We’ve got the last sauce debuting tonight and I need the place spotless, so you — ”
“Uh, no.” Gloria folds her arms over her chest, looking smugly sinister. “We absolutely need to talk. Who’s is it? Let me guess: Jake Ferry. Funny I haven’t seen anything on Facebook about it… oooh.” Her eyes widen even more, if that’s possible. “Nobody knows.”
Much as I try to keep a straight, flat face with no affect or emotion at all, Gloria has this freakish instinct for gossip. Her hand goes to her mouth. “Jackpot,” she breathes. “He doesn’t know. Holy. Fuck. Janie!”
Threats are on my lips, clawing to get out. But that will only set her off, and being defensive will just confirm everything she’s thinking.
“If I had just slightly fewer scruples,” she says to my silence, “I would totally cash in on this. Wonder what Reginald Ferry would pay me for a tidbit like this? Probably a lot. What’s a few hundred thousand for him? I bet he’s got that in his couch cushions. Have you thought about that? I bet you could make a killing.”
“I don’t care about Ferry money,” I tell her. “I don’t need to ‘cash in.’ I’ve got my own money that I worked for and earned on my own merits instead of spending my life hunting down someone who could give it to me. Get out of my way.”
Gloria’s eyes narrow, her lips parted slightly with the offense she’s taken from my not-so-subtle comment. I have to stifle a groan. Just the thing I didn’t want to do. Set her off.
Her jaw twitches, and she steps out of the way.
As I walk past her, though, she has a final word. “We’ll talk later. Count on it.”
Seriously, they probably wouldn’t even look for the body.
Mama gives me a strange look when I visit to drop off her meds — sure enough, George texted me about picking them up because he was “busy” — and I find myself attempting to make a hasty exit.
“I had a strange dream the other night,” she says before I can escape.
“Oh?” I wonder. The look in her eyes tells me everything I need to know about what she’s thinking, but I feign ignorance anyway. “What about?”
“I was on the beach,” she says, her eyes going distant. “The beach where your father and I… anyway, there was a storm way out over the ocean, but there was no wind. And out of nowhere, these fish start leaping out of the ocean and onto the beach around me. Isn’t that funny?”
“That’s… funny all right. I’ve got to go, Mama.” I kiss her on the forehead.
“Did I ever tell you that before I even knew I was pregnant with you, I had a dream a lot like that? They say dreaming of fish is a signal of a pregnancy close to you…” She looks like she’s a combination of worried and near-ecstatic. And then her eyes drop to my belly.
“Uh… well, you know I don’t believe in that sort of thing, Mama.” It’s all I can think to say to throw her off my scent. But the truth is, Mama’s had some accurate dreams before. Who knows what actually causes them — I refuse to believe it’s some supernatural gift of prophecy — but once she’s got her mind set on something because of them they usually self-fulfill.
In this case, though? I’d rather not think about it.
“You can talk to me, Janie,” she says quietly. “You know that, right?”
“What? Mama,” I sigh, and take her hand. “Of course I know that. But I have to go. Lots to do. Are… you and George coming to the lounge for the launch party?”
“I woul
dn’t miss it,” she assures me. “You know George doesn’t really like to go out, but I’ll be there, I promise.”
George doesn’t like spending money would be more accurate, and doesn’t like being seen in public with my mother. Never mind they’d never have to pay for a thing in my place. “We’ll go shopping before that,” I tell her. “Get you something sexy to wear, how’s that?”
Mama laughs, and that suspicion in her eyes is finally replaced with scandalized humor. “Oh, now… I don’t know about all that. I love you, baby girl.”
“I love you too, Mama.” With that, I’m finally out the door. Spooked, sure, but I’m at least reasonably certain my secret is still intact.
Not forever, though. In the mornings, I make a habit of checking the mirror to see if I’m showing. Day to day, I can’t really tell — probably the change is too gradual to track that way. Which is why I took a picture shortly after I had it confirmed and, like it or not, I look different.
Maybe Mama didn’t even have a dream. Maybe she’s just trying to find a way to get me to admit it. I feel awful for hiding it from her, but she would tell George and the boys, and they’d be all over it. Especially George — I’d never hear the end of how I got knocked up out of wedlock, never mind the fact that George has been married three times.
I have another checkup with Annie, so I head into town, keeping a wary eye out for any sign of Jake. Avoiding him is getting to be ridiculous. After having spotted him going into Ferry Lights a couple of times and even staying late at Red Hall to make sure he left before I did, I’ve started seeing him everywhere. I’m not even sure it’s him half the time, but I’ve left a nearly full cart of groceries at the store just because I thought I saw him walk into the aisle next to the one I was in.
Now, I expect him to pop out from behind any given corner, or show up at Red Hall, and the worst part is that I find myself hoping he will every time I stare at the slight bulge of my tummy.
