The Platinum Reunion

by T V Hartwell

  “When you’d come back from New York, you weren’t feeling well,” Jake said, recalling that particular memory too.

  “So why didn’t you tell me about this conversation you’d had with Mike after you’d gotten back from Vegas?”

  “I wanted to, but I felt uneasy about it. They said it would’ve made your condition worse if I’d confronted you about it.”

  Amanda was beside herself. “It would’ve made my condition worse? What condition did they claim I had? And why would they tell you this lie?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m getting to. So I ended up meeting with your dad on that Monday following my bachelor party in Vegas.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “I met him after work with Mike at The California Club. Rick decided to meet with me personally, I guess, when Mike told him that I wouldn’t go along with what he wanted me to do.”

  Amanda grew impatient. “Okay. So what did my dad tell you? What illness did he say I had?”

  “Basically…Rick said that you had a serious mental illness.”

  Amanda’s mouth fell open and her eyes teared up as she looked at Jake in complete bewilderment. She couldn’t believe it.

  Registering her hurt, Jake’s eyes teared up too as he continued to speak. “He specifically said that you had multiple personality disorder, or—dissociative identity disorder, I guess, is the official term for it now.”

  “Oh my God,” Amanda said before she began to cry, covering her face with her hands and shaking her head.

  Jake pulled up closer to her in his seat to console her, reaching to gently hold her by the wrists. “Amanda,” he said softly. But he let go when she stripped her hands from her face and looked at him with a pained and befuddled expression.

  “My dad told you that I had multiple personalities?” she asked incredulously as the tears continued to stream down her face.

  “Yes.”

  “Jake…how could you have believed something like that? Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “I know this sounds crazy, but he was very convincing. He said that you’d had the disorder since you were a child. He claimed that you had a twin sister named Maggie who died of some rare blood disease when she was three. He said you two were very close—”

  “That’s ridiculous. I never had a twin. Alex is my only sister…my only sibling.”

  “I know that now, but he said at first, when you were still a little girl, like around five or six, you would say that you were having conversations with Maggie, but then by the time you were nine or ten, the signs of you having a split personality started to appear. He said that you thought you were Maggie. It was as if the loss of your twin suddenly hit you later in childhood and the way you dealt with the grief or trauma of her passing was to pretend to be her, or you became her somehow in your mind.”

  As Jake spoke, Amanda got up to grab a tissue to wipe her face, and then she sat back down. She just stared at Jake in stunned silence and anger. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “This is what Rick claimed,” Jake said, sounding defensive as he registered the shock and dismay on her face. “To be honest, when Rick first said that you had a mental illness, I thought he was going to say you had ongoing bouts with anorexia or something like that because, if you recall, that weekend after you got back from New York and I got back from Vegas, you told me you’d received treatment for that while you were in boarding school. So I brought that up. I told him that you had just told me about having anorexia back then and the reason having to do with that guy Raoul you were dating at the time, but your dad dismissed that notion out of hand.”

  Amanda furrowed her brow, incredulous. “He dismissed it out of hand?”

  “Yeah. He said that wasn’t the real reason.”

  Amanda huffed in agitation. “Then what was the real reason?”

  “He said that anorexia was just a symptom of your split personality and that Maggie caused you or prompted you to stop eating and to starve yourself because she didn’t want this guy Raoul to take you away from her. Rick said that Maggie felt jealous about your relationship with Raoul, so making you starve was her way of holding on to you or scaring him away, I guess.”

  “This is fucking crazy. Where on earth did he come up with this stuff?”

  “I don’t know, but your dad is a good liar, I must say.”

  “But how would he know this?”

  “Know what?”

  “That this Maggie was jealous of my relationship with Raoul and, as a result, made me starve myself to keep me away from him?”

  “Because I guess Maggie, meaning you when you acted like Maggie, told him and Camilla. He claimed that you only behaved like you were Maggie around them and that it had been a closely guarded family secret until this Maggie reappeared in the months leading up to our wedding.”

  “Oh my God,” Amanda said, slapping the palm of her hand to her forehead and sighing. “So she became jealous of you too? Is that what he told you?”

  “Exactly. He said that you—or Maggie, rather—had threatened to kill Amanda because she was so distraught that I would take you away from her forever if we got married. They, meaning Rick and Mike, even suggested that you might come after me and try to harm me.”

  “Oh my God. I can’t believe this. This is so insane,” Amanda said as she began to cry again, burying her face in her hands.

  Jake rose from his chair and sat close beside her on the edge of the bed. He wrapped his left arm around her to comfort her. “Amanda, I am so sorry. I feel like such a fool for letting this happen.”

  “But why?” she asked plaintively through her tears. “Why did he do this? And what does your mother have to do with this? You said that she was involved too somehow.”

  Jake took a deep breath and then sighed hard. “So you recall that our parents, Rick and my mom, dated each other during high school.”

  Amanda nodded. “Okay.”

  “So of course, after high school they went their separate ways, and Rick eventually met Camilla at Princeton and they got married. My mom met my dad at Stanford and they ended up getting married too. However, apparently, your dad and my mom reconnected somehow after they were married and had an affair.”

  Amanda snickered and shook her head. “Oh, how surprising,” she said mockingly. She already believed that her father was a philanderer.

  “But that’s not the worst part of it,” Jake continued. “After the affair, my mom became pregnant…with me.”

  Amanda pulled back to look at Jake with a puzzled expression on her face. “I hope you’re not about to tell me what I think you’re about to tell me.”

  “My mom thought that Rick, your dad, might be my father too.”

  Amanda’s eyes popped open wide as she gasped in astonishment and slapped her hand to her mouth. However, Jake quickly assuaged her horror.

  “But he’s not. I have since taken a DNA test, and you and I are not siblings. It turned out to be a false alarm.”

  “Thank…God. You just scared the shit out of me.”

  Jake continued to explain to Amanda all of the events that led to his decision to break up with her and the events that followed, including the revelation and false alarm about his paternal origin. Amanda sat and listened in complete bewilderment as Jake told her of his mother Jamie’s attempt to keep her affair and Jake’s paternity a secret until the very end; how Jamie had enlisted Rick’s help to stop the wedding; the role Reverend O’Mahoney had played in bringing the secret to light; that he’d gone to a clinic in Santa Monica with his father, Tom, to take a DNA test and subsequently learned that Tom was indeed his natural father; and of Rick’s attempt to pay Jake off with an even larger sum of money after the DNA test to keep Jake silent about Rick’s grotesque act of deception and defamation of his own daughter.

  When Jake was done with the full story, Amanda was livid. Her hurt and sorrow had been overtaken by rage and indignation.

  “Show me the contract. I want to see it
…right now.”

  Jake got up and went over to his briefcase to fetch the contract that had been initially drafted but that he’d never signed stipulating that he’d stay away from Amanda for good after breaking up with her and not going through with their wedding in exchange for money. He pulled the contract out of a folder and handed it to her.

  Amanda sat silently and read it. She gasped when she saw the amount of money he’d been offered. “Five million dollars?” she looked up and said to Jake, incredulous.

  “Yeah. And like I said, he’d been offering me more, especially after it had been confirmed that he wasn’t my father after all. The lies and drama for nothing—he wanted to keep it a secret. And like I told you before, I’m not sure how much your mother even knows about this. She seemed clueless when I spoke to her last week.”

  “She was clueless, because she said you told her you had done what she and my dad wanted, but she didn’t know what you were talking about. She said you sounded crazy. She even accused you of being on drugs.”

  Jake just chuckled and rolled his eyes.

  Amanda continued to read the rest of the contract. When she finished it, she placed the contract down beside her on the bed and went for her phone. “This is a fucking outrage,” she said, seething, and then she hit the dial button to call a number from her contact list.

  “What are you doing?” Jake asked.

  “I’m calling my dad.”

  Chapter Forty

  Amanda was so infuriated, she was shaking. As the phone rang, she stood to her feet to try to gain better control of her nerves and speak forcefully and clearly. On the fourth ring, Rick picked up.

  “Hey, Mandi. How are you, darling?”

  “How am I? The way you’d expect a daughter to be after just learning that her own father told the biggest lie imaginable to get her boyfriend to dump her.”

  “What do you mean, sweetie?” Rick asked, trying to sound innocent and perplexed.

  “Jake’s standing right here with me, Dad. He’s told me everything.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, honey—”

  “Enough! Don’t lie to me,” Amanda yelled. “I have the contract in my hand…where you offered to pay him five million dollars not to see or speak to me ever again. All to cover up your mistake…the affair you’d had with Jamie? Instead of coming forward and admitting the truth, you had to make me suffer? I had to pay for your mistake? You invent this outlandish story to cover your ass and then make me look like I’m the crazy person? How dare you! Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Rick tried to interject. “Honey, I’m—”

  “Don’t honey me. You lied. You told a big fucking lie. You told Jake that I had multiple personality disorder? How could you? What the fuck is wrong with you? I’m your daughter, for Christ’s sake. How could you do this me?” Amanda said, breaking down and crying again.

  Jake looked on, astounded, as Amanda screamed at the top of her lungs. He’d never seen her so enraged. It was so out of character for her and disconcerting to witness. He had to take a seat.

  “Mandi, I was trying to protect you, protect us, protect our family.”

  “That’s bullshit! You were trying to protect yourself. You only cared about yourself in this situation, not about me, or else you wouldn’t have allowed me to pay the price for your mistake.”

  “That’s not true. Maybe I didn’t go about things in the best way, but I was trying to protect you, honey, and protect your inheritance—”

  “Oh please. Don’t try to make this about money and inheritance.”

  “Well, it’s true. His mother, Jamie, kept this whole thing about Jake possibly being my son all to herself for years. I didn’t know anything about it until she came to me two months before your wedding and dropped this bombshell on me out of nowhere. I never really believed it, to tell you the truth. Jake doesn’t look anything like me, but I thought the best thing to do was to separate you from him and not risk anything.”

  “What are you talking about? Risk what?”

  “Mandi, look, you don’t know what Jake is capable of. He’s no good, honey. Getting him out of your life turned out to be for the best anyway. He cheated on you…with a guy. Jake was never right for you to begin with. He’s a sleaze, a total scumbag.”

  “Who are you to call someone a scumbag? Huh?”

  There was silence for a few seconds on the other end of the line. Amanda could tell that must’ve felt like a dagger to her dad’s heart to hear those words coming from her mouth.

  Rick’s voice trembled, seemingly with restrained anger, as he spoke. “I beg your pardon, young lady, but I’m your father. I’m might not be perfect in every way, but I damn sure have taken very good care of you and our family, and I deserve your respect, or least the benefit of the doubt that I was operating with your best interests at heart. Had Jake turned out to be my illegitimate son, he could’ve come after our money, your money. You and Alex might’ve had to split your inheritance with him.”

  “You are fucking pathetic. You know that? Listen to yourself. Do hear the shit coming out of your mouth right now? You are in no place to pass judgment on anyone. You cheated on your wife like I’m sure you’ve done the whole time you’ve been married. And when you were told that you might have a son as a result of your immoral behavior, instead of doing the responsible thing and confirming whether or not it was in fact true, you went and told this horrific lie about your own daughter to cover your own ass. And then you go and offer someone millions to buy their silence so that I would never find out about what you had done. You are evil and there is no justification for what you did. None! Do you realize what you did, Dad? Do you fully comprehend the pain and agony you caused? I was destroyed. You nearly ruined my life. And you were okay with that.”

  “Mandi, that’s not true, not true at all.”

  “It is true. Not only did you rob me of my dignity in telling my fiancé and the love of my life that I was too dangerous and unfit to be his wife, or anyone else’s wife, for that matter, but you also robbed me, you robbed us of our child,” Amanda charged as she began to sob. “You did that. You, you did it,” she screamed.

  That was the first time Jake had heard her acknowledge in his presence that they had had a child. It broke his heart to hear her say those words, “you robbed us of our child.” Jake placed his hands to his face and cried quietly to himself as Amanda continued to rage at her father.

  “You are responsible for the loss of my baby. All the stress and pain of being dumped by my fiancé and trying to figure out, alone, by myself, what to do about an unplanned pregnancy, all of the pressure you and Mom put on me to get an abortion, deciding whether I should be a single mother, and then trying to find adoptive parents—you have no idea. You have no fucking idea. All of the stress and trauma of that situation is what caused me to lose my baby. That’s what caused the miscarriage. Are you proud of yourself? Does that make you happy? Huh? That’s what you wanted anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Amanda, I don’t know what else to say—”

  “How about, ‘Amanda, I apologize. I made a very bad mistake and caused you harm and unbelievable pain and suffering, unjustly. Please forgive me. I’m deeply sorry for what I did.’ But no, you can’t say that because you aren’t truly sorry. You are too self-centered and self-absorbed to have empathy, to have the decency or capacity to show true remorse. You are an evil, selfish, deceitful maniac, and I hate you. I hate you so much right now. There aren’t enough words for me to express how much I loathe you.”

  “You don’t mean that, Mandi. I know you’re hurting, honey, and you’re upset with me, and rightfully so. I’ll fly to New York now so that we can talk this through. I want to make this right. I want to make this up to you.”

  “Make this up how? Are you kidding me? I don’t want to see you. You disgust me. Being in your presence would completely freak me out. Stay away from me. Just stay away. I don’t want to see you. I’m ashamed of you…ashamed that
you’re my father,” Amanda screamed through sobs before she hit the end call button.

  Jake immediately stood up. He too was crying. “Mandi, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he repeated before embracing her.

  Amanda, inconsolable, didn’t resist. She leaned her head to Jake’s shoulder, keeping her hands down at her sides at first.

  Sensing that she was receptive to his overture, Jake held on to her more tightly, pressing her body to his.

  Although feeling awkward, deep down Amanda wanted to be held by him. She eventually gave in and wrapped her arms around his waist. When she did so, Jake lightly stroked the back of her head. He then kissed the crown of her head and kept his lips planted there.

  Jake’s touch made Amanda feel warm inside. To be locked in the embrace of her former love felt familiar, natural, and comforting. But she also had mixed and conflicting emotions about standing there with him like that. She was with Adam now. Her mind told her to pull away, but she couldn’t let Jake go.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “We had a baby, Jake, but I miscarried,” Amanda said as she cried on Jake’s shoulder.

  “I know. I’m so sorry. I would’ve been there if you’d told me. I would’ve been there for you. I would’ve done whatever you needed me to do, anything to make sure that you and our baby were healthy and safe.”

  “That was our dream. That’s what we wanted, to have a family together of our own. And we were almost there. It almost happened. But then everything was snatched away from us. It’s so cruel. I can’t believe they did this to us.”

  “I know. You didn’t deserve this. We didn’t deserve this. I feel like you’ve been taken from me, Mandi. I wanted to be your husband. I swear to God, I did.”

  “Jake, don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that right now,” Amanda said through continued tears. “I can’t take it.”

  Jake pulled back slightly so that he could look at her. He then held her face with his hands. “But it’s true. I was in love with you. I swear. I still am.”