by Kris Jayne
“Why is she here?”
“Look, Son—”
“Why is she fucking here?” I shouted.
“We were going to tell you today,” he said.
“What?”
“Look, Griffin—” Dad began.
“Don’t ‘look’ me, trying to explain and cushion the blow. Say it. Say it out loud.”
Marisa hugged her silk wrapper tighter and leaned into his chest. Her voice was softer and more pleading. “Griffin—”
Their shared hesitation to speak the obvious truth galled me. “You’re sleeping together. My own father is sleeping with the woman I wanted to marry. And you are shagging my old man behind my back. Does he know—”
Marisa cut me off. “We didn’t intend for this to happen.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did a whirlwind pick you up and throw your pussy on top of my dad? Whoops!” I flailed my arms over my head. “I know the winds off the outer banks of the Carolinas can be something, but I didn’t know they could do that.”
Dad shook a finger at me. “Look here, I’ll not have you talking like that in this house. We’re adults. We should be able to discuss this without being vulgar. I understand how upsetting this must be for you, but—”
Upsetting? The blood rushed to my feet. I thought I might faint. My vision blurred. “With my father, Mar?”
“Griff, I didn’t plan this.” Her voice had squeaked, nasal and grating. At least I wouldn’t have to listen to that cat-screeching whine for the rest of my life. My father had fewer years left. Maybe that’s why he didn’t mind.
He piped up. “We…reconnected, and I’ve always been fond of her, and…I know this is hard.” His tone dropped, and for a nanosecond, a shadow of guilt passed over his eyes.
Marisa encircled his midsection in her arms. “We love each other. I hope you can understand, and we can get past this. You and I have been over for a while,” she declared.
I shook my head.
Another layer of shame settled into Dad’s face, and he said nothing.
I swiveled a searching gaze between the two of them, then gave in to the nauseating defeat. “Good luck with her.” I propelled the words through gritted teeth.
“Griffin—” Marisa started in a whisper.
“Merry Christmas.” I squeezed a scornful, enraged smile on my face and tossed Dad’s gift on the counter—vouchers for a week of golf at St. Andrews in Scotland finagled from a partner at the private equity firm where I worked. Dad and I were supposed to take the trip together.
Scrap those plans.
I walked out.
He sent them back to me a couple of weeks later. I ended up going the next summer with my friend, Jamie.
Dad couldn’t have gone, anyway. By then, Marisa was almost ready to deliver Grace. I got news of her pregnancy via email since I’d refused to come back to the house or answer his phone calls.
They married the weekend after Valentine’s Day. Obviously, I missed the wedding.
To be back in this house raised the bile in my throat again. The memory froze my feet on the wood floor, and I struggled to refocus on the changed scene in the here and now. A scramble of toys littered the refurbished carpet in the living room. When I was growing up, my parents hadn’t allowed me to play in there.
“When people come to the door, I don’t want them to look in and see your mess,” Dad had boomed.
I guess those rules—like all the ones he’d claimed to stand for—had flown out the triple-glazed windows.
I didn’t venture any further toward the back of the house where I knew Marisa was settling the kids into their rooms for the night. Which one of them had my old room? I hoped it was Grace.
The guest rooms sat at the end of a hall around the fountain in the foyer under the front stairs. The largest one on the right had a small patio and the nicest bathroom, if I remembered. I might as well be comfortable in my misery.
After I showered and settled in, I texted Delilah and waited to see if she’d respond. I thought about calling her, but I’d bothered her with my troubles enough for the day. I didn’t need her thinking she had to be my mother. My phone buzzed, but it wasn’t my new girlfriend. It was my old one.
Marisa: I heard you come in. Come to the kitchen. We need to talk.
Me: I’m tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.
Marisa: We need to talk now. The kids will be in your face tomorrow. We’ll have no privacy.
Instead of answering, I forced myself out of the guest room and across the house to the kitchen.
Chapter 4
Griffin
My neck tightened as soon as the kitchen tile cooled my feet. She stood in the exact same spot, sipping wine this time, and, yet again, in her pajamas.
I blinked to clear the unpleasant nostalgia. “You lied.”
She swirled the ruby liquid in her stemmed crystal and tipped her head my direction. “I didn’t lie.”
“Yes, you did. You made it sound like Dad was dying.”
“Your father is an elderly man who had chest pains and numbness in his hand and was rushed to the hospital. I’m not supposed to tell you about that?” She pressed her lips together with feigned incredulity.
Others—especially men—still fell for her tricks. I didn’t. “You’re supposed to tell me exactly what’s happening, not make it sound worse so I go running out—”
I was going to say running out of Delilah’s house. Marisa didn’t know need to know the details of my relationship.
She raised an eyebrow, waiting for me to finish the sentence.
“—running out in the middle of the night to get here as if he might die. First of all, he’s sixty-four. That’s not elderly. Second of all, he’s not dying, Marisa.”
Her lips pursed. “No, but he could have. He could die tomorrow, and you haven’t spoken to him or met the children. That wouldn’t have bothered you? The idea of that bothers your father a lot.”
Sparks of guilt tried to catch in my gut, but I doused them. “I’m not the reason we don’t speak.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, daring her to suggest otherwise.
Her fists flung to her narrow hips in challenge. “And I am, I suppose? That’s what you’re implying, right? I’m not the reason you and your father don’t have a relationship.”
“Well, let’s look at the facts. You and I dated all through college. We break up, but stay in touch—more than that at times—and I think we’re friends. Then, you start fucking my dad without a word to me. Oh wait, no, you were fucking him before. Sometimes I forget that detail since you didn’t confess that to me until later. Have you had any confessions for my dad lately?”
Her face pinched. “Don’t go there, Griffin. The past is the past.”
She’d certainly like that to be true. It would be neat and convenient for me to forget all the twists and turns of our relationship. Five years ago, she told me the first time she and my dad were together was the weekend of our college graduation. I was off with my friends, presumably drunk and up to no good, and she felt abandoned. Dad was comforting her, she said, and they swore it would never happen again.
She spilled these details on the phone out of the blue right after I saw my dad at a golf event in Florida. I called home to talk with him, feeling as if the ice had thawed a little. He wanted me to come see Grace. Then, Marisa issued her little confession.
From that point forward, my only conversations with Dad concerned business. I kept a seat on the board of his company along with family shares, so there was enough of that to discuss. I could block out what he had never admitted to me and the things I sometimes felt I should tell him but knew I wouldn’t. Whatever they thought of me, when I made promises, I kept them.
The truth didn’t matter, anyway.
“The past.” I snickered. “You’re right. Maybe you did me a favor. Back then, one batted eyelash, and I might have taken you back. Fortunately, you revealed yourself for the shape-shifting whore you are. Unfortunately, my father has the misfortune of be
ing shackled to you.”
She paled. Her arms dropped to her sides, and she straightened, shoulders up and drawn back.
“I’m not going to try to defend what we did, but that’s not fair.”
“Which ‘we’ are we talking about?”
Her chin thrust skyward. “I’m sorry for what Gregory and I did to you, Griff. If you ever came home and gave me a chance to tell you, you’d know how sorry. I would have apologized a long time ago.” She tilted her head with a sigh. “I was young and insecure.”
I balked, and she bristled before continuing.
“That’s not an excuse. It’s a reason.”
Her apology almost had me. “You’ve never been insecure a day in your life. You’re the most confident, arrogant woman I know.”
“I was unsure of my future. I wanted some safety and security. I wanted a more stable life than the one I grew up with.”
Her mouth curled into a pout. She always brought up her childhood when we fought and she needed justification for her selfish impulses.
She grew up in Charlotte. Her parents ran a successful business until her father’s gambling bankrupted the family. Then, Marisa went from living in a desirable, gentrified neighborhood and going to private school to living in a shabby apartment and getting bullied as a stuck-up, rich kid at her public school. All the while, her old friends pretended she no longer existed. None of their parents wanted her at their houses, and they certainly weren’t heading to the “wrong side of town” to visit her.
Marisa swore she’d never feel that kind of instability ever again.
I’d heard the story repeatedly. It used to make me feel sorry for her. Actually, it still did. Like she said, it was a reason for her manipulations, not an excuse.
“I couldn’t give you security. Yes, I remember. You said something about how you couldn’t hitch your wagon to mine when I was drunk all the time and all over the road. Nice imagery. Are you still trying to be a writer or does living off my father’s money mean you never have use your brain ever again?”
I hated the vicious snark in the question but couldn’t help it. Back then, she’d accused me of being content to live off my family name instead of working hard. The irony burned in my throat.
Challenge slanted her eyes, and the mushroomed ponytail piled on her head bobbed. “Is that what bothers you? That your dad provides a life for me? I have two young children.”
“And Jacinda, and your house manager Peggy, and a fleet of housekeepers,” I shot back.
Her jaw flexed. “I’m a good mother.”
I’d ventured too far, and my anger clouded my brain. Other than her tired dismissiveness at the hospital, I had no idea what kind of mother she was.
I relented. “I’m not suggesting you aren’t. Or maybe I did. Forget I said anything. It’s none of my business.”
“Apology accepted,” she sniffed.
“I didn’t apologize.”
“And back to mean again,” she sang.
My pique re-surged. “Yes. I forgot. I’m the bad one in this scenario. Everything would be okay if only I behaved better. This is why I need to come home more often, so I can be reminded of that.”
Her hands flew up in exasperation. “We just want the opportunity to make it up to you. You have no idea how much that would mean to your father—and to me.”
Marisa came around the long kitchen island, slipping closer to me before freezing a few feet away. She curled a finger around a lock of striped hair that dangled out of her messy bun like an escaped convict. Her chin dipped.
“I’m glad you stayed, Griff.” Her body swayed, and a button on her silk pajama top popped loose, revealing the cleft of her breasts. She crossed her arms in front, but instead of concealing, the motion shoved her bosom upward.
I stepped back. “I’m here to see my father settled back home and to spend some time with the kids. One thing you’re right about, I shouldn’t have let whatever has gone on between us adults impact them. But don’t get it twisted, Marisa. I’m not here for you at all. In any way. That is over.”
With that, I turned to head back to the guest wing. The soft patter of her feet followed.
“You don’t understand, Griffin.”
“Go to bed, Marisa.” I tossed over my shoulder from the center of the living room.
“Wait.”
She touched my elbow. I whirled around with my hands up.
“What can you possibly want?”
“After tonight, we’ll never have a chance to have this conversation. Contrary to what you might think, I’m not an idiot. If you ever do come back here, it’ll be to see your dad or Grace and Gregory Jr. I know I’ll never have a chance to say this to you again. So just listen, please.”
“What?”
“That summer you proposed. Remember how you blew off those interviews to go to Hilton Head with your friends for a week? You took off with barely a word. Gregory was calling me.”
“Not true. I told you I was leaving. I told you that Dad wanted me to come work for the company, and that I needed time to think.” Why we were rehashing the past, I wasn’t sure, but the urge to straighten the record overwhelmed my need to get away from her.
“You needed a weekend drunk on the beach to think?”
I jerked back. “I’m going to bed. I don’t need to be chastised for blowing off steam when I was twenty-five. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get locked into working for my dad my entire life.”
He always intended I follow this very specific, chartered course: go to college and then come work for him. Unless, of course, I wanted to head to an even more prestigious school for an MBA and then come work for him. Regardless, all roads led to working for Dad and, eventually, taking over his business.
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do “business.” Certainly not at a big company where everything was already established. Tradition was forcing my feet into some hard, too-tight wingtips previously worn by my father and his father before him. It was all so prescribed. I rebelled sometimes.
Everyone back here in Raleigh framed my wanting to find my own way as irresponsibility. If I didn’t know my path precisely down to the millimeter, somehow that meant I wasn’t serious or, worse, was a fool.
Discovering Marisa was one of those people had been devastating.
She folded her fingers in front of her with her index fingers pointed at her chin. “I knew what I wanted. I was ready to start a stable life with a grown man and have a family. You weren’t grown yet, Griffin.”
“Well, Dad’s thirty years older, so he certainly was.”
“Yes, he is.” She gazed off, then focused intently.
I knew what she was looking at. Behind me, high on the wall, hung a portrait of Dad—commanding, square-shouldered in a navy, three-piece suit. His brown eyes pierced the space.
I’d stared at that portrait a good portion of my life, full of uncertainty if I could live up to the man in the oiled image.
She stared at it now. The inscrutable flickers in her face might be sadness, regret, cunning, fear, or grief.
“I know it sounds horrible,” Marisa began, “but your father was everything you were—handsome, charming, funny—but he was solid. He had the qualities that I was looking for in you. But I see them in you now. You don’t have to worry about living up to him. You’ve done it.”
Her voice and her head dropped. She wrapped her arms around herself. I thought for a second that she might cry. Then, she looked up at me with wide, shining, but tearless, eyes.
My breath caught and slipped between my lips like a thief. “That’s what you wanted to say to me?”
She presented me with a sliver of a smile. “Yes. I know you’ve chased his approval. You don’t have to anymore. He’s proud of you.” Warmth eased her cheeks, and her mouth spread into wider smile. “I guess, on some level, I still wanted to be with you, but I also wanted security.”
The pleading angle of her head and the manufactured cracks in her tone made me flinch. Yes.
Security. Someone to take care of her.
Now that Dad was older and getting checked into hospitals and I was older with a career and a more sure-footed existence, I was suddenly the better bet.
I could see it. That is why she called me to North Carolina because she was shifting to her next plan. After all these years, she still thought I’d fall into the pool of those big, green eyes and want her again.
Good Lord, she was out of her fucking mind.
Confronting her would only get me so far, and it was beside the point. She was right. I wasn’t coming back here to see her ever again. I still had to get through the next two or three days with her and the kids and my dad.
So I narrowed my eyes and returned her smile. “Yes. I’ve spent my life wanting to earn my father’s love, and you hand it to me. It’s quite a Christmas gift. Delilah said I should be grateful that you got me here.”
Saying the other woman’s name brought me more comfort than a thousand of Marisa’s sweet, batted-eye looks ever had.
Marisa blinked. “She did?”
“Yes. She, as usual, was right. I am grateful. Clarity is a good thing.”
The skunk-haired siren in front of me released a relieved sigh. “I’m glad. Your dad and I both love you, Griff.”
I gritted my teeth. “You know, no one calls me that anymore.”
“Oh,” she fanned her lashes. “I always did.”
“I know. Don’t.”
“Griffin—”
“Thank you.” I cut her off. “What time do the kids get up?”
She tugged again on that stray hair cascading over her cheek. “Grace is usually up by eight or so. Why?”
“I’m making pancakes, remember?” I turned my back to her and continued to my room. “Goodnight, Marisa.”
Chapter 5
Delilah
“Mom! Happy New Year!”
Katerina threw her arms around my neck and yanked me into a firm hug. New Year’s was still days away, but Kat was always the type to look ahead.