“You lied to me, Mom.”
“When did I lie?”
“Always. Forever. Every single time you opened your mouth.”
“Chloe, I don’t know what’s—”
“Have they talked to you? Have they been asking questions?”
“About what?”
Her words came out more manic than sensible. She was frustrated now, afraid of whatever this was.
“About me.”
“What about you?”
“You tell me. What about me, Mom?”
“I can’t answer your questions if you won’t at least give me some context for what you’re saying.”
“Just tell me the truth. Tell me who my father is.”
Nicole rolled her eyes and swiped at Chloe with a playful cat’s paw. The tension in the room was still thick, but this was a familiar battle. One that Nicole, through years of fighting, was more than accustomed to winning.
“Oh, Chloe. Don’t be silly. It was a long time ago and I’d rather not think about it. Come on. I have groceries. I thought you could help me make macaroons. Like we used to?”
Chloe’s fire surged as if sprayed with kerosene.
“Stop pretending to be an idiot! Stop treating me like a fucking fool!”
“Chloe!”
But her protest meant nothing. Chloe was standing, clearly in charge.
“I know you were at that concert, Mom. The one you swore up and down you weren’t at. And I can prove it. I can show you the ticket sales and the seating chart for the Layback Lounge. There were cameras recording the show, even though it was never broadcast or sold. I can show you the footage. Every once in a while, they panned the crowd. And there you were, front and center at the rich men’s table with Isaac Ryan on your right and Cli—”
“And it’s none of your business!” Nicole snapped.
“And Clive Spooner on your left.”
Nicole wanted to tell Chloe to mind her own business, but she’d already said it. Chloe, simply by turning into the line of fire rather than away, had disarmed her.
She felt weak beneath her daughter’s gaze. Guilty, too. Regretful of the secrets she’d kept and justified hiding for so long. Ashamed of the fool Clive had turned her into. She’d been a stupid little girl, and he’d been a powerful rich man. The idea that he’d loved her was, in retrospect, clearly absurd. And yet she’d believed it with all her heart, and quailed at the thought of admitting as much to Chloe or anyone else.
Nicole was still here, still surviving. Chloe was here, strong and healthy and successful. They’d always had a great relationship, more like sisters than mother and daughter. Wasn’t that good enough? Was there truly no statute of limitations on shame?
“You were with him for six years, Mom. The six years before I was born.”
“You’ve been spying?”
“Is it true, Mom? You and Clive Spooner?”
“It’s my business, Chloe. You’re sticking your nose into my private past.”
“It’s my business too.”
“How is it your business?”
“Because you’ve never told me the truth. Worse: you’ve told me that there is a truth, then refused to divulge it. Did the spa teach you that, Mom? How to bring someone to the brink, then leave them with blue balls?”
“I never teased you.”
“You told me you knew who my father was. You practically waved it in my face. But no matter how many times I asked, you said you wouldn’t tell me. Almost happily. As if it gave you pleasure to see me squirm.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like? Tell me, Mom. I’m dying to know.”
Nicole stopped with Chloe, both of them wide-eyed and waiting.
“I … I was trying to protect you.”
“You should have told me he was a random john if you wanted to protect me. You should have told me he was dead. You lied instead.”
“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you the truth.” Nicole realized the pathetic nature of her argument even as she said it, but this technicality was all she had.
She hadn’t lied; she’d withheld.
“You’re a saint,” Chloe said.
Nicole felt it as a low blow. Even when they fought, Chloe had never hit her quite like that. Even when at odds, they’d respected each other. But Nicole could see it now: Chloe’s betrayal and the hurt behind her anger. She could feel the shift in Chloe’s thoughts about her: once a role model, now a coward too weak to put her daughter first.
A girl needed a daddy, even if he was only an idea. But Chloe had never had either. Nicole had never been willing to speak the truth and had kept Clive’s memory close for fear of disrespecting those six years.
She was having her cake and eating it too. Holding her shame while shaming Chloe. It was the ultimate no-win. Whatever Chloe thought about her now, Nicole had spent two decades earning it.
“I’m sorry, Sweetie,” she said, her eyes going misty. “I did my best.”
“Your best wasn’t enough.”
“I thought it would do you good to know he was alive. That he was at least out there. But if you’d known who he was …” She stopped when she saw Chloe shaking her head, impossibly smiling a not-quite-right smile. “What?”
“You’re ridiculous. You’re delusional.”
“Chloe, meeting your father would only—”
“He’s not my father!”
Nicole blinked.
Of course that was true. Of course it was.
But only now, with Chloe raging above her, did she find herself caving to admit it.
With Clive on the hook, even if the man was absent, Nicole had at least held something. Admitting that Clive wasn’t Chloe’s father, meant admitting that her life with him was truly over for good.
And that meant that she was alone.
In front of Chloe, Nicole was beaten. Defeated.
So full of regret, her heart threatened to burst.
“Please just tell me, Chloe,” she said, shoulders falling and eyes suddenly heavy, “what you’d like to know.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chloe watched her mother, her eyes growing wet, working to hide her new flood of emotion, struggling to stay strong.
Her anger drained like water from a split tub. The worst of this was over.
She told her mother what she’d learned:
Six years of appointments, paid dinners out, trips, bookings, and public sightings both on Voyos and off.
Nicole’s pregnancy, documented by the spa but never medically. The Beam’s insistence that Nicole was both sterile and a hysterectomy patient — though she held her tongue on her sources, reluctant still to tell anyone outside O about The Beam.
All Clive’s time at the spa — far more, toward the end, than any other client ever visited his favorite girl, whether he could afford it or not. Correspondingly, Nicole’s acceptance of that time. She had work; she must have had other freelance opportunities. But no. The Beam showed Chloe that Nicole had always made room for Clive.
Their trips to District Zero. The concert. The hints at an elegant, Cinderella type of night — which Nicole, nodding along, filled in with details: Clive had given her a dress, jewelry, a necklace fit for a princess. He’d wined and dined her, despite knowing she’d put out for him either way. He’d known her favorite singer, Nicole told Chloe. He’d loved her favorite song.
Chloe’s wireframe of their relationship as offered by Beam records filled with color. Its bones grew flesh, gathered weight: a sense that theirs hadn’t just been an ordinary client relationship, but a twisted kind of love in bloom.
“For me, anyway,” Nicole said with a hesitant smile.
And she filled in moments The Beam hadn’t shown. It came at Chloe like a pornographic romance. Tales of raunchy, spa-style sex fell into tender moments. Nicole told Chloe about a time when Clive had taken her against a shed beside the modesty pool, both of them trying to keep quiet. Plus, something about a rocket pop �
�� a frozen treat Nicole laughingly described eating seductively, making double entendres that made them both laugh.
And there was laughter.
And joy.
Listening to her mother’s story, Chloe felt like she was intruding on moments far too intimate to share — not because they were erotic (a spa girl’s life tended to be an open book), but because they were tender. She almost wished she hadn’t asked, hadn’t forced her mother to open this painful box from her past.
But once Nicole was moving, she barely paused, breathless as she relived moments she’d clearly never remotely allowed to dim in her memory. Every once in a while, she she draw a breath, then mother and daughter would look into each other’s eyes, and a bittersweet understanding would pass between them: This delights me now. But we both know how it will feel when I reach the story’s end.
Still, she pushed on, Chloe trying to split her attention between filing the story’s details for later processing and empathizing with her mom as a human being. The dichotomy felt like removing Spa Chloe from Personal Chloe: operating as both data bank and sensitive daughter. She was half machine, half human. She listened. She archived. And she prepared for them both to cry.
Years passed in Nicole’s retelling, Chloe peeking her voyeur’s head into the many shades of their years together:
Laughing Clive, joking with her like a teenager.
Intense Clive, eyeing her in the bedroom.
Business Clive, pristine and sexy in his bespoke suits, tossing credits as though they were nothing. Of course he knew Alexa Mathis. Of course he’d worked with Anthony Ross, as well as Onyx and Aiden from Forage. Of course he’d talked nanotechnology with Noah Fucking West. The two of them had once spent a long night over two bottles of wine debating whether nanos would ever be able to think on their own — whether they’d ever be able to decide what users wanted instead of following a programmer’s orders.
Chivalrous Clive, buying Nicole flowers and jewelry. Taking her out and showing her off — not as a girl for hire, but as the girl who belonged on his arm.
Sexual Clive, with his insatiable appetite and frightening edge. Nicole told Chloe about the toys he’d wanted to try, even though she was nervous. About a next-level virtual reality session that, when paired with a vertigo-causing drug, had left Nicole disoriented and panicked, but ultimately satisfied. About injections he’d wanted them both to take, and how they’d fought until Nicole’s eventual surrender. About aggressive insertables. About cock rings with studs that hurt them at first, then left them trembling by the end.
And Sweet Clive. The one Nicole said she’d foolishly fallen for.
By the time Nicole had finished talking about her impossible pregnancy and the alienation that followed, Chloe’s eyes were as wet as her mother’s. It was a bittersweet love, gone missing rather than dead, hard to release for the lingering, torturous hope waiting in the wings.
“I know he’s not your father, Baby,” Nicole said, sighing, her body as slumped and spent as if she’d run a race. “I was silly, but I wasn’t an idiot. But it was just so hard to admit. Because even though it couldn’t have been Clive, it couldn’t have been anyone else.”
Chloe was too tired to feel the statement’s full weight, though she knew she’d feel it like soreness the day after exercise. She’d come here to find her father (and hence herself), believing she could suss something from Nicole that The Beam hadn’t known or wouldn’t say.
But now the story was over and Chloe believed Nicole when she said that there wasn’t anything more. And yet the mystery was still a mystery. She was still a woman without a father. A girl born from nothing at all.
Nicole rolled her head, looking quietly at Chloe as both lay boneless on the couch. They’d opened a bottle of wine and drunk it all. Still what had come out had been like its own hard birth, devoid of painkillers. Anesthesia hadn’t dulled the pain as truth was delivered.
“I don’t know if you can understand this, Chloe, but I needed to tell myself that lie. Of course I knew it wasn’t true. But I clung to it anyway. It was all I had.”
Chloe nodded. “I understand, Mom.”
Chloe didn’t want to break the long silence but knew she’d have to. The issue was as settled as it was going to be, but it wasn’t resolved.
“But I have to have a dad. That’s how it works. I’m half you and half someone else. Who was it? And how?”
“I don’t know, Honey.” Nicole shrugged. “Literally the only other man it could have been was my performance partner, as impossible as that was. I asked him at one point if he’d consent to be tested against you. He was very nice about it, but of course you weren’t his. I must have been a sad case at that point, because once word got out, every male performer on Voyos volunteered the same — just in case I slipped on someone’s puddle, I suppose. But even if someone had come up positive, it still wouldn’t have explained you, Chloe. I was too scared to get exams back then, but I’ve had plenty since. The hysterectomy was done. I simply don’t have the equipment to make a baby. I never have.”
Chloe waited for the punchline.
But there was none.
She was more lost than ever. So many possibilities suddenly dead.
“Then how, Mom? I’m here. The tests say I’m definitely your daughter. The security cameras say I came out of you, and I have a belly button to prove it. I know I can’t be Clive’s or anyone else’s. But then how do I exist? What the hell am I, Mom?”
Nicole pressed her wide lips together. Her smile reached every inch of her face, brightest in her eyes. “I can only give you the answer that I give myself whenever I ask those questions.”
“Which is?”
Nicole’s smile widened.
“A miracle.”
CHAPTER NINE
Parker looked down at Andrew’s mobile. “Take out the battery.”
Andrew had been sending Crossbrace messages and checking his mail while waiting for Barnes. Or at least that’s what he told himself. The park was wide and open — nobody could see what you were doing on a mobile or tablet unless they walked right up to you. Nobody would know if Andrew was actually watching highlights from Heaven On Earth or consulting the program’s wikis and message boards, curious to see if someone would mention new arrivals with blue eyes and slight overbites. Or if the video would show what they were doing while away from their secretly-for-hire boyfriends.
“What?” said Andrew, not understanding. He’d seen Barnes coming fast enough to hide his nosing around in Chloe’s business, but his statement was out of the blue, without any context.
“Your mobile. Take out the battery.”
“It’s in do-not-disturb mode.”
“I don’t care.”
Andrew pressed the button on the side. “Here. I’ll turn it off.”
“I love that you think your grasp of technology is better than mine. Now take out the fucking battery if you care to continue this conversation.”
Andrew didn’t want to continue the conversation, but he took the battery out of his mobile anyway, making a show of holding up the separated battery and mobile for inspection. What the hell; Barnes was better than Alexa and Alexa was better than that rather creepy call from the dry-voiced man identifying himself as “Alexa’s partner.” At least Barnes pretended to occasionally have Andrew’s best interests at heart, provided they aligned with O’s.
“Better?”
“You don’t want to be overheard any more than I do,” Barnes said. “You’re just too dumb to realize how precarious your position is.”
“You’re certainly winning my loyalty right now.”
Barnes ignored Andrew, scoping the park. He wasn’t wearing a trench coat, fedora, and sunglasses, but he may as well have been.
“I talked to Alexa,” Barnes said.
“And?”
“She said no. You’re not getting out of this contract no matter how many different ways you try to ask.”
“But—”
“Save
your breath, Andrew. I’m not going to believe you.”
Andrew was about to make a quip, but something stopped him. Something had changed with Barnes. He clearly hadn’t been talking to Alexa just to deliver Andrew’s latest proposal for a way out.
In the past, Barnes had always seemed to Andrew like he was humoring Alexa’s position — like he was actually on Andrew’s side but had to answer to the boss no matter how unreasonable she was. But that wasn’t the case now. The whip-fast way he’d cut Andrew off offered no compromise. It said, I’m sick of your shit, so here’s how this is going to go down, punk.
“I need to get some truths into you,” Barnes said in that same no-bullshit manner. “It’s clear you’re trying hard to deny what I and the others have told you.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe. It’s that—”
“I’ll do the talking,” Barnes interrupted. “There’s not much to say and I don’t particularly want anyone seeing me with you, so we’ll have to move fast. What Alexa said about you not having a choice? That’s true. In exactly the way she said. You can take a chance and find out if we’re bluffing, but that would be a terrible idea. With me so far?”
Andrew’s sarcasm muscles were locked. He could only nod.
“I’m a shrink and Alexa is not. Her beliefs about the human mind are and have always been unusual. Chloe isn’t acting. She loves you. I have no doubt.”
Andrew felt himself brighten, in spite of the horizon’s inky clouds.
“But that’s not a good thing. You need to get your head out of your ass and stop believing in Happily Ever After, Andrew. You’re not getting out of your contract with O, and that means you’ll have to keep doing what we need you to do. Even in the best case, if you think you can confess to Chloe and get away clean — which you can’t — how exactly do you think she’ll react? This isn’t a 2000’s-era teen movie. She’s—”
“Like Can’t Buy Me Love? Or She’s All That?”
Barnes stared hard at Andrew. He didn’t look impressed with the retro knowledge, or the interruption.
“She’s not going to forgive you for lying to her and betraying her,” he continued. “Even if you do go out and hold a boom box over your head.”
The Voyos Reunion Page 5