by A. J. Chase
Mac had simply not told her what happened because he hadn't thought it would matter. He hadn't thought she would talk to him more than once or twice. He had avoided telling her because he didn't want her to think so little of him at the last moments of his life. She could understand and forgive him for that. Mac hadn't known she would fall headlong into a relationship with the man. How could he have? He'd even warned her against it because he felt Chandler's personality was not well suited to relationships and guessed he'd be just Fielding's type.
For the first month or so after she got out of the hospital, Fielding did very little. She stayed at her house and wandered around like a zombie. Occasionally she read a book or watched a little TV. And she waited to receive the letter that said Chandler was suing her. She engaged the services of another lawyer, outside of the legions that handled her inheritance, just for the occasion when that lawsuit would come. She had a stack of his business cards by the door so that she could send it away with whoever came with Chandler's lawsuit.
By the end of March, she began to really miss dancing. As the snow was starting to melt and the weather started to lighten, so did her mood. She interviewed for, and took, a job teaching advanced tap dancing at the theater high school in Manhattan. It was a job that she loved, but it wasn't the theater. Not by any means. Reporters began to forget about her, and papers had long since retracted their job offers. She was finally left in peace. Or what she could find of it.
In April, Josh and Janine went to Vegas to gamble for the weekend and came back married. That was when Fielding started to feel really alone again. She had no family, her closest friend was a married man, and she would rather have cut off her own head than start dating again. It would just take some adjusting to being mostly alone. She would make it through. She always had before.
It was the first Tuesday in May when the visit she had been waiting for finally came. There was a knock on her door at seven-thirty in the morning. She had been on her way out the door, but once Fielding received a call from the doorman asking if he could send up a young woman, she knew she would be late. The girl in the crisp linen suit looked younger than she would have expected from Chandler's lawyer, but her presence was undeniably official, and she had that almost emaciated prettiness that English girls had cultivated into an art. She looked Fielding over with a careful examination that lacked rancor or self-consciousness—only curiosity was visible in her pale blue eyes.
"Are you Fielding French?" She requested in that sweetly lyrical upper crust English accent that Fielding hadn't heard since she had walked away from Chandler four months ago. The sound of it was painful, but she brushed it off.
"Yes, that's me. Just give me the papers and take this card." She shoved a handful of her lawyer's cards into the girl's slender fingers. "I'm running late and not to be rude, but I'm not going to let someone who works for him or his attorney slow me down."
The young woman smiled slightly, revealing a small dimple indenting her left cheek. "I don't work for him." She didn't bother to ask who he was, making her assertion seem less than true. "I'm his daughter."
Fielding couldn't have been more stunned had Chandler shown up on her step himself. Some part of her had always hoped, in some pathetic way, that he would show up, but she had never so much as dreamed that Anne Bentley would appear here, as if from thin air.
"I…" She didn't know how to finish the statement so she just stood there in the doorway, wordless and stunned.
Anne pushed past her without being invited in and took in Fielding's light, airy loft with its walls of windows facing the park. "Well, I can see it's true that you have plenty of money."
"What?" Fielding crossed her arms over her chest.
Anne dropped her bag on the couch and walked the room slowly taking in every picture like she had been invited to make that kind of inspection. She picked up the picture of Fielding, Josh, and Mac on the boat. Fielding had taken it from Mac's office after his death, as well as the Devil sampler. Had she ever awakened the Devil! And Mac had been right. She had paid for it in the end.
It struck Fielding, suddenly, how like her father's Anne's fingers were, long and elegant with short, square nails. For some reason the observation still had the ability to hurt her.
"I'm sorry, but what are you doing here?" She asked through clenched teeth, debating the best way to handle this intrusion.
Anne looked up at Fielding with wide, keenly intelligent eyes and smiled a small Mona Lisa smile. "You're not what I expected."
"You have one up on me since I wasn't expecting you at all."
Anne laughed.
Suddenly, a horrible idea occurred to Fielding that might explain Anne's presence here. "He's okay, isn't he?"
She could barely force the words out. Enough people had died on her lately. Even if she never saw him again, she couldn't bear the idea that he was hurt.
"My father?" Anne automatically clarified, despite the fact there was no one else they could be talking about. "He's all right. Physically anyway." There was a small downturn in her voice at the end of her sentence.
She pointed at the picture. "Is this your uncle?"
Fielding sighed. There didn't seem to be any getting rid of the girl until she wanted to leave or Fielding wanted to kick her out. "Yes."
"I read he was sick."
Where on earth had the teenager read that, and why had she bothered? "He died in January. On the same day…" She couldn't even finish the sentence. "He died on January fourth."
The corners of Anne's lips turned down ever so slightly. "Why did you hurt my father?" The question came out of nowhere just like everything else about Anne Bentley.
Fielding gasped. "Why did I hurt him? Did you ever ask him what he did to me?"
Anne's frown deepened. "I never asked him anything. He wouldn't tell me if I did. Dad is closed up so tight, he makes an oyster look like an East Ender on a Saturday night." She sighed. "I was hoping that you would tell me."
Fielding opened her mouth and closed it again when no easy words came. The thought of telling any of that story was keenly agonizing. "I can't." She clutched her middle as though the knife had returned.
Anne sighed deeply. "Is this true?" She finally asked, digging in her bag and producing a torn bit of newspaper.
Fielding reached out and took the paper with trembling hands.
There was a giant slashing headline across the top, but she didn't know what it said because the words swam in front of her eyes. She lost her balance for a moment and then caught it against a chair. There were two large pictures on the right side of the page. One was of her at Mac's Christmas party wrapped in Chandler's arms, and there was no misinterpreting the look of total adoration on her face as she looked up at him. He had his head slightly turned, but nevertheless, there was no mistaking his profile and posture to anyone but the most casual observer.
The other picture was like another physical blow. It could only have been taken through the window of the suite at the Plaza. The violation that she felt was soul deep, like she had been viciously attacked when she had been least expecting it. How could they? How could they take pictures of her and Chandler in a place that was supposed to be private, in a moment that surely should have been?
She was sick.
Then she grew sicker at the idea that, to Chandler, this was exactly how he had viewed the press all along. They had stripped him bare. Had violated him when he was already down. And she was one of their ranks.
The photograph showed her in bed, her sleeping body wrapped in the sheet. Her head was turned away from the camera, but Fielding knew it was she. Chandler was the focus in this one. He stood by the bed wearing nothing but low slung, unbuttoned jeans. Even in a picture she felt her body react to his tight stomach, the ridges above his hips, his sleek, muscled chest. But it was his face that stole her breath. His hair was mussed. He was wearing unfamiliar gold wire-framed glasses, and he needed a shave. Like the trench coat picture, someone had managed to reach out
and steal a moment where he was experiencing actual emotion.
He was looking at her with a tenderness that would have killed her had he done it while she was awake to see. If she were still pregnant, she would have cried, but since she was somewhat sane again, she merely felt tears swim in her eyes for a moment before she blinked them away. How she had loved him. It had been so consuming. It still was, just underneath her skin. She would fall apart if she ever saw him in the flesh again, and she knew it. A picture had nearly done the trick.
"Is it?" Anne demanded again tapping one highlighted paragraph.
Fielding forced her eyes to focus on the words. "Hospital insiders say the couple was unaware of the baby, but both seemed shocked and saddened about the loss. French was approximately five weeks pregnant at the time of her stabbing."
She dropped the article and backed away from it.
How could they? How could they just so casually talk about her baby that way? Without even asking her if it was all right. No wonder Chandler hated her so badly. Her control shifted a little more. She forgave him, a little, for leaving her to bear the loss of their child alone.
"Yes," she finally managed, her voice thick with restrained emotion.
Anne sighed. "Then I'm sorry for both of you."
"I…thank you." Fielding didn't know what else to say. She still couldn't even understand why Anne was here. "Does Chandler know that you're here?"
Her barking laugh belied her elegant, ladylike exterior. "Good Lord, no. He'd go mad if he thought I knew about you at all, let alone came over here to talk to you. He likes to pretend as if he doesn't have sex, or emotions. I told him I was going on holiday to Spain with my girlfriends. It will take him at least two days to realize I never went to Spain at all, and by then I ought to be home."
She had to ask again. "Why are you here?"
Anne crossed around the room again looking at the framed evidence of Fielding's history. She ran her fingers over a few of the panes of glass. "When I was in my first year at Cambridge, I had a psychology class." Though the comment was apropos to nothing, Fielding didn't try to get her back on track. Anne had come here for a purpose—that much was obvious, although Fielding had no idea what it was.
"We had the entire term to finish our final project. Months. We had to pick some form of media, a play, a poem, a song, a painting, whatever, to be the most accurate description for the people in our family. Some people were easy, like my mother. She's dead. I hardly knew her. My impressions of her were the only reflections of her personality from which to draw."
She stopped in front of another picture. A newer one of Fielding, Daphne, Leslie, and Kyle. "Even my grandmother and great-grandmother were not so hard. I had them figured by mid-way through. But it took me the whole class, months, to come up with something for my father. How do you characterize a man like that in a single poem or painting?"
Against her will Fielding was now intrigued. "What did you pick?"
Anne smiled cheekily. "I picked the sage words of a couple of your fellow Americans. Simon and Garfunkel."
Fielding laughed, but then stopped suddenly when she realized what song she must mean. "I Am a Rock," she whispered.
Anne nodded. "I heard it one day. I had never heard it before, and I knew. I knew that it was Dad's song." She shook her head and quoted some of the lyrics from memory.
Fielding wandered to the window and looked down at the bustling city. She didn't want Anne's take on Chandler. It was painful, and it poked holes in her defenses against the pain of her own memories of him. It was easier to disdain him and the way he had treated her than to miss him. Even though she kept her eyes on the window Anne continued to quote from the song.
"You probably know the words. Shielded in his arm, touching no one, letting no one touch. A rock feels no pain."
"Why are you telling me this?" It felt like an unfair attack on the places Fielding hurt the most, and she still didn't know what Anne was doing there.
"You're not being fair to him."
"I'm not being fair to him?" She gaped at Anne. "In what way am I not being fair? He didn't want me in his life. He told me that he hated me. And then he backed those words up by leaving me to suffer alone when our baby and my uncle died on the same day. The day his friend stabbed me in the gut with a big old knife. How does any of that translate into bad form on my part?"
"Have you forgiven him for that?"
Fielding couldn't believe this girl's nerve. "Why do you care? Honestly, what are you doing here? If I forgave him it wouldn't matter, because he will never forgive me, and he will never be here to hear my apology or accept my forgiveness."
Immediately she felt bad for raising her voice to a girl who was still something of a child and who loved her hard and complicated father.
Anne bit her lip and looked down at the floor. "He called the hospital every morning and every night to ensure that you were getting better. For him, that was a real stretch. I wish that you could see that. He loves you."
The words were momentarily crippling. She shook her head. "Your father doesn't love anyone but you. He hates me, thinks I'm a reporter."
"And are you then? A reporter?"
Fielding didn't even have to pause to think. "Never. I was just doing a favor for my uncle. But I'm McKinley French's niece, a man he despised. Also, I lied to your father. Either was probably enough to chase him away, but here I am both at once, Mac's niece and the woman who broke his trust."
Anne wrung her hands in frustration. "That's not true." She bit her lip. "Okay, it is true, but if you reached out to him, I'm sure that he would cave. I'm sure he would. If you could only see how miserable he is. He's so cross and sad and pale all the time. All he does is grouse and attack."
"This is different how?" Fielding crossed her arms across her chest.
Anne laughed but then bit her lip again. "He doesn't even dance anymore," she whispered.
Those words were the last ones that Fielding could take. Chandler loved to dance. It was everything to him, and she had taken that away from him along with everything else.
"I understand where you're coming from, I really do. You love your father, and you want him to be happy, but I'm just a human being. And furthermore, I'm the wrong human being. I don't have the power to fix the things in his past. And even if I did, he wouldn't let me. I'm sorry, Anne, but I can't fix the way he's broken."
Anne looked down. "I understand. I had just hoped…well, anyway. I'm sorry that I bothered you." She grabbed her bag and opened the door.
Fielding stared after the teenager. She felt a certain affection for her just because she was Chandler's daughter, and whatever Fielding might say, she was beginning to suspect that Chandler would remain her biggest weakness until the day that she died.
"Anne."
Anne turned.
"For what it's worth, I really do …did love your father."
She nodded and smiled slightly before disappearing out the door and shutting it softly behind her.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was almost impossible for Fielding to pay attention to her classes after she finally arrived late. She pled personal problems accounting for her tardiness. If anything was ever the truth, that was. She was scattered all morning, and well into the afternoon, before she was finally able to put some of the disturbing emotions caused by that disturbing conversation behind her. Her students were all watching her cautiously because she was usually so focused. She kept missing their questions and giving answers that didn't fit.
By the time that she left for the day, she had found a center again. She went to the movies with Leslie and had coffee with Kyle and his new boyfriend. At ten, she took medication to help her sleep, her old friends these many months, though she'd been weaning herself off of them. Before Anne. Now, every time that she looked into any corner, she kept seeing Anne Bentley's sad smile and hearing her torturous words. She would never get any sleep if she was left to relax on her own.
The next day was bett
er, and her students stopped acting as though they were afraid she had been body snatched. She didn't forget a single move or assignment. She was on top of her game and overloaded with false cheerfulness. She sincerely wished she had never met Anne Bentley at all. When she arrived home she put on her sweatpants and picked up a book as the buzzer sounded in her apartment.
She pressed a button by her front door to speak to the doorman in the lobby. "Yes?"
"There was a man down here who wanted to see you. I told him I had to call you first, but he just gave me this truly awful look and pushed right by me."
She sighed. Hopefully it wasn't yet another reporter. She was too weary to deal with that.
"What exactly does he want, Harry?" She wanted more information before security was called.
"He just said he wanted to talk to you, and he wasn't taking no for an answer. And he really sounded mad and mean, Miss French, and I almost couldn't understand him with his accent. I think I should call security."
She stilled. "He had an accent?"
"Yeah, British."
Oh God, she couldn't see him. Couldn't look at him and survive it. "What did this man look like?"
Harry was slower to answer than she would have liked, but he probably had to try and remember the details. They wouldn't be burned into his brain like they were in hers.
"He was taller than me. Blond. Mid-to-late thirties. Wearing a black wool Burberry trench coat despite the fact it isn't that cold outside. Looks like he needs a haircut. I don't trust him. Just give me a minute to call security."
She sighed. She had no intention of letting Chandler in, but security wasn't necessary either. "That's all right, really. I know who he is."
"Do you want to see him?" Harry demanded.
There was the rub, wasn't it. "Not really, but it doesn't matter. I still don't need security. I can get rid of him on my own."
"I don't know…"
At the same instant, she heard vicious pounding on her door. Her heart leaped into her throat as she heard Chandler's voice for the first time in months.