Her Foreign Affair

by Shea Mcmaster

  Court gripped her shoulder. “We could have made it work, Jeannie. We would have worked something out.”

  She was already shaking her head. “No. It wouldn’t have been fair to either child, you, or any of us, no matter what you chose. I’d seen my friends with divorced parents and how the splits affected them. I decided none of us needed such a complication. Especially the children. It would be too confusing with me in California and you in England. Too much distance.”

  Court moved in front of her and bent, hands on the arms of the chair, putting his face close to hers. “I think I should have been allowed to have a part in that decision,” Court said quietly, his gaze locked on hers with an expression so tender, yet serious, she couldn’t look away.

  “Perhaps,” she conceded. “But I was too numb and too hurt to consider your feelings. I thought it would be easier all around to come home and raise my child alone. If I couldn’t have you, I’d have a part of you. And if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be torn in two. I figured I was strong enough to raise Birdie on my own.” She glanced sideways at her daughter. “And I do have my beautiful daughter to remind me of a precious time of my life.”

  “Oh for crying out loud! This is my life you made careless decisions with.” Birdie’s eruption broke the spell between Randi and Court, both of them turning their heads to see her glare as hot and as hurt as Randi had ever seen.

  Court crouched, staying close, one hand falling to Randi’s knee in a show of comfort as her head threatened to explode.

  “I did not make a careless decision!” She choked back her shout and forced the words through gritted teeth.

  Birdie subsided deep into her corner of the sofa. “Keep going.”

  Court settled on the carpet, keeping a hand on Randi while another deep breath helped restore a small amount of calm to her thundering pulse. “I flew out the next morning and made it home with no further trauma other than morning sickness. I managed to pass it off as air sickness for a day or two, but your grandmother finally got me to talk. Since I knew I didn’t want an abortion, sooner or later, I’d have to tell them. I wouldn’t be able to hide it for long and returning to Stanford in the fall would be impossible.”

  Birdie knew her views on abortion—although right for some people, Randi had never once considered it as a personal choice—Birdie seemed to relax a little, but the scowl didn’t leave her face. “I bet Grandpa swallowed that like broken glass.”

  A humorless laugh escaped Randi. “Oh yeah. He yelled, he threatened, and tried to bully.” But she’d stood firm, her mother beside her, refusing to get the abortion he insisted on. There was no point in telling Birdie any of that now. From the moment he’d held her, Birdie had been the apple of her grandfather’s eye. “But your grandmother took my side, and he agreed to back off if I got married.”

  “Did you know Da—Wyatt…before?” Birdie’s voice choked.

  Swallowing the lump in her throat, Randi shook her head. “No. Grandpa hired him after I went to London. Grandpa brought him home for dinner a couple weeks after I’d shared my news. He was the fifth candidate brought home. And by far the nicest all around.”

  “Is that how you chose my dad?” Birdie sneered. “You interviewed applicants for the job?”

  “If you choose to look at it that way, but like any job, it takes the right person. I suppose you could say dating is an interview process, if you want to boil it down to its essence. I had a couple choices before me. Live at home and listen to my father berate me for being irresponsible. Not an option if I wanted to keep my sanity and raise my child in a positive atmosphere. Drop out of school, get a job, and try to make it on my own. Difficult, but doable, in another state. Even back then, California was too expensive for any kind of decent life alone with an infant and no degree. Or I could marry a nice and decent man who promised to love my child as his own and live a normal life.” She directed a pointed look at her daughter who stared back, not giving an inch.

  Keep moving, she told herself. “Wyatt seemed kind and calm, and he inspired a feeling of peace in me. I didn’t make the decision lightly and neither did he. We spent a week together, talking about our dreams, goals, and expectations. We figured out where we meshed and where we’d need to compromise. Even with our age difference we were surprisingly compatible. And we went into our marriage better prepared to work together than I expect most couples do.” Talking about Wyatt didn’t come easy with Court touching her, sitting close enough she could feel his body heat.

  “But did you love him?”

  “I learned to, and he learned to love me.” Apparently, Birdie caught on to her feelings of tenderness for the man they’d both been so close to, because for a second, they shared a tiny smile. “If you listened to him talk, he always said he fell in love at first sight. Not quite, but close. It wasn’t easy with my father doing a sales job on both of us, which was why Wyatt took a week off work and courted me. It was the only way we could talk. Now that I think about it, Wyatt knew your grandfather well enough…. I guess you could say a feeling of protectiveness seemed to rise up out of him. He became the shield between the two of us and the outside world.”

  Birdie gave her a long, thoughtful, and pained look before she nodded. “Okay, I believe you, though things have changed. Does Grandpa know…about…” Birdie’s gaze flicked toward Court.

  “Yeah, he figured it out when Court gave his full name earlier. I begged him to keep it to himself. I didn’t want to draw Jordan into our drama.”

  “Good move, that.” Drew nodded sagely.

  “You haven’t seen him on a tear. Just getting him out of the house tonight, well, it took some fancy tap dancing.” Randi sighed and dropped her head back against the chair. “Anyhow, to get on with this story, I was prepared to drop out of school. Instead, Wyatt talked me into transferring to St. Mary’s, which isn’t far from here, and easing up on my class schedule. He had a tiny house in Albany, so it was convenient to the office for him and school for me. I went half time fall semester, took spring semester off to have you, then started up again in the fall, and graduated the following spring. I went to work for your grandfather, and we grew into a family. That’s everything in a nutshell.”

  “Only if you forget about lying to me about who I am,” Birdie replied sullenly. “I can’t believe you lied to me. For all your harping about honesty all my life—”

  “I only lied by omission, Birdie. I’ve been working up to telling you everything. It was never my intention to keep it from you forever. Wyatt and I wanted to tell you by your twenty-first birthday.” Randi bowed her head and looked at her hands lying uselessly in her lap. “Fact is, sitting on my desk are some forms I am—was—preparing to send to a research agency. To find out more about Court, so I could tell you after Christmas. And had you ever looked, it’s all there on your birth certificate. You just never looked at it. Attached to it is your adoption certificate. From when Wyatt legally adopted you.”

  “What?” Birdie came off the sofa. “Where is it?” she demanded.

  Feeling as old as if two minutes had gone into every one she’d lived, Randi relied heavily on the sturdy arms of her rocking chair to push herself vertical. Court, rising gracefully to his feet, slipped a hand under her elbow, the warmth of him lending strength to her quickly waning reserves.

  Birdie was already down the hall and opening the door to the master suite and Randi’s office space. “It’s in your files, right? You once told me….” Her voice trailed off as she moved deeper into Randi’s room toward the filing cabinet in the little office nook where she worked.

  Drew still sat on the sofa, looking a little lost and a lot bemused.

  “Come on, Drew. You might as well see this too,” she said to him.

  With a shrug, he unfolded his tall frame until he, too, towered over her. “You know anyone can put a name on a birth certificate.” He sent what appeared to be a significant look in his father’s direction. “Doesn’t make it true.”<
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  “I know,” she said. “I’d planned to put Wyatt’s name on Birdie’s, but…” She sighed. “We’ll get to that in a bit. She’ll have the same question.”

  “What about the legalities of adoptions without informing the biological father?” Drew asked.

  Randi shrugged. “My father knows a lot of influential people. It was handled quietly, and it’s a bit late to question the matter now.” She looked down the hall to where Birdie had disappeared. “We’d better continue this down there.”

  Chapter 9

  They found Birdie kneeling before the filing cabinet, the bottom drawer half open, a short stack of papers in her hand. The copy of her birth certificate from the hospital sat on top. A copy of the one filed with the government from what Court could make out.

  “Why?” she asked her mother without looking up. Court held his breath having only had the abbreviated version in the loo.

  “Because I almost died.” Randi sighed.

  “Died? You were dying?” Birdie looked up, tears streaking down her cheeks. Each one dug in like a claw in Court’s guts.

  “Hmm.” Randi kneeled beside her daughter, and holding Birdie close, tipped her auburn head toward Birdie’s shining gold lengths tumbling from a loose clip. “Remember we told you I was sick after you were born, which is why you were bottle fed?”

  “Yeah, but I thought you meant like the flu or something.”

  Randi nodded to a framed photo on her desk, and Court followed her gaze. The young girl he’d known, looking tired but happy and extremely beautiful, held a baby in her arms while another man held them both. A stab of intense jealous pain jabbed him in the gut, but he forced it to subside as he focused on Randi’s words.

  “About five minutes after that photo was taken, something came undone inside. Unstoppable bleeding led to an emergency hysterectomy, and somewhere in there an infection set in. The hospital wanted the paperwork filled out, and I was delirious.”

  This conversation had to hurt her as badly as it hurt him. Damn, he and Drew should have stayed in the other room. They had their own discussion to have, and Birdie deserved a private conversation with her mother. But Randi spoke again, and he couldn’t move to save his life. He wanted the same answers.

  “Wyatt wanted you to someday know the truth. He loved you as much as any father ever loved a daughter. You were his in all the ways that counted.” Randi’s voice dropped to a broken whisper.

  His daughter. Something clenched hard around the area of his heart.

  Their daughter. Still needed to adjust to the thought.

  “Wyatt did what he thought was the right thing since I couldn’t. He named you, then took you home, not knowing if I’d live or not. That’s true love, Birdie. He could have claimed you on the birth certificate, and no one would have fought it. Ever. But he had faith I’d live, and someday, you’d need to know the truth. I stayed in the hospital an extra three weeks, and during that time you two bonded as strongly as if he’d helped create you. Had I died, he would have kept and raised you himself, with the help of my parents. He adopted you, so you legally carry his name.” Randi took the papers from Birdie and flipped through them until she found the adoption certificate.

  Ah, there it was. Mystery solved as to why the husband had loved the daughter so much, possibly more than the mother. Made sense now. Had to admit a grudging admiration for the man posed with Randi in a second framed photo on the desk. A photo taken many years later in which the viewer could sense the loving relationship between them. He couldn’t bear to think about it now. There was more to Randi’s story, he’d bet his company on it. Much more had happened. He watched her face closely, and by the way she looked away, the shuttering of her eyes, the tightening of her lips, he knew she held something back. Some key detail, given away further by a significant pause and the sadness in her voice when she resumed her story.

  “That’s also why you were close to Grandma and are still close to Grandpa. The three of them took turns watching over you at home, then rotated out to stay with me at the hospital. They brought you in at least once a day so you could sleep on me, which allowed you and me to bond as well, though not as strongly initially as you did with the others. You and I formed our own bond later. It was an extremely difficult time for them, and Wyatt debated long and hard about the right thing to do. He gave you his last name, but for the sake of history, he put Court’s name on the birth certificate. In case you ever developed a medical condition and some day needed to track down your biological family.”

  Court tapped Drew on the shoulder and tilted his head toward the door. Both women had tears streaming down their cheeks, weeping as they sat on the floor and clung to each other. He reacted instinctively. They needed to share a moment of grief in which he and Drew had no part.

  Once they cleared the room, Drew murmured behind him, “Scary thing, that.”

  “Hmm?” He looked at Drew over his shoulder as they walked back to the family room.

  “Women crying.”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s called the better part of valor to leave them to it. They don’t much appreciate us rushing in with tissues and solutions while trying to shush them.”

  “Uh-huh. You’re a lily livered pansy when it comes to emotional women.”

  “I’ve seen you do your fair share of running, mate.”

  “Possibly,” Drew acknowledged. He stopped in the kitchen, dim from the fading light, to find a glass, then filled it at the sink. “I’m curious, did you ever love Mum?”

  Neither of them reached for the light switch. Some discussions were better had in shadows. Especially when it came to topics with potentially damaging emotional content. Such as the question just asked. The question he’d never wanted to answer.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged when Drew’s eyes narrowed their gaze on him. “I didn’t love her the way I loved—love—the woman in the other room. I suppose what your mother and I felt came from years of knowing each other. I pulled her pigtails in nursery school. She threw rocks at me and circled the girls against the boys. We spent summers tramping through the woods searching for Pooh’s beehive, looking for the honey.” He hoped like hell Drew heard the mute appeal for understanding.

  “I suppose you could say we felt comfortable with each other, enough to go through the motions, but we had no grand passion for each other. Life was predictable and routine with Bea. Nothing like the glorious turmoil my Jeannie—Randi—put me through the few short months we had.”

  Drew toyed with the glass in his hands, but didn’t look up. “So you…chose her because of me.”

  “Yes and no. I chose her because it was the right thing to do as I saw it at the time. I convinced myself the adorable American had been an angel who’d come to me in a time of need. After the debacle with your mother, I felt very emasculated. My Jeannie-girl fixed it. She gave me back my pride and validated me as a man. In a very odd way, she made it easier for me to step up and accept my responsibility.” Though he never had quite been able to forget the look on her face before she turned and ran from him.

  Drew’s eyes met Court’s dead on, piercing despite the fading light. “And were you sorry for…being forced to marry her?”

  “What are you saying?”

  A rare flicker of doubt flashed through Drew’s eyes, his next question coming slowly. “Did you ever regret…did you ever consider…abortion?”

  “Hell no!” Court stared at his son. “You are the very best thing to come from that union, and not for one minute did I ever consider throwing you away. It wasn’t your mess. I am, and have always been, very proud to be a father. Your father. Even if things had worked out differently, I never would have abandoned you.”

  Drew nodded, relief evident in his posture. “I believe you. You both tried, but I always knew there was something not quite right between you two. I didn’t know parents shared a bedroom until I went to Eton and the other boys started talking. I didn’t know parents talked, and l
aughed, and spent time together. But I always knew you loved me. Mum did as well, in her own way. Some days I had to work hard to see it. What, with all her mutterings about duty, you would have thought she was a martyr right up there with Gandhi.” Drew shrugged. “Once she died, I saw the world from a different angle.”

  “About that…” Court started pacing again. “The accident…”

  “I know. You’d just handed her divorce papers.”

  Court stopped and spun on his heel. “Yes. Wait. How did you know? I made certain you weren’t around when I handed them to her.”

  “Should have looked at the drapes a little closer. You didn’t see me. Neither of you did. I’d been sneaking looks at some of the, um…” Drew’s face colored in a way rarely seen, “…art books and when the library door opened, I jumped behind the nearest drape. Terribly clichéd romance, I know, but the cliché fit then. I heard it all. First time I’d ever heard her lose it. So different from her normal, unemotional tone, I’d never seen her angry before.”

  Slowly shaking his head, Court continued. “I can tell you there were only a handful of times I’d ever heard any emotion in her voice, and I’d known her all my life. What finally gave me the leverage was I’d discovered she’d had a lover on the side. Had for years. As near as I can tell, it was a close call as to who had really impregnated her.” Court held up a hand. “Let me assure you, you are indeed my son. On that I have no doubts. Especially after seeing you side by side with your sister.”