Douglas ignored his mother but Julia’s eyes followed Monique.
He arrived at her side and bent to whisper in her ear, “If I may have a private word before dinner?”
“What?” she asked distractedly, not looking at him, but instead she continued gazing down the hall and he saw her face pale as she breathed, “Oh.”
Douglas followed her eyes and saw what made her pale. In confusion, he stared at a tall, familiar-looking man with greying blond hair and faded blue eyes.
Then he heard Julia whisper, “My God, it’s my Dad.”
At her words, Douglas’s vision exploded in a white-hot blaze of fury.
* * * * *
Monique was escorting into the stairwell, and fawning over, Dr. Trevor Fairfax, Julia’s father.
Dear Lord in heaven, Julia thought and then she felt the room reel and she was almost certain she was going to faint even though she’d never done such a ridiculous thing in her entire life.
“I didn’t want to say anything because Dr. Fairfax didn’t know if he could make it but here he is! Isn’t this an extraordinary surprise? A family reunion!” Monique announced with malevolent delight.
The room was still spinning and in a desperate effort to steady herself, Julia focused on Douglas. Looking at him from under her lashes, she saw to her distracted surprise that he was staring at her father, not blandly, but thin-lipped, his scar frighteningly defined and a muscle worked angrily in his hard jaw.
Monique continued with her announcement and Julia swung her dazed eyes to the woman. “I know, Julia, that this will be a big surprise for you. But I do hope it’s a welcome one. I’ve had many heartfelt conversations with your father, who was understandably upset about Gavin, and, of course, that no one saw fit to invite him to his own son’s funeral.”
At any other time Julia would have laughed out loud at the thought of the heartless Monique having a heartfelt anything.
However nothing at that moment was even the slightest bit funny.
She didn’t even dignify Monique’s second pronouncement with a thought. Of course her father hadn’t been invited to Gavin’s funeral. It was Trevor Fairfax’s choice not to be a part of their lives. Julia herself hadn’t seen her father since her college graduation when he handed her a tiny cardboard box that held a pair of earrings made of paste and some metal that turned green within a few weeks. He had walked away from her then, feeling his duty done, and she’d never seen or heard from him again.
And she liked it that way.
“Julia.” Her father came forward, his smooth, cultured voice, grating across her skin like sandpaper. His blue eyes, eyes so much like Gavin’s, moved over her face with worried care. To her disbelief, he pulled her rapidly stiffening body into his arms. “I was so sorry to hear about Gavin.”
“Children!” Monique called and Julia jumped while still suffering her father’s embrace. “We have a surprise for you.”
Julia uttered a panicked noise and her father released her, his hands on her shoulders slid down to hold her firmly by her upper arms. They had to look, for all intents and purposes, like the happily reunited father and daughter and this thought made Julia want to scream.
For some reason she could not fathom, her eyes searched for Douglas, but he was no longer at her side. She didn’t want the kids to be involved in this, yet somehow in those vital seconds, she had been rendered speechless.
Sam, Oliver and Charlie were staring at the scene openly, obviously bemused by this highly-charged turn in the so recently convivial state of affairs.
The children had entered the room and were watching in silent confusion. Before Julia could pull herself together, she realised Douglas had moved toward them.
“Lizzie, take your brother and sister into the kitchen.” His deep voice ordered then Julia saw Mrs. K bustle up the long room. “Mrs. Kilpatrick, please take the children to the kitchen.”
“What’s happening?” Mrs. K, who normally would not say a word in response to any command of Douglas’s (except “Yes, Lord Ashton”), took one look at Julia’s stricken face and her own became a mask of concern.
Julia finally found her voice.
“Please,” she implored and Mrs. K became all business. She quickly hustled the children out, pulling the dining room doors closed behind her.
Julia heard Ruby’s shout, “Who’s that man?” and Julia’s eyes closed in despair as she pulled herself free of her father’s hands.
“Julia, my dear, I know this is a surprise. I was stunned to get your mother’s letter telling me what happened to Gavin. So young, so full of life.” Her father was speaking to her and when she opened her eyes, she couldn’t meet his, couldn’t get a handle on her careening thoughts. His words were so inane, the kind of thing you’d say about someone you didn’t know.
But then, he didn’t know Gavin.
She caught Monique in her line of vision, the other woman’s face alight with vicious glee while she stood taking in the scene. After fifteen years, Monique knew that Trevor Fairfax had no place in his first family’s life and still she contacted him, invited him there, on Thanksgiving.
Julia’s bewildered panic began to give way to anger. She felt rather than saw Douglas position himself behind her, very close behind her. So close, she could feel the heat from his body. For some reason, this emboldened her.
“So full of life?” she whispered, as if to herself, emotions surging through her and she lifted her eyes to her father’s. Gavin would have likely looked like him, if he’d been given a few more decades, and that thought drove away all vestiges of panic and replaced them with blinding fury.
The likes of Trevor Fairfax, who could cheat on his wife and turn his back on his children, rarely seeing them, never paying child support, never giving them a kind word or a loving touch, could live happily into his sixties. But a good man like Gavin, who was full of love and fun and enjoyed life to its fullest, didn’t even make it to forty years of age.
At that thought, Julia’s rage exploded.
“How do you know what he was full of?” she snapped. “You hadn’t seen him in fifteen years, hadn’t sent a single Christmas card, hadn’t looked upon his children or ever met his beautiful wife! He could have been dying of cancer at the time of the accident, brought low with diabetes, had his legs crushed in a freak accident involving a tree,” she declared wildly, her voice rising.
She felt Douglas’s hand touch the small of her back and feeling it there gave her even more courage.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded hotly.
“Julia, I don’t think…” Monique started a reprimand but surprisingly it was Trevor who interrupted her.
With a look at his audience, his eyes showing nothing but polite irritation at her outburst, the very soul of the patient father, Trevor asked, “Perhaps we can have some privacy?”
“Yes, perhaps we should all go to the kitchen,” Charlotte offered quietly from somewhere behind Julia.
“No!” Julia cried, panicked, wanting her friends around her, feeling she couldn’t face this loathsome man alone, not without Patricia there, not without Gavin there. Tears began to fill her eyes, tears she resolutely refused to shed.
Douglas moved even closer. “Oliver, please take the women into the dining room and begin the meal.” His voice rumbled, so close, it sent vibrations down her back and her head twisted, her eyes flying to his.
Don’t leave me, she silently begged.
Douglas spared her only a glance before he said, “We’ll go into the library.”
She saw that Douglas’s eyes were blank, gone was the anger she had seen in his face earlier, gone was the teasing man she was with last night. Now, it was pure Douglas, unaffected and calm.
Even in the face of that, she felt a sense of relief that he said the word, “we”.
The others bustled quickly into the dining room, closing the door behind them as Douglas swung out his arm toward the library, cordially inviting them to move forward, the pict
ure of the gracious host.
Trevor hesitated. “Could I speak with my daughter alone?”
Without hesitation, Douglas said simply, “No.”
It was said in his usual authoritative tone that brooked no argument. After uttering that one word, Douglas pressed his hand into Julia’s back, gently forcing her forward before she could see her father’s response and before her father could respond at all.
She preceded both men into the room, Douglas stopping considerately to allow Trevor to go in front of him and then turning to close the doors behind him.
Julia walked to the ceiling-high windows and surveyed the gardens. Although she knew in their full bloom they could be beautiful, now the formal and regimented beds had been put to sleep for the winter. They were nothing but borders and large circles of overturned dirt with enormous empty urns in the middle surrounded by still-green lawns. They were terraced with magnificent balustrades that led into a small, natural wooded area that gave way to graceful rolling fields where chocolate-faced, round, woolly sheep grazed. The sun was already beginning to set on this beautiful pastoral scene and the day, whose weather had veered from hazy to bright, was fading.
Julia saw none of that, her mind turning in circles and she had begun to shake.
She was shaking because her father was there, pretending to feel a grief there was no way on God’s green earth he could feel.
She was shaking because she knew Monique hated her enough to do this to her, on a special day, a holiday, for goodness sakes. It was never pleasant to acknowledge that someone hated you that much, especially someone with whom you were forced to live.
And she was shaking because even if Douglas was with her (and she was thankful that he was and she wasn’t going to try to process why, she just was), she still felt somehow alone. Thousands of miles away from her wise and dramatic mother who would know exactly what to say. And forever away from her beloved brother who would have known exactly what to do.
And she was just Julia, the weakest of the lot, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to face this.
“Julia, you must know, regardless of our estrangement, it came as a great shock –” her father began but she turned and levelled her gaze at him, the look in her eye causing him to stop speaking.
He’d walked into the room and was standing not five feet from her, his face earnest, his eyes warm.
Her lip curled.
“Estrangement?” she broke in, her voice shaking. “What a convenient word. I thought it was called ‘abandonment’.”
Trevor’s head jerked in response as if she’d physically struck a blow.
“Of course,” Julia continued, ignoring her father, anger spurring her on. She turned her attention from her father to Douglas, who was standing with his shoulders against the doors and his arms crossed on his chest, regarding her with that bland expression on his face. “I may not have full command of the English language. I was born in a small town in Indiana to a mother whose parents were farmers, as were their parents before them. We’re just simple folk.” Her eyes swung back to her father. “I was not born to privilege. My mother was not heiress to a popcorn fortune who came complete with a trust fund, a five bedroom mansion and a fourth generation membership to the country club. My father was, of course, a well-known surgeon but I never saw him. He didn’t send me to private school and violin lessons and pay for college and graduate school. So perhaps I have it wrong. I suppose the genteel way is to refer to it as ‘estrangement’ but where I come from, we call ‘em as we see ‘em and we’d call it ‘abandonment’.” Her eyes swung back to Douglas. “What do you think, Douglas?”
“Julia, is this really necessary?” her father asked before Douglas could answer (not that he was going to answer). “I came to make amends, when things like this happen, you realise –”
It was then Julia completely lost control, her vision exploding into fireworks of fury. Her fists clenched and her body tensed from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.
She leaned forward stiffly from the waist and hissed, “Make amends? You can never make amends. Even if I was to spend the next fifteen years telling you, you will never know what a good man your son was. You will never have the chance to meet the glorious woman he chose for his bride. You will never have her joy and light shine down on you. You’re too late.”
“I know that, Julia,” Trevor replied, his voice conciliatory. He began to walk forward and she threw her arm up to fend him off. It registered somewhere in her brain that Douglas had pushed away from the doors when father started to approach daughter but Julia was too overcome to think about what that meant.
“So now, because I have a little bit of my brother in me, I’m going to let you have Thanksgiving dinner with your grandchildren. Not for your sake, but for theirs,” Julia went on. “Their parents just died and I don’t want anything disturbing what, up until now, was perhaps their first lovely day in months. And afterwards, you’re going to go back to your wife and family and never darken our door again.”
At the mention of his second family, his face grew pale and his carefully controlled expression faltered.
“Felicia’s left me, Julia.” His voice cracked on this admission and instead of Julia feeling an ounce of compassion, which she saw his eyes beseeching her for, it all became blazingly clear why he was there.
If his wife had left him then now he was alone, only now would he come back into her life. Not of his own accord, but because, perhaps, he had no one else.
She didn’t care. She could not believe his selfishness, it took her breath away. But he wasn’t finished.
“My children, they’re all…” He didn’t complete that thought and she didn’t wonder at it. None of her half sisters or brother had ever made any advances to her or Gavin either. “And then I heard about Gavin and I just had to –”
She advanced on him, taking two swift strides and barely registering his wince and recoil at her quick, furious charge. She realised then how old he looked, how faded and defeated, his handsomeness nothing but a memory.
Gavin would have never looked like that. Never.
She jolted to a halt.
“If you have problems, they’re your problems. We, Mom, Gavin and I, had problems too but we managed to sort through them without you! There was the time when Mom had nineteen cents in the bank and you hadn’t paid child support and we had no toilet paper, where were you when Gavin had to break open his piggy bank so we could go to the store? There was the time when Gavin won All-County in football and all the other boys stood on the stage with their fathers and Mom had to be at work and my brother had to stand there alone, where were you then?” She hurled every word at him like a spear. “So, now you can take my offer and then you can go away and I swear to all that is holy, if you ever approach my mother, I’ll hunt you down and –”
“I believe,” Douglas cut in firmly, quieting her with his calm words, “dinner is getting cold. I would imagine the children are missing their aunt and likely becoming concerned.” Both father and daughter swung to Douglas who was now standing several feet from the doorway. “If Julia has anything more to say after supper, perhaps she can do so then. Now it’s important to get back to the children.”
Julia was still shaking but she took a deep breath while she watched Douglas. He looked completely unperturbed at this turn of events and she tried to suck some of his energy from across the room.
“Of course,” she agreed with a stiff nod, because he was right, she should be thinking of the children. “Father, would you like to meet your grandchildren?” she inquired, but her tone was barely civil, making these lovely words sound nearly threatening.
He simply nodded, looking back and forth between Douglas and Julia.
She took another breath and motioned with her arm to the door. Trevor started to exit the room and she followed him, her movements jerky. As she passed Douglas, he caught her hand and pulled on it gently to stop her.
“You have to get contro
l of yourself,” he told her from between his teeth. “You can’t let the children see you like this.”
“And how do you propose I do that?” Julia flashed back. He may be able to stand cold and controlled in the face of just about anything but she wasn’t built like that.
Douglas turned.
“Dr. Fairfax,” he called to the older man and her father, already in the hall, stopped. “If you’ll give me a moment with Julia?”
Trevor looked relieved, obviously believing that he had an ally in Douglas as he had in Monique and therefore he nodded gratefully.
Julia also wondered where Douglas stood on all this drama and decided that it was likely exactly where Douglas always stood, casually removed.
“Please close the doors and wait for us in the hall,” Douglas requested. “And please do not approach the children until Julia and I are there to make introductions.”
Trevor nodded again before he closed the doors behind him and Douglas pulled Julia back to the windows where his gentle tug on her hand made her halt.
He turned her to face him but didn’t let go over her hand.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she muttered under her breath, her body still shaking, resolving to worry about Douglas some other time.
“Julia, you lose your temper, you let him see he can affect you and you give him power. You cannot give him power. You need to control yourself,” Douglas informed her, like it was as easy as that.
“He does have power!” she burst out. “He’s my father. He’ll always be my father.”
It was all too much, losing Gavin and Tammy, losing her old life, playing this game with Douglas and now this. She didn’t have the strength, never had, Sean had shown her that.
She lifted a hand and raked her fingers with agitation through her hair.
“He’s never been your father,” Douglas stated and her entire body jerked at his pronouncement, her arm dropping listlessly, because, in his statement’s exquisite simplicity, she realised he was right.
She stared at him, stunned with the knowledge shared eloquently, through five little words, that Douglas didn’t stand casually removed, not from her but instead, from Dr. Trevor Fairfax. Gone was the fury she’d seen the moment her father entered the hall. Douglas gave Trevor Fairfax nothing and this was because he was worth nothing to Douglas except his casual indifference. And telling her this, showing her, Douglas was indicating this was how she should also behave.
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