by Tara Leigh
A house deeded to Nina Chapman.
29
Jolie
“Thanks for meeting me.”
Eva scrutinized my expression for a minute before shaking her head. “I can smell man problems from a mile away, and you reek of it. Is there trouble in Verona?”
“Verona?”
“I brushed up on my Romeo and Juliet.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “My drama is not exactly Shakespeare-worthy.”
“Well, it’s got to be more interesting than Fancy Nancy and Flat Stanley, which is what the twins are obsessed with right now. I swear, it almost makes me miss Goodnight Moon.”
Memories of my first few days as a young mother rose up, so vivid I could almost smell the baby powder. It hadn’t lasted long. I was demoted from mother to sister before Romy’s first smile. A smile she gave to Nina.
Lost in thought, I didn’t hear Eva’s question. “What?”
“I said, tell me more about the man who kissed you like it was his damn job.”
Heat rose up my cheeks as sadness swirled inside my stomach. I gulped at my coffee. “It’s a long story.”
Eva’s sip was delicate, her lips perfectly placed on the lipstick stain she’d already left on the edge. “My favorite kind.”
Feeling like I was reciting the plot of a B novel, I offered a rough skeleton of my relationship with Tripp, ending with waking up in his bedroom this morning.
She pulled a confused face. “So, Tripp was using his partner’s screenname to message you, but he came clean about it on his own.” I nodded and she continued. “And you spent the night at his place.”
Tears spilled from my lashes as I nodded again. “Yeah.”
Eva reached into her ginormous purse for a small packet of tissues, pressing it into my hand. “So, what am I missing here?”
I swallowed heavily, wishing my coffee was a cocktail. There was no way to explain why I needed a shoulder to cry on without revealing the truth about Romy’s birth. “There’s something else.”
“I hope so, because otherwise you’re not making any sense.”
I’d never told anyone that Romy was really my daughter, but right now the enormity of the situation I’d gotten myself into felt overwhelming and I needed to share it with someone else. Praying I wouldn’t regret the confession, I opened my mouth and spoke in a rush. “My little sister, Romy?” Eva nodded, her eyes wide and gleaming with interest. “She’s not my little sister. She’s my daughter.”
“Well, fuck me sideways,” she blurted, setting her cappuccino down so hard the handle of her glass mug broke off.
We stared at the fractured pieces for a moment, dissolving into laughter at the exact same time. Our waiter rushed over, mopping up the foam that had spilled onto the tabletop and taking away the broken pieces. “Maybe you should have used plastic?” I teased, almost wheezing.
“Isn’t that what you should have said to Tripp about ten years ago?” Eva’s audacity prompted another fit of giggles, to the point where we were holding our stomachs and wiping at our eyes.
God, it felt so good to laugh. The coils of tension that had been winding their way around my ribcage for the past decade slipped the tiniest bit, loosening just enough for me to almost take a deep breath.
We were just beginning to get ourselves under control when the waiter returned with a plate of macaroons. “On the house, ladies.”
Eva eyed them for a minute before plucking one of the assortment and taking a small bite. “How old is Romy now?”
“Nine, almost ten.”
“So that means what—another nine before she’s either in college or strutting down the catwalk?”
I drew back. “God forbid.” In the beginning of my career, there had been so many lecherous older men pawing at me, expecting me to do more than walk down a runway, or strip down in front of the camera. And I’d seen firsthand what a one-night-stand or a mistake in judgment could cost. Not that I ever regretted having Romy. She was by far the brightest part of my life and always had been, but the thought of sending her out into the world I’d clawed my way through was terrifying.
Eva merely smiled. “Either way, you only have her for a little while longer. And right now, she’s not even yours.”
I winced, hating that she was right. Every day I allowed Romy to believe I was just her older sister was like a handful of dirt scooped from the ground between us. Over the years, those small bits had added up, creating a ditch so deep and wide it had become a gaping chasm I didn’t know how to cross.
My hands were so dirty they may never come clean.
I wasn’t denying that Nina was Romy’s mother. Nina had kissed every boo-boo, baked every birthday cake, taken Romy to all her dentist and doctor appointments, been the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus. Nina was, and would always be, Romy’s mother.
But somehow, there had to be a role for me that was more than her older sister.
“Tell me about Tripp. Is he a good guy?” Eva’s question broke through my jumbled thoughts.
“Yes.” The word came out automatically, a different answer than I might have given just a couple of days ago. A different answer than his recent actions may have warranted . . . but in my heart I knew his crassness was a reaction to me walking out on him the other night. And the tit-for-tat hurting each other had to stop.
“You know you have to tell him, right? You should have spilled the beans after all that hot sex.”
Our conversation was making me jittery. Of course I knew I had to tell him. The real question was how. “I never said it was hot.”
She raised an eyebrow, lowing her voice until it was an ironic rasp. “Oh honey, you didn’t need to. Your face is glowing like you had a lifetime worth of orgasms in one night.”
I brought my hands up to my cheeks. “It is?”
She swung her foot, the red-soled stiletto dangling from her toes. “Jolie, the chemistry between you two at the shoot could have powered this city. You have to figure out a way to forgive the mistakes of the past so you can build a future together.”
I took a shaky sip of my cocktail. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Your man is alive, Jolie. Of course it’s possible.”
Guilt lashed my skin beneath Eva’s stare. Her chance for a future with the father of her twins had been cut tragically short.
She was right. Where there was life, there was hope. And I was down to a single thread of hope, dangling in front of me, within my grasp. I just had to trust that that thread wouldn’t break.
Knowing she had made her point, Eva changed tacks. “What kind of a father do you think Tripp would be?”
Imagining Tripp as a parent was a jolt. In many ways, I still thought of him as the lanky nineteen-year old who had shattered my heart into a million pieces. But he was a grown man now, succeeding after so many cards had been stacked against him. I pictured him standing at the sidelines of Romy’s soccer games, skiing alongside her down a mountain. “A great one.”
“Well then, even if you aren’t sure whether you and Tripp can be a couple, that child deserves to have a father.” She leaned across the table, placing her palm atop mine. “You and Nina have a lot to hash out, but Tripp deserves a chance to be the father he already is.”
“I know.” Tears stung my eyes as I nodded, sniffling. “God, I’ve really made one hell of a mess, haven’t I?”
“Well, it could be worse.”
I snorted. “Yeah, how?”
“Well, you could be boring. She’s going to go through the I-hate-my-mom-and-dad-and-everyone-that-once-changed-my-diapers phase eventually, at least she has a few good reasons now.”
Heaving a sigh, I rubbed at the crease trying to burrow its way across my forehead. “I should have told him, Eva. I should have found a way to get back in touch with him. It sounds so awful to say it out loud, but while I was pregnant . . . it was the one thing I had of Tripp, a connection between us that no one could sever. I can’t explain it,
but it made me feel a little better.” I clung to Eva’s understanding expression like a lifeline. “I was barely eighteen, and I guess I needed some sort of sign that what we’d had was real. A reason not to regret what we’d been to each other, because something good had come from it.” I shook my head, my voice like two sheets of sandpaper rubbing together.
“And after, what made you keep the secret for so long?” She asked the question without a trace of judgment, but even so, it reminded me just how deep of a hole I’d dug for myself.
Looking up, I stared at the bright spotlights until my eyesight was blurry, taking a moment to breathe because I didn’t want to dissolve into tears. In a way, this was the hardest to admit. “Because I was afraid Tripp would be ready to be a parent, while I wasn’t. Nina had always wanted to have a baby, and she was so good with Romy. As the jobs got bigger and better-paying, I told myself that being an unwed teenage mother would put an end to my career just when it was starting to take off. And after a while, I figured it was better to leave things the way they were, that Romy was better off with one parent who was stable and responsible, and had spent the years actually parenting, than to give her two who didn’t know what they were doing. I was travelling constantly, always gone, so I signed adoption papers and bought a house for Nina and Romy in Connecticut. But now . . .” I sighed. “Things just feel different now. Like it’s time, for all of us.”
“Is there any chance Nina will feel the same way?”
As Eva patiently waited, I hesitated to answer her. I’d harbored this bomb for so long, the thought of pulling the pin was terrifying. But it had to be done. “None,” I finally admitted. “But I can’t keep this secret anymore. Not from Tripp. And not from Romy. If he wants to be a father to his daughter, he should have that chance.”
Eva blew out a long breath. “That’s going to be one hell of a conversation.”
“I know. She’s not going to like it. At all.”
“No, I don’t expect she will.” Neither of us said anything for a minute. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit down with Tripp first? That way Nina won’t be able to talk you out of it.”
I chewed at the inside of my cheek. It was a tempting idea. “No, I can’t do that to her. She deserves to know before I take that step.”
Eva nodded slowly. “So, how do you think Tripp will take the news that he’s a baby daddy?”
My stomach pitched and rolled at the thought of admitting all that I’d kept from him, my voice cracking. “I think he’s going to be furious. And he has every right to be. No matter how things ended between us, he didn’t deserve to miss the first nine years of his daughter’s life.”
Dear God, what have I done?
“I stole those years from him.” I stole them from myself, too. “First words, first smiles, first . . . everything. There’s no way to ever get them back.”
“No. There’s not.” Eva admitted. “But he’ll have the opportunity to be there for the next milestone, and the next, and the one after that.”
“Not until I offer Nina my head on a silver platter. Hopefully she won’t chop it off before I have the chance to make things right.”
“Good luck. When are you planning to tell her?”
I finished the last of my coffee and checked the time on my phone. “I’m heading to Connecticut after a meeting with my accountant and attorney to review my business plan. I want to talk with Nina before Romy gets home from school.”
“Well, if you don’t come back, I’ll send out a search party.”
I looked her straight in the eye, dread for what I was about to do welling up inside my bones. “You might need to.”
30
Tripp
Companies weren’t like people. They were a hell of a lot easier to understand. Everything boiled down to numbers. Profit or loss. Asset or liability. Cash flow, taxes, operating costs. A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Except that corruption was a messy business. Two sets of books. Money transfers between accounts. Shell corporations that served no purpose beyond hiding assets. People trying to make sure the facade appeared perfect. The problem was—people make mistakes. People aren’t perfect.
I had built a billion-dollar fortune exposing those mistakes.
When it came to Francis Hughes, I didn’t have much to go on. And unless I wanted to get on a plane to Europe, my only trail led to Connecticut.
Taking a road trip had to be better than sitting in my office handcuffed to my computer, my eyes drifting to Jolie’s alluring billboard every two minutes.
The Range Rover I’d ordered just before leaving California had been waiting for me at a Manhattan dealership. I could have bought a more exotic car, like the Lotus and Maclaren I’d left in San Jose, but New York City was notoriously hazardous for high-end sports cars. Pot holes, untrustworthy parking attendants, high curbs. An SUV seemed like a more practical choice.
I picked up the vehicle and was soon speeding along the Henry Hudson Parkway, heading north. The sun was shining, the water a bright shade of blue, and it was still early enough to avoid the gridlock that would strangle access to the bridges and tunnels leading out of Manhattan as commuters headed home.
Two hours later, I exited the highway and found myself in a quaint, New England town. I drove past the post office where Hughes had rented a box, then to the strip mall on the outskirts of town where he’d leased space, although the storefront was still empty, then finally to Nina’s home. It was easy to find—a large colonial, surrounded by other large colonials, at the end of the cul-de-sac.
Maybe Francis Hughes was Nina’s live-in boyfriend and she just hadn’t told Jolie yet. I parked in the middle of the block, as close as possible to a hedge of immaculately pruned evergreens. It wasn’t the most conducive environment for a stakeout, but then again, I didn’t even know what I was looking for.
Just as I was settling in with the coffee and Wall Street Journal I’d bought from a bakery on Main Street, a yellow minibus pulled onto the street, stopping behind me to discharge a pair of kids in tartan uniforms. Ducking low in my seat, I stared straight ahead, my view unobstructed as Nina’s front door swung open, expelling two women. Nina hadn’t changed much from my cursory glance, but my attention was on the woman beside her.
Jolie.
They walked down the steps, their faces turned in my direction, looking straight at me.
Fuck. Of all days, what was Jolie doing here? Just as I was about to get out of the car and spare myself the indignity of being caught skulking in the front seat, the minibus drove by, entering the cul-de-sac and stopping directly in front of Nina’s house.
I straightened in my seat, trying to peer around the bus, expecting to see Jolie and Nina edging around the back bumper, navy letters proclaiming The Lowell School, at any second.
“Jolie!” The excited squeal came through my partially lowered window, before the sound of the bus closing its door and accelerating covered anything else. By the time it was out of my way, I saw a young girl walking back toward the house, bookended by Jolie and Nina.
The girl was tall, her hair pulled back in a single braid.
Had Nina remarried? Was the girl her daughter? I tried to recall any part of a conversation concerning Nina, although I knew for certain Jolie had never mentioned having a niece.
Watching the threesome walk back inside the house felt a little like the time a rogue baseball had hit me just below my ribs, in the softest part of my belly. It wasn’t painful, but not being able to draw a deep breath for several minutes had been nerve-wracking.
My coach and teammates had rushed over to where I’d been sucking wind on the ground, and I remembered staring at the red dust covering the tips of their shoes and the ends of their laces.
“Don’t worry about breathing, Montgomery, you’ll do that again in a minute,” my coach had said. “For now, know what you see and trust what you know.” He began calling out plays with his fingers, and I concentrated on remembering which p
lay belonged to which signal. By the fourth play, I took a shallow breath, and by the seventh, I felt almost normal.
Know what you see, trust what you know.
What I saw was a little girl getting off a bus in front of a house. What I knew was that Nina lived in that house.
The rest, I could piece together.
Taking a sharp inhale, I picked up my phone and called the San Jose office. Unexpectedly, Lance’s voice boomed through the speaker. “How’s New York treating you—your balls frozen off yet?”
I scoffed through a surprised grin. “Big and juicy as ever. When did you get back?”
“Late last night. And I’m glad yours are intact. Because I’ve been reading through my inbox and it looks like Jolie Chapman has her hands wrapped pretty tightly around mine.”
I pushed aside the wave of jealousy that surged forward at the thought of Jolie’s hands on anyone else’s balls but my own. “Not anymore.”
“Okay, good. They serve me pretty well, you know, on account of their size and—”
“I’m glad you’re home, dude, but this is the first and last conversation we’ll ever have about your junk.”
“Ah. You must be calling to welcome me back then.”
I suppressed a groan. “I’ll throw you a parade later, but right now I need your help on something.”
“Let me guess. This is about Chapman.”
Not bothering to confirm the obvious, I rattled off Nina’s address and the name of the private school that had been written on the back of the bus. By focusing solely on Francis Hughes, I may have missed the bigger picture. “I need everything you can find on Nina, Francis, the girl and their connection to Jolie. Put everyone on it, Lance. I mean it, I need this information yesterday.”
If I’d been in my office, I could have done some of the work myself, but having forgotten a car charger for my phone, I was reluctant to use my internet browser more than necessary. “Got it,” Lance said, hanging up without another extraneous word.