by Craft, Maggi
So Dad was right. It was about money, but if he was my kid, I wouldn’t let him do without. That wouldn’t be fair. I had never in my life done without, and I wouldn’t ever let any child of mine. “Let’s do the paternity test, and if he is my son, I will make sure he has what he needs.” I couldn’t stay in there anymore. I got up and left. I didn’t go home, and I didn’t go to Mom’s. I just drove around, trying to clear my head.
After about an hour, Dad called. “Where are you?”
“I’m just driving. Why? What happened?”
“Nothing really—she left. She’s going to get the kid and bring him back to do a paternity test. Meet me at the club. Let’s go play golf, so we can talk and have some privacy.”
The thought of that did make me feel a little better. At least now I wouldn’t be lying to Arden. She had called a few times, but I wasn’t feeling up to talking to her. She had left voice mails, so I knew everything was fine. She was just calling to check on me and to remind me to drink a lot of water today since I had been sick the night before. I really didn’t deserve her.
Once we were out on the course, Dad told me what happened after I left. “If the kid is yours, you just need to pay her off. I don’t think that she has any intention of hurting you. Just make sure she has Mitch’s number. If she ever needs anything, have her contact him, not you. She still lives in France, so it’s not like you will have to worry about running into them anywhere.”
“She is going back to France and then coming right back?” I asked. This wasn’t a big deal to me. I did it all of the time, but I also had the resources to do it. “Did you send her in the jet?”
“Are you crazy? Hell no. We don’t need any more ties to this girl than we already have. I gave her money, cash money. Damn, son, can you imagine what would happen if Arden found out you sent your private jet to take this woman to France and bring her and this illegitimate child back? She would have your ass. You should have listened to me and made her sign a damn prenup like I told you to,” he said.
“We aren’t getting a divorce, Dad. We’ll figure this out.” I said it, but I wasn’t convinced myself. Arden wasn’t known for tolerance, and she might not want to be with me anymore if she knew this. That was a fact I had to face.
“I hope you’re right,” he said.
When I got home, Arden was in our bed with Noah. They were both asleep. I took a shower and got in bed with them. I was exhausted. Watching them lie there asleep, so peaceful and happy, I just wanted to scream.
I didn’t know how this was going to turn out, and I really didn’t want to tell Arden. Lying to her just wasn’t working either. I was torn between what I should do and what I wanted to do. I tried to put myself in her shoes to help me make a better decision, but that didn’t help either. On the one hand, I would want to know. On the other, if it didn’t affect me, and she didn’t do this while we were together, then why should I suffer for it? I would probably be better off not knowing. She had told me that she would rather I had lied to her about sleeping with Kinley. It didn’t affect her or our relationship, but it did bother her. She would have rather not have known. None of this was helping. So I remained in the mindset of don’t say anything to anyone yet.
I dozed off, and Arden woke me up later, kissing my chest. I jerked away. Not the reaction she’d expected, I’m sure, but I was definitely not in the mood.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
She looked up at me. “What do you think I’m doing?” She continued kissing me.
“Where is Noah?”
“Slayde, Noah is with Casey. Do you want to have sex with me or not?” She looked angry.
How could I tell her no? I had never told her no.
“I know this is going to sound crazy, but I really don’t feel up to it.”
She felt my forehead. “You do feel a little warm, but I don’t think you have fever. You probably shouldn’t have been in the sun so long today. How was golf?”
“It was just golf.” I was glad we had at least gotten nine holes in so I didn’t have to lie about anything. “What have you been doing all day?” I didn’t want to talk about my day.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, and it was wonderful. We just let the kids play. Ava took her first step today, and you missed it. I tried to call you.”
I was really upset that I missed that. This other kid wasn’t even on this side of the world, and he was already taking things away from my family. “Aw, I always miss everything.”
“Lucky for you, I recorded it on my phone.” She reached for her phone. “Here.”
I sat there and watched the video and listened to Arden in the background saying, “I wish your daddy were here.” I felt even worse. Was this setting the tone for what could be the rest of our lives?
“Arden, I need to tell you something.” I couldn’t believe I had said that. But all of a sudden we heard a scream and Casey calling Arden. She sounded like something was wrong. We both jumped up and ran down the hall. Casey was holding a wailing Ava, whose head was bleeding.
“What happened?” Arden asked. She was so calm, unlike me. I was freaking out.
Casey looked shaken. “She pulled the shelf over in the playroom, and it hit her on the head. It happened so fast.” She told Ava, “I’m so sorry.” Casey loved them as much as we did. She was crying too.
“It’s not your fault, Casey. You know things like this happen all of the time. We should have bolted that to the wall like you told us to when we moved in. Let’s go look at it. I don’t think it is as bad as we think.”
Arden carried Ava to our bathroom and cleaned and bandaged her head all up. Then she checked to make sure her eyes weren’t dilated, so we knew she didn’t have a concussion. There was a little knot with a cut on it.
“There is a knot. Don’t you think we should take her to the ER?” I asked.
Arden looked insulted. “No, I don’t. If we take her to the ER, she will be checked out by a first-year intern who doesn’t know her head from a hole in the ground. We will wait there for hours, and they won’t do anything more than what I just did. A knot is a good sign. It means the swelling came out and isn’t inside her head. Slayde, I am a doctor, remember? I have done this before. She’s fine.”
I was glad she felt good about it, but I wasn’t ready to put Ava down for bed. “They say it’s not a great idea to go to sleep if you hit your head. You may not wake up.”
“She still has an hour or so before she’s ready for bed. We will watch her until then. If it isn’t better, we will go to the ER. For now, let’s just try and keep some ice on it, if she’ll let us. She’s going to be OK.” She smiled at me, trying to reassure me it was OK, and I took her word for it.
A week had passed since I met Milania at the attorney’s office, and we still hadn’t heard from her. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. Dad kept telling me not to worry about it, but that was easier said than done. I went to see Mitch while Arden was at work.
“What am I supposed to do now? I can’t just keep waiting on her to show up at my front door again, Mitch,” I said.
He looked at me kind of crazily. “What do you mean? She’s not coming back. She signed the papers before she left.”
“What?” I asked.
Then he made a face that let me know he’d just let the cat out of the bag. “Maybe you need to speak with Zac.”
I didn’t say anything else. I just stormed out and drove to my dad’s office.
“What in the hell did you do?” I asked, barging into his office. I hadn’t realized he was on the phone. He held his finger up to tell me to hold on and then pointed at a chair. I didn’t want to sit down, and I sure wasn’t doing it because he told me to. When he got off the phone, I started again. “What did you do, Dad? She hasn’t come back like you said she was going to.”
“Slayde, I thought this is what you wa
nted. For her to disappear and for things to go on like this never happened. Now it has. So stop worrying about it, and go home to your wife and kids and be happy, and keep your dick in your pants from now on.”
“I didn’t cheat on Arden, Dad. This was before I even ran into her in Paris. I would never cheat on her. I need you to tell me every detail.” I sat down, and he told Trish to hold all of his calls, and he locked the door. He went over to his little fake putting green.
“Slayde, look, this girl doesn’t have a clue how much money you have. She just wanted a little money to send her kid to school. She wasn’t looking for you to be a father, but she knew you would help her out. So I gave her some money, and she left.”
“Just like that. How are you sure that will be the end of it?” I asked.
“I gave her two hundred and fifty grand. She’s not sending him to Yale. He’s going to some math-and-science school in a shitty little town in France.”
“What makes you so sure she won’t be back?”
“I had Art set it up in an account where she gets only so much a month. It’s drawing interest, and it won’t run out anytime soon. If she opens her mouth, the deal’s off.” Art was our accountant. He only handled Dad’s and my money. He and Mitch knew more about what went on with my father than I did. Who knew what they could do to him if they wanted—but then again, Dad was smart enough that he probably had something on them too.
“You gave her a quarter of a million dollars without a blood test? That doesn’t even sound like you. What about the blood test?”
“Art said he could figure out some way to write it off. So it’s not really like I gave her anything. I would have had to give it to Uncle Sam anyway.” He said that so nonchalantly. He was being so calm about all of this. He was standing there, practicing his golf swing, while telling me the details of a low-down dirty deal he made with this poor girl. I really didn’t realize he was capable of that.
I was about to leave when he said, “Slayde, this never happened. Do you hear me?”
I didn’t say anything.
He put down his golf club and walked over to me. “Do you love your wife?”
Tears came into my eyes. I nodded.
“Do you want to lose her?”
I shook my head no.
“Then keep your damn mouth shut for once in your life. You tell her, and you’ll lose everything.”
I left completely shaken up. What was I turning into? Was I becoming like my father? He had so despised his own father, and now he was him. Now, looking at my own father, was I looking at myself in twenty years? I couldn’t even imagine all of the things my mother had no clue about. Hell, he could have a whole other family out there, and she’d probably never know. To me, that was worse than anything I could ever imagine doing to Arden, but I didn’t know what else to do. Now the only question was, would I be able to live with this secret for the rest of my life?