***
“So you’re telling me your father is alive?” Lauren McDonald said louder than Callie would’ve liked. The two of them were in Callie’s classroom eating lunch the following day. Lauren wasn’t only Callie’s closest friend, but also a fellow teacher at Reagan Elementary School.
While she hadn’t intended to tell Lauren about her mother’s secret yet, she couldn’t keep the information bottled up any longer. She simply needed to talk more. Her conversation with Helen hadn’t been enough, and she trusted Lauren more than anyone else.
Tucking several strands of ash blonde hair behind her ear, Lauren rested her chin on her hands and leaned forward. “Why didn’t she tell you before?” She didn’t give Callie a chance to answer her first question before continuing. “You guys seemed so close. It’s hard to believe she kept this from you.”
Tell me about it. “I wish I knew all the answers.” Callie frowned. “The only thing I know is Senator Warren Sherbrooke and my mother were involved thirty-two years ago.”
A sudden gasp escaped from Lauren. “You didn’t tell me he was your father!”
“Yes, I did.” Callie thought she mentioned it, but the look on Lauren’s face said otherwise.
Lauren shook her head adamantly, causing her long pink earrings to dance wildly. “What else did you forget to tell me, chickie?”
She’d left out Dylan Talbot’s visit too. “My father sent someone to my apartment.” For some reason, she didn’t want to mention Dylan’s name. Maybe it was because she still found it hard to believe he’d really been in her apartment. “My father wants to meet me, or at least that’s what his messenger said.”
“So when are you going to see him?”
Callie shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know, maybe never.”
Lauren’s light brown eyes grew wide. “Why not? It sounds as if he’s sincere. I don’t think it’d hurt to give him a chance. Worst case, he turns out to be a jerk and you wasted a few hours of your day. There are worse things than that.”
Lauren made it sound so simple, and maybe if her emotions weren’t involved, it would be. Unfortunately, she couldn’t turn her emotions off.
“You might be right, but I’m not ready. I can’t explain it. Something tells me now isn’t the time. Besides, I can’t take time off now, you know that. Once school ends, I’ll reconsider.”
“If you say so.” Lauren frowned. “But I think you should give him a chance, Callie. Meet with him at least once. You could end up having a great relationship with your father and his family.”
Callie and Lauren finished their lunches and threw away their trash in silence. The students were due back from recess at any minute.
Standing, Lauren started toward the door, which connected their rooms, but then stopped and turned back around. “Callie, you’ve got a brother and a sister. Well, a half-brother and sister.”
The room around her seemed to tilt and spin, and Callie clutched the closest desk to steady herself, as she took a few deep breaths. Lauren was right. Warren Sherbrooke and his wife, Elizabeth, had a son and a daughter in their mid-to-late twenties. She should have realized sooner that she had half-siblings. Somehow though, her brain hadn’t made the connection. It was so focused on her mother’s lie and Warren himself that she hadn’t thought of the bigger picture. This new development only added to her emotional turmoil.
“I’ll talk to you later.” Lauren’s voice broke through the fog just as Callie’s students came barreling into the classroom. Sending her friend a little wave, she tried to focus on her afternoon lessons.
That night, Callie scrolled through the hits her Internet search found. When she’d sat down, Callie only intended to write a few email messages before losing herself in a book. Instead, she’d brought up her favorite search engine and typed in her father’s name. She’d done a very brief Internet search after learning the truth about her father, but this time she intended to do a more thorough job. In seconds, the Internet came up with well over one million hits.
Thank goodness for modern technology.
Like most of America, she already knew the basics about Warren Sherbrooke. While that meant she knew more about him than she did any other stranger, she still didn’t know a lot about him. While the Internet couldn’t give her all the answers, it could help fill in some of the gaps.
Dylan Talbot could tell me even more. Callie eyed his business card. At first, she’d considered throwing it away, but at the last minute, she’d changed her mind. Now the card sat on her end table near the house phone, which she never used.
“For now, this will have to do,” she said. She refused to call him. If she called him, it would look as if she wanted a meeting with her father, and she still had not made up her mind.
Moving the cursor over the first Internet link, she double clicked. Instantly, an official political website popped up.
Over the next hour, Callie scanned through the various sites. Many of them contained the same information, much of which she already knew. As she read the articles regarding Warren and the Sherbrooke family, the same question kept plaguing her. How had her parents ever met? They came from completely opposite backgrounds. Callie couldn’t imagine anything that would’ve brought them in contact with each other, let alone allowed them to be intimate.
He came from a wealthy, well-connected family. Ruth Taylor, on the other hand, had grown up in Rhode Island where her parents had owned a small deli and convenience store in Newport. Sometime before Callie’s birth, her mom had moved to Massachusetts. So how had it happened? She was dying to know. Unfortunately, the only person who could tell her the truth was her father.
The Teacher's Billionaire Page 5