“Why?” Harvey asked.
“Haven’t you been listening to me, Harvey? That’s why I’m here. I want you to tell me why I didn’t do it. I think there was something fishy going on there. It’s easy to say now, but it wasn’t so easy to say back then. Then there’s the girl who was donating her eggs at the same place. We bumped into each other on the last day. She looked so damn sad. We both had trouble looking at one another because we both knew why we were there, and it was embarrassing.”
“Go on, Pete.” The pen and pad were back in Harvey’s hands.
“She…her name was Lily…she said, maybe I said, damn, I don’t know, but one of us said there was something sinister about the place.”
“What made you think that?”
“Lily said it was because of the big, long building that ran across the back of the sperm bank and the egg donor clinic. She said it didn’t have windows or doors, yet it was attached to the egg donor clinic and the sperm bank. She also said she tried getting into it, but an Amazon of a woman stopped her. She damn well spooked me, Harvey, and I’ve been spooked ever since.”
“Is this why you can’t sleep?”
“Damn straight. Plus, every time I see a teenage kid, I think it’s one of mine. Am I losing it, Harvey?” Pete asked in a tormented voice. “For all I know I could have twelve kids out there walking around. Before you can ask, yes, they tried to get me to go to counseling sessions, but I blew them off. Look, I was young and stupid. Back then the only thing I was thinking about was how I was going to make it through the last year so I could make my first million by the time I turned forty. Did I know I was going to be a billionaire at forty instead of a millionaire? It just snowballed and happened. It’s not like I was counting the dollars on a daily basis. Lily whatever-her-name-was didn’t go to the counseling sessions either. The way she put it was, ‘It’s no big deal.’ I think back then it was a big deal for her, more so than me, but that’s how I’m seeing it now.”
“I see.”
Pete bristled. “What the hell do you see, Harvey? That I was a jerk? I know that. Just tell me what the hell to do to get this monkey off my back.”
“It doesn’t work that way. What do you want to do? Everything in life starts at the beginning.”
“So what you’re telling me is I should go back to California and do whatever I have to do. I did try to locate Lily. For some reason, I couldn’t find her in the yearbook.”
“Why didn’t you hire a private detective to find her? It would appear you didn’t want to find her badly enough. It’s not like you can’t afford the best of the best, Pete.”
“I guess I’m afraid.” Pete sat back down on the recliner. “You need a bigger place, Harvey. This is too cozy, too comfortable. You need more light in here, too.”
“I’ll take it under consideration. Why didn’t you follow through on the promise you made to yourself? Did you think it was too far over the top—one of those things you say because the moment seems right at the time—or did you really believe there was something sinister about the facility?”
“Probably a little bit of both. I have to go back to the beginning, don’t I?”
“It’s a good place to start, Pete. You do realize you cannot invade people’s lives, don’t you?”
“Hell, yes. That’s one of the things that’s killing me. God, I was so stupid. Why the hell didn’t I just take a semester’s leave, work my ass off, then finish up? Why?”
“Is it because you are so goal-oriented? So on target, so anal, you can’t get sidetracked in any way? There are people like that, you know,” Harvey said quietly.
“You mean that in my haste to become a millionaire at the age of forty, I didn’t give two shits about anything except myself?”
“Something like that. Do you want some advice?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do, Harvey.”
“Then find the elusive Miss Lily and take it from there. It’s not that misery loves company, but more like you two have so much in common, maybe you can help each other. I’m just a phone call away, Pete.”
“I can’t unring the bell. This is never going to go away, right? I have to come to terms with what I did and didn’t do. I guess I’ve known that all along, just didn’t want to face it.”
“No one is perfect; nor is it a perfect world we live in. We all make mistakes, and we have to live with them. Sometimes you get up to bat again, and sometimes you don’t. You have to make the best of it.”
“And that about ends our session,” Pete said, getting up off the chair.
Harvey clapped Pete on the shoulder. “It’s not the end of the world, Pete. It might seem like that right now, but eventually there will be light at the end of the tunnel.”
“I’ll call you.”
“From California?” Harvey asked.
“Yeah, from California.”
Chapter 2
Lily Madison stared off into space. She was jolted out of her thoughts when the office manager of Sandcastle Ltd. entered her workroom to drop her personal mail on the desk. Penny Lyons knew better than to intrude when her boss was designing. Lily looked down at her sketch pad. Lines. Nothing else. It wasn’t happening that day. The truth was, it hadn’t been happening for some time. All of her creativity seemed to have vanished into thin air. She wondered, and not for the first time, why she’d left her teaching job years ago to go into designing children’s clothing. Because, she answered herself, I didn’t want to deal with children. And, yet, here I am, designing and managing one of the largest children’s clothing lines in the country. Nothing made sense anymore.
Children.
It always came back to children.
The story of her life.
Better not to dwell on that at the moment.
Lily slid off her drafting stool and walked over to her desk. She felt a head rush when she saw the large square envelope from her old alma mater. Now what did they want? She’d sent an extremely generous check, and that should have been the end of it, but here they were, writing to her yet again. Her heart jumped up into her throat as she slit open the envelope with her nail. Her sigh of relief was so loud it bounced off the walls of the workroom. A thank-you card. She was so light-headed with relief, she sank down on her chair to pull herself together. Seconds later, she was rummaging in her desk for her scribbled notes. She’d called PAK Industries twice to try and locate Pak, as he’d introduced himself to her years ago, to no avail. Mr. Peter Aaron Kelly was out of town, she’d been told. She’d even tried through the Alumni Association to find Pak’s home address, but they wouldn’t give it out. She supposed that was a good thing.
Lily sighed again when she struggled with her thoughts in regard to the head of PAK Industries. She’d thought of him often during the past years because they had so much in common, and yet they didn’t really know each other. A brief encounter, a five-minute lunch, yet she still remembered him so clearly. He had become one of the richest men in the world. She was no slouch in that department herself. While her revenues couldn’t quite match Peter Kelly’s, they were up there with so many zeros she often got dizzy when she looked at her financial statements.
How clearly she remembered the day she had decided to track down Peter Kelly. It was the day the first invitation had arrived. She told herself that if there was a way for her to find out if he was attending the fund-raiser, she would consider going herself. She needed to talk to him. Or someone. Preferably him.
Lily pushed the thank-you card around on her desk with the tip of a pencil. She moved it one way, then another until she finally tipped it into an open drawer. Good. Now she didn’t have to look at it. She slammed the drawer shut with way too much force.
The phone on her desk chirped. She pressed the button for the speakerphone to activate.
“Are you ready for your lunch, Lily?” Penny asked.
“Sure, send it in. And bring the paper and two cups of coffee.” Like she was really going to eat lunch. These days she nibbled, and that was abo
ut it. She wasn’t sleeping either. A dangerous combination, Penny had chastised her. Half the time she was walking around like a zombie. Why? She knew why but didn’t want to face up to her past. No sense lying to herself. That was why she wanted to talk to Peter Kelly.
Lily looked up when her lunch was set in front of her. It looked good, but, as usual, she wasn’t hungry. She reached for the coffee and gulped at it as she opened the paper. She always went to the financial section first. Coffee cup in hand, she looked down at the photo and article that took the entire half of the financial page above the fold. The cup dropped from her hands as she stared at the man she had just been thinking about. She stared at the picture for a long time as she tried to control her trembling body until she realized it wasn’t Peter Kelly she was now staring at but Senator Hudson Preston.
Why did this particular picture of those two men put her in such a state of panic? When she couldn’t come up with an answer, Lily sat on her hands to stop them from shaking. What was wrong with her? It was Peter Kelly who rendered her witless. She didn’t even know Senator Preston.
Almost an hour later, Lily managed to get up off the chair she’d been sitting on. Her hands felt numb. She gathered up the newspaper with averted eyes and scrunched it into a ball. Then she mopped up the spilled coffee that had soaked into the blotter and puddled on the carpet. While she was doing that she was talking to her secretary, instructing her to book a flight to San Francisco so she could attend the fundraiser at Berkeley. “An early flight tomorrow morning.”
Lily leaned over her desk, her hands gripping the edges. She’d made a decision. She’d actually made a decision. Not just your run-of-the-mill decision but an important one. So important, she felt like her very life hung in the balance. At least that was how she felt at the moment.
Lily jammed her cell phone into the pocket of her jeans. She looked around to see where she’d tossed her straw bag. She slung it over her shoulder, but not before she jammed a matching straw hat on her head. She almost ran from the office, shouting orders over her shoulder. Before she ran into her private elevator, she shouted, “I’ll call, and you’ll see me when you see me.”
How blasé that sounded, Lily thought as she climbed behind the wheel of her Range Rover minutes later. Her stomach in knots, her thoughts all over the map, she barreled out of the parking lot and on out to the road that would take her to Interstate 26 and downtown Charleston, where she lived on the Battery. A half-hour drive, depending on traffic. Time to buy an outfit for the black-tie dinner at Berkeley. Maybe another new outfit for the day after. A travel outfit. Lily tried to remember the last time she’d gone clothes shopping. When she couldn’t, she gave up. She wondered if she had enough time to get a facial and a haircut. Just the thought of getting a haircut sent shivers up and down her spine. Some inner instinct warned her that she needed to look as successful as she was if she was going to see Peter Kelly. Assuming she would meet Peter Kelly if he even showed up for the fund-raiser. Well, she’d just have to make the time. The worst-case scenario was that she would have to pay extra to have the beauty shop stay open to accommodate her.
As Lily drove toward Charleston, she let her mind wander back to her past and the years leading up to the present. She had so many regrets these days. She’d hoped to be married with children by now, but that wasn’t happening. She didn’t think it would ever happen. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. She was married to her company and would just be cheating a husband. She had no motherly instincts, but there was a reason for that. A reason she didn’t want to dwell on. How sad.
Lily tried to remember the last time she’d had a real date. Well over a year ago. Penny said it was because she was too intimidating. Penny also said her standards were way too high, and at her age, she needed to stop being so picky. Lily didn’t even bother to offer any rebuttal because Penny was right. If things continued the way they were, she was going to end up an old maid, rocking on her verandah and staring out at the ocean.
Lily continued with her soul-searching. She’d always been a methodical kind of person. And analytical. She rarely made a mistake, but when she did, it was usually of the mega kind. To date she regretted only two things she’d done in her life. The first one was going into the teaching field. She simply wasn’t teacher material. While she admired all teachers, she herself had no desire to mold young minds. The second mistake was to donate her eggs to that awful clinic. How young and stupid she was back then. How needy, how greedy, how goal-oriented she was during that last year at Berkeley.
With all that on her shoulders, it still boggled her mind that she’d made a go of the little business she’d started in her grandmother’s garage. These days she ran a company that netted a billion dollars annually.
All of that, and still she was an emotional wreck, teetering on the edge. For months she’d known she had to do something to turn her life around. Then when the invitation arrived to attend the special fund-raiser, her mind had kicked into high gear. Why she thought Peter Kelly could help her was beyond her comprehension. Some deep part of her gut said that since he was part of her past in a minimal way, the answers had to lie with him. “Maybe I’m in the throes of a nervous breakdown and too stupid to know it,” she muttered to herself.
Lily had reached Charleston. She parked by the outdoor market and made her way to a specialty shop on King Street—a shop named Olga’s—where she bought a ton of clothes that Olga herself paraded in front of her. She explained that she was going to the hairdresser at Charleston Place and paid extra to have her purchases delivered to her home on the Battery.
At seven o’clock, when she left the beauty shop, her long crop of hair was sheared, sunstreaked, and highlighted. Her mane of curly hair, what was left of it, was now styled into a becoming skullcap hairdo that curled winsomely around her face. She liked the change because she looked totally unlike herself. The beautician said she looked ten years younger. The woman’s testimonial pleased Lily so much that she purchased two shopping bags of products she knew she would probably use once. Her face glowed and tingled, but she was zit-and blackhead-free. She hadn’t even known she had zits and black-heads, which probably just meant she needed glasses.
From time to time when she parked her car in her driveway, Lily would stop and look at her house. She would marvel at how far she’d come in life, from the ramshackle house she’d lived in with her grandmother to this historical house that she had restored. A house that was far too big for one person. Oh, she had a housekeeper and a gardener, but they went home at five o’clock. It was a house that begged for children and pets, not a young single woman who rarely got home before nine at night and left at six in the morning.
Lily pressed the code to the gate in her walled-off courtyard. The solar lights guided her toward the kitchen, which was awash in light. In fact, every light and every television set was on inside the house, something she insisted on. She hated coming home to darkness and silence.
Lily set her shopping bags on the counter and poured herself a glass of wine that she carried out to the courtyard, where she settled herself in a comfortable cushioned glider. She leaned back and closed her eyes, but she couldn’t turn off her mind.
If only…if only…
Lily woke a little past midnight bathed in sweat. The damn dream again. She dropped her head into her hands and started to cry. It was always the same dream: children, dozens of them, dressed in clothing she’d designed, and who looked just like her at their age, picketing with faceless parents outside Sandcastle headquarters. Everyone was screaming and shouting, but she could never make out what they were saying. Until a week ago—when she had the dream again, and the words were so crystal clear it felt like they were burned into her brain just the way they were minutes ago when she woke.
Lily choked on her own sobs as she struggled to get herself together. The words—“See, see, it is a big deal”—wrapped themselves around her very soul.
What a fool she’d been. She knew she was still being a
fool to think Peter Kelly could help her. First, she needed to help herself. She needed to talk to someone, to try and unload the guilt she’d been carrying around for so long. At the very least she needed a professional to help her come to terms with what she considered “Lily’s folly” so many years ago.
Lily was stiff from the damp air. She picked up her empty wineglass and made her way into the house, where she climbed the stairs to the second floor to take a shower. She knew there would be no more sleep for her that night, so she might as well pack and get things ready for her early-morning trip to the airport.
The image in the bathroom mirror startled her until she remembered her makeover just hours ago. “The new me,” she mumbled as she stepped into the shower. This new me is going to turn her life around or die trying. With that promise, her spirits lifted. Maybe, just maybe, she would finally be able to get a handle on her life.
Fifteen minutes later, a luxurious towel wrapped around her, Lily padded out to her bedroom to look at what Olga called her “traveling attire.” She stared at the pale green linen suit with matching sandals and winced. Linen? How had she allowed Olga to talk her into linen? She’d be one wrinkled mess before she even got to the airport in Charleston. She hung the suit in the spacious closet as she moved hangers this way and that. She finally chose a pair of off-white capri pants with a matching top. She rummaged through her shoe rack until she found a comfortable pair of straw sandals for the trek through the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where she had a layover.
She just needed one more thing. Her old hat, the one she’d been wearing when she had first met Pak/Peter Kelly. He’d even commented on it. Said he liked it. How weird was it that she would remember a detail like that after all these years?
In the dressing room off her bedroom, there were shelves and shelves filled with head busts wearing hats. All from back when she first thought she wanted to be a hat designer. Hats, she’d been told back then, were in the tank, so she’d given up on that idea and designed hats only for herself. There it was, her very first creation. A denim fishing hat with the brim rolled up. A huge silk sunflower was pinned to the middle. She smiled. She’d always loved that particular hat, maybe because it was her first design. The sunflower wasn’t the least bit faded or droopy. Nor was there any dust on the denim hat. She plopped it on her head and sashayed out to her bedroom where she got dressed, still wearing the hat. It didn’t exactly go with her outfit, so she changed the capri pants to a pair of soft denims with a design around the hem. They weren’t jeans, so that was okay.
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