He’s looking at me like the next thing I say will be the most important words he will ever hear. I shift in my seat, pushing back slightly so there is more space between us.
“My mother never-” I stop and clear my throat, dropping my eyes to the floor. The shiny marble gleams under the warm glow of the chandelier overhead. The floor is so shiny that I can see our reflection in it. Zeus is staring at me. I watch him in the polished stone as I speak. “She didn’t say you were my father.” It’s true she hadn’t, the identity of my father is a secret she’d never given up to me, no matter how many times I’d asked her when I was a kid.
“You think he’s someone special? Like a fairytale or some shit? Don’t be stupid, Honey. Your father is just some loser that knocked me up. He’s not going to rescue you.”
I swallow past the lump that is growing in my throat. It threatens to choke off my air if I think too much on the words she’d hurled at me like stones aimed at a glass house. I’d been fragile as a kid. Just looking for somewhere to fit in. Someone to belong with and I picked up early, my mother didn’t want or love me. A father, even one that wasn’t there, was better than nothing. Because so long as I didn’t know, I could dream.
I could believe he was good and honest. That if he only knew about me, he’d find me and take me to a house with a yard and a dog. Somewhere that was calm and quiet on Sunday mornings and didn’t stink of spilled bourbon and the rank weed my mother smoked in the living room with her Billie Holiday records blasting after her shows.
She’d loved holding the knowledge of who he was over my head. Loved rubbing in that he was no one and that I was stuck with her. It hurt at first, but I learned to stop asking about him. I turned that part of myself off to give her less power over me.
Zeus isn’t exactly what she’d said he was. She’d been lying, but I guess that tracked when it came to her.
“Why didn’t she say anything when we met?” I ask. I don’t want to say when the truth came out about why Law really was with me. I don’t want to think about that.
“I asked her not to. If you didn’t know by now there was no need for your mother to be the one to tell you. You know how she is.”
He is right. I do know how she is.
“You mean a bitch.”
Zeus chuckles. “I was going to say…dramatic, but yes, that does fit Rosario aptly.”
I look up at him. “She made it sound like you wanted me. Like you wanted me for-” I stop, because the words are getting stuck. I hate how my mother turns me into just another object. A piece of meat. Since I was a kid she’d chided me over the looks she said I attracted, how much I looked like her and that I was lucky I could turn a man’s eye.
I clear my throat and try again. “That you wanted me for-”
“For sex?” He sighs and gives me an assessing look. “Your mother is vulgar, narcissistic and obsessive. She’s jealous of you, so of course she’d want to put something like that in your head when it comes to me.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “You really do sound like you know her.”
“Of course I know her. I’ve known her since we were very young. That’s how you came to be.”
“Did you love her?” I can’t help myself. I have to know.
His mouth lifts into a half smile. “I loved who I thought she was when we were kids, but that girl has been dead for a long time. I wish I could say you were something made out of love but…” his voice trails off and I snort.
“My mother has never loved anyone. We both know that.”
Zeus inclines his head in agreement. “No, not even you.”
“Especially not me.”
We stare at each other in silence. The more I look at him, the more I see features I recognize. Yes, I look like my mother, but there are hints of him in me, too. The tilt of my chin, the curve of my eyes and the birthmark below the corner of his mouth. Minuscule as these features are, we have those in common. I don’t know why, but it makes me glad to know I’m not all my mother.
When someone erases the past, they have a way of controlling your present and future. When I was a kid, my mother had all the power in the world to do that to me. She still can rattle me when she wants, even though I’m a grown woman now. Knowing Zeus is my father, shocking as it is, gives me some power back. It takes away the mystery that has hung over my head since birth.
It gives me a name, a person, another way of looking at myself. I am grateful for it, even if it is him.
“If you knew I was your kid then why did you wait so long? I’ve been a member of the club too, in New York for a decade.” I’d been a member of the club even before Christian, nearly two years now. Why had he waited?
“Timing wasn’t right. She only came to me a couple of years ago, when you first arrived. The timing seemed too perfect and I had to be sure you weren’t in on her scheme. The dates she gave me seemed right for when I last saw her. But you know your mother. There was money involved for the information.”
“It’s always money.”
“She used your identity to get me to bail her out of a few of her financial woes,” he says and I scoff. My mother is always in trouble when it comes to money and men. Doesn’t surprise me that’s how Zeus found out I was his daughter.
“You believed her?”
