“But I asked you if you were married.”
“And I told you no.”
“You also told me you never had a girlfriend.”
“Because I never did.”Until now, he wanted to add, but couldn’t. Although his feelings for her were proven to his absolute satisfaction when he thought she was harmed in that crash, he knew it was too soon.
“No marriage. No girlfriend. But two children?”
Edmund wasn’t proud of the way he lived his life, but it was his life. “Yes.”
“Where are they now?”
“My daughter? I have no idea. My son? He’s incarcerated.”
Wait what? Maude was floored again. “What do you mean you don’t know where your daughter is?”
“She used to spend summers with me her entire childhood. But as soon as she turned eighteen and I wouldn’t bankroll her Gucci lifestyle, but insisted she get a job and take care of herself, she didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. Child support was over so she and her mother moved on to the next sucker. That was five years ago. I’ve tried to reach out a few times, but she made it clear she was done with me. I’m of no use to her anymore.”
That was so sad to Maude. “How old were you when you had her?”
“Barely eighteen. Her mother, a med student, was twenty-six.”
“Is her mother a doctor now?”
“Nope. She dropped out and married a wealthy business owner.”
“Are you two on speaking terms?”
“We are not, no.”
“What about your son?”
Edmund exhaled. “He’s a different story.”
“Different mother?”
He nodded. “Very different. She was a rich kid like me who just wanted to have some fun. But as soon as we slipped up and she got pregnant, she wanted a ring on it. And I was actually going to step up. Not because I wanted to, but she was so angry with me for not wearing protection that it just got out of hand.”
“What do you mean?”
“My father intervened and her father intervened and that was that. No marriage. No acknowledgement of parentage by me. She and her family would raise the child and I would have nothing to do with him. That was the arrangement.”
Maude was upset. “And you allowed that? You never acknowledged your own son?”
“Of course I did! They didn’t want me to, but I did. And his mother did allow him to spend weekends with me on a regular basis because she actually loved him and wanted him to get to know his father. My son and I had a very good relationship.”
“What went wrong?” Maude was certain something did.
“While he was a freshman at Yale, my sister recruited him to help her scam her rich but unsuspecting boyfriend at the time. They embezzled something like a million dollars from him all told. But they got caught. My son took the fall even after I told him I would disown him if he didn’t tell the authorities the truth. But he still refused to implicate Natasha. And he ended up getting ten years.”
“Wow,” said Maude. “And Natasha let her own nephew take the fall like that?”
Edmund looked at her. “My sister has never claimed responsibility for anything in her entire life. We enabled it. But after she allowed my son to go to prison for something that would never have happened had she not recruited him, I was done with her. With both of them.”
“But you just said it wasn’t your son’s fault.”
Edmund snapped. “It was his fault! What are you talking about? Did my sister recruit him? Yes. But he allowed that recruitment. If you sign up and join the army and get killed in battle, it’s not the army’s fault. It’s your fault for signing up. But the army played a part in your destruction. My son made his bed. He has to lay in it.”
