The two men settled into chairs. Oliver looked at Elijah as though expecting something—recriminations, maybe. Elijah said nothing. He wasn’t the one who had wanted this conversation. If his father wanted to speak, then he could do it.
After a moment, he drew a breath. “All right,” he said. “Let me have it.”
“Let you have what?” Elijah said coldly. “I really don’t have anything to say to you. You know what you did, and you know why it’s twisted. I don’t have to explain that, I hope.”
“You’re judging me too harshly,” his father told him. “You need to hear my side of this.”
“Maybe you need me to hear it. I don’t really think this has anything to do with what I need. I don’t think you have everbeen concerned with what I needed, if I’m honest.” Elijah folded his arms and regarded his father. “I think you’re the most selfish parent I could possibly have had.”
“Elijah, just listen,” his father said. “If you could only open your mind, you would see that I’m just trying to do what’s best for you.”
“It’s interesting how doing what’s best for me has never involved finding out what I actually wanted. Or did you genuinely think that paying a woman to spend time with me was going to make me happy?”
“Well, I never paid her a dime,” his father said.
“You wanted to, though.”
“I wanted to give her a business loan. I wanted there to be something in it for her. What’s the matter with that?”
“What’s wrong with that is that it assumes she couldn’t possibly have wanted to spend time with me for any other reason,” Elijah said. “Which is what you think, isn’t it? You found a good woman, a quality woman, and your first thought was,what could she possibly see in my son? But if I pay her… well, then she might be willing to tolerate him.Isn’t that right?”
His father sighed. “Son, she had already turned you down. I saw it happen. I wasn’t making an assumption there. It wasn’t that I decided she was too good for you in some way. She had already shown she wasn’t interested.”
Elijah opened his mouth to retort, but then closed it. His father was right, as much as he hated to admit it—that was exactly what had happened. “Well, you still should have stayed out of it,” he said, feeling pathetic.
“Maybe I should have.” His father shifted in his seat. “The truth was that I never expected things to go the way they did, Elijah. I never thought you would start taking this one seriously. I thought it was going to be just another fling. And if it was that, it seemed harmless for me to push a girl in your direction, to make sure your fling was with someone who would help you stay out of the news. You must admit that’s something you’ve struggled with on your own. You keep making headlines, and not in a good way.”
“It’s not yours to control,” Elijah said. “If you’re disappointed in me, you have to live with that. You can’t pull strings behind the scenes to reframe my life into something you can tolerate. You just have to… be disappointed.”
“Maybe you’re right,” his father admitted. “But, Elijah… it’s not that I’m disappointed in you.”
A laugh huffed its way out of Elijah’s throat. “You can’t tell me now that you’re happy with me,” he said. “That ship sailed a long time ago, Dad. We both know the truth. I’m not enough for you, and I never have been. You’ve always wished that I was someone different.”
“Will you listen to me?” his father demanded. “I mean, will you get down off your high horse and let me say what I came here to say?”
“Which is what? Which is that you were completely justified in interfering in my life, and I ought to just get over it?”
“No, damn it.” His father let out a long sigh. “I’m trying to apologize to you, Elijah. That’s what I’ve been trying to say here. I shouldn’t have done it, all right? I’m sorry.”
The words hung in the air.
Elijah couldn’t quite believe what he had heard. “You’re sorry?”
“I underestimated you,” his father said. “Or I… I misunderstood you. I don’t know. I didn’t think you were someone who had it in you to care about a relationship. You have a different girl on your arm every week—at least, you used to. I didn’t think it mattered to you who it was. I didn’t think you’d be that bothered by the idea of me making a deal with someone.” He hesitated. “I didn’t know that she was going to matter to you. If I had known, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“You shouldn’t have done it anyway,” Elijah said, but something in him softened slightly at his father’s words. “You overstepped. You shouldn’t have tried to manipulate my life like that, whether you thought it was going to be a big deal to me or not.”
“You’re right,” his father said. “I shouldn’t have.”
The two men sat quietly for a minute.
“You need to know that she’s completely separated herself from our agreement,” Oliver said. “I reached out to her after I heard from you about all this. I thought she and I might be able to get back on the same page, that maybe we could go back to helping each other figure all this out. But she shut me down. She wants nothing to do with me. And you need to know that it didn’t just start—this aversion to me she has. She contacted me weeks ago and told me that our arrangement was over. Whatever has happened between the two of you, it’s had nothing to do with me. Not for a very long time.”
Elijah sucked in a breath. “Dad… she’s pregnant.”
His father went rigid. “Are you sure?”
“She has no reason to lie about it.” He closed his eyes. “I just don’t know if I can trust her motives. Knowing that she was only with me in the first place because she wanted to open new doors of business opportunity… how can I trust someone like that? How can I let myself start a family with her? But what choice do I have in the matter now? I just don’t know what to do.”
