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Dexter clears his throat. A gecko skitters across the table next to theirs and they both glance at it. Small blooms of hot pink hibiscus dot the low shrubbery around the deck and a slight breeze off the ocean blows the leaves and petals around ever so slightly.
“Etienne Boucher,” Dexter says, biting on the end of his pen as he watches Ruby’s face. He’s switched on his recorder and Ruby can almost feel the device capturing every irregular beat of her heart.
She nods. “Jack’s mistress,” she says firmly, trying to own this conversation before it owns her. “I’m aware of her.”
“Can you tell me how you felt when you found out about her existence?”
This seems straightforward enough, and Ruby doesn’t censor herself. “Betrayed. Confused. Lost. Annihilated. Lied to. Alone.”
Dexter doesn’t write anything, and his eyes never leave her face. “How did you become aware that Jack had been unfaithful?”
“My daughter, Harlow, bought one of those DNA kits for a college class she was taking. It was supposed to be straightforward, but the results suggested a potential sibling in France.” Ruby sets her elbows on the table and laces her hands together. She rests her chin on the hammock that her fingers make and she looks directly into Dexter’s intense gaze. “As you can imagine, I was floored. At first I thought it was a mistake—maybe they’d mixed up Harlow’s results with someone else’s. Jack had never been married before we met, and he’d never mentioned anything of the sort. And obviously I knew that I only had two children,” she says, closing her eyes for a long beat and keeping them that way. “So I thought it had to be a mistake.”
Ruby opens her eyes again and looks at the flowers just over Jack’s right shoulder. “But then I did a little digging, and found out that this child was twelve years old and that his mother was the sister of one of Jack’s closest friends, Yannik Boucher. Every time Jack had gone to France for diplomatic reasons, or to visit Yannik, he’d truly been going to see Etienne and the child.”
“Julien.”
“Yes,” Ruby says, her voice nearly a whisper. “Julien.”
Finding out about him had been particularly hard for her, as she’d always held a secret wish in her heart that she might someday give Jack the son he so dearly wanted. Of course he’d loved his girls with all his heart, but she knew that he saw himself with a son, and so after Harlow, she’d tried again and again to get pregnant, but after three miscarriages in a row, she’d never again been successful, and that part of her life had unceremoniously ended. So to find out that another woman—a secret mistress—had given Jack what his heart had truly desired had gutted Ruby. It brought her to her knees.
“How did you approach Jack when this information came to light?”
Ruby inhales sharply and leans back in her chair, no longer resting on her elbows. She tries to remember something that she’s always worked so hard to forget: her husband’s face as he continued to try and lie to her. After all the years she’d known and loved him, Jack had thought that he still might be able to wiggle out of the truth of what he’d done, and it had infuriated her.
“I didn’t approach him. Harlow did.”
She goes back to another memory that she generally keeps tucked away in her mind: she, Jack, and the girls were in Palm Beach for a golf tournament at which Jack had agreed to appear, and Harlow had opened the email results over brunch on the balcony of their hotel that overlooked the water. What had ensued was a ridiculous farce—Jack insisting that DNA kits were an inexact science, and that most likely the potential match was a cousin of some sort. He’d brushed it all off, smiling at Ruby across the table calmly as he asked her to pass the cream and sugar.
“And what happened?” Dexter’s damp hair has dried in the warmth of the tropical morning, and his brow is furrowed as he tries to make sense of one of the hardest times in Ruby’s life. “Did he deny it?”
“He absolutely did. He shrugged it off, told Harlow it was probably wrong, left us to finish our brunch together at the hotel where we were staying, and was whisked away in a limo to the golf tournament we’d gone to Palm Beach to attend. Later that night, on Air Force One, he locked himself in his private office and stayed busy with who knows what so that we wouldn’t have time to talk. The next morning he was off again on some trip, and he absolutely denied the possibility of his children having a sibling.” Ruby chews on her lower lip as she reaches over and plays with the straw of her iced coffee absentmindedly.
“How did the truth finally come out?” Dexter moves them forward, pulling Ruby out of her thoughts.
“I hired someone to look into it.” Ruby straightens her shoulders and looks at Dexter across the table. “I wanted answers, and I knew Jack was never going to give them, so I paid a private investigator to get to the bottom of it.”
Dexter looks up from his notes and blinks repeatedly in disbelief. “The First Lady of the United States just hired a P.I. to uncover her husband’s love child?”
A smirk tugs at the corners of Ruby’s mouth as Dexter realizes how tacky it is to call Jack’s son his “love child.” But he’d called Etienne her husband’s “side piece” the night before, so rather than feeling affronted, she laughs and after a few seconds, Dexter does too.
“I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “You just caught me off guard there.”
“For what it’s worth, Sunday Bond is one of my best friends, and she had her sister hire the P.I. So it wasn’t terribly far removed from me, but no, I didn’t show up and knock on the frosted glass door of a private detective, wearing a trench coat and a fedora and a fake mustache.”
“Although that would have been a really amazing story.” The smile lingers on Dexter’s face for a moment, and then fades. “So what happened next?”
“Oh,” Ruby says, waving a hand dismissively. “It took him less than forty-eight hours. The DNA results pointed at Julien Boucher, a young boy living in France with his mother. The P.I. approached Julien’s mother, Etienne, who had no idea her son had even taken a DNA test. She was appalled, because obviously Jack would have forbidden such a thing. Apparently Julien had some questions about his father, who had always confused him with his comings and goings from their lives, so he and a friend ordered the kit and did it all as a science project for school.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, big wow. Surprise, young Julien—your father is the President of the United States of America!” Ruby throws her hands wide like she’s on a stage and makes an exaggerated face that she drops immediately. “He would have stumbled on this information for himself at some point in his life, but I’m assuming that Etienne kept him fairly isolated from the news and such. He’d been homeschooled and his friends hand-selected, but she couldn’t have kept it from him forever anyway.”
“So once you were armed with that information…”
“Armed with that information, I was ready to kick Jack’s butt from here to next week.” Ruby looks out at the palm trees and the sand behind the bookstore, remembering. Her eyes fill with tears. “But he never came home.”
Dexter gives her a second to compose herself, busying himself with jotting notes. When he lifts his pen from the paper, he takes a beat to carefully formulate his next question, which hangs between them as Ruby glazes over. “Do you know what happened to him?”
