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But it had been intimacy.
And it had been real.
Whatever had happened after, it had been real for me.
And that was why I found myself unable to deny him. That was why, in spite of the years of pain, anger and anguish, I could not deny this man now when he asked for an audience with me.
Or maybe I was weak.
I would have to allow for that, I knew. I had always been weak for Hercules.
But strong for Lily.
Strong for Lily from the very beginning.
I would be strong for her now.
I followed him into the kitchen, and then I gestured to the back door. It was his turn to follow me, out to the backyard with a scant covering of crabgrass, peppered down a rolling slope.
You could just barely see the ocean through the trees, the most beautiful views on the island not afforded to a family like mine.
I had always found that unfair when I was a child. That the bright, brilliant ocean views were granted to those who only lived here a few months out of the year.
As an adult, of course, I understood. The cost of such beauty.
I looked back at Hercules, and my previous thought echoed in my head.
The cost of such beauty.
I knew the cost of touching beauty like his.
Or so I’d thought.
I had not realized a further payment might be required.
“Is she mine?” The question was a growl.
It took me a full minute to process those words. Because it was not the question I had expected him to ask.
There had been papers. Demands. He had never wanted her. He didn’t want me.
“How can you ask me that?” I sputtered.
“What else could I ask? Is that child mine?”
“You know she is,” I said. “You know. You sent men. You made me sign papers. I was never supposed to come and see you, and here you are at my parents’ house...”
“What men? What papers?”
“They were your men,” I said. “Men from the palace. I called, Hercules. So many times. I was pregnant, and I was terrified. And do you have any idea what my father...? I needed you. I needed you, and you sent a nondisclosure agreement.”
“I did no such thing,” he said.
The light in his eyes had gone obsidian, and for the first time I was staring full in the face of the blackness I had witnessed in that unguarded moment when he thought no one had been looking at him that first day I’d seen him.
There was something beneath that careless playboy facade that the paper saw, something beneath the caring lover that I had spent time with years ago.
It was something I had not touched. Had not tasted.
Until now.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I called the palace and left messages, and no one returned them. Finally, I said... I told them that I was pregnant with your baby.”
“You told someone at the palace?”
“Yes. There was nothing else I could do.”
“You told someone at the palace and then men arrived.” It wasn’t a question, more grim statement.
“Yes. Men came, and they offered me a sum of money if I never spoke to you again. If I never contacted you again.”
“You took a payoff in order to avoid telling me about my child?”
“I thought you were the one offering the payoff,” I said, my heart fluttering in my chest like a trapped bird. I was beginning to feel sick, because the implications of the words being spoken between us were starting to turn over inside of me, revealing facets that I had not immediately understood or seen. “I didn’t choose money over you. I thought you were demanding that I never see you...”
“This child is my heir,” he said.
“She’s a girl,” I said, defensively.
“That doesn’t matter. A law as old as time in my country, which my father would have changed if he could have, believe me. But he could not, alas for him. And so it remains. Any child of mine—as long as she is legitimate—can take the throne.”
“Well,” I said, drawing myself up as tall as I possibly could. I still fell laughably short of the top of his shoulder. “She’s not legitimate. She won’t be. She can’t be. Surely you know that already.”
“That isn’t how it works. If I choose to recognize her by marrying you, then she will be legitimate.”
“I don’t... I don’t understand any of this,” I said, panic rising up inside of me.
How was I supposed to make sense of it? I had thought all these years that he never wanted to see her. That he would rather pay exorbitant sums to keep Lily and myself as his dirty secret. Making sense of the fact that he seemed to want Lily was almost impossible.
It was untangling a web that had been stretched across my life five years ago. One that I had built myself with the remnants I’d had left.
I’d lost him.
I’d lost my parents.
And now here he was, larger than life and every inch as heartbreakingly beautiful as he’d been at the first, and he was telling me that he wanted Lily.
“This is my father’s doing,” he said, reiterating what he’d said before. “He and I have an agreement. I don’t know if you know much about the history of my country.”
“I steer clear of everything concerning you to the best of my ability.”
His lip lifted into a curl. “Except for my money.”
Anger sizzled through my veins. “I’m sorry. Should I have sat in poverty and virtue with your child after being rejected by you and by my parents? Would that have made a more beautiful and sympathetic picture of maternal suffering for you? When I had an offer of comfort and riches on the table, should I have opted to take something else? There is no shame in poverty, not when life has given you no choice. But I was given a choice. A choice to make sure that no matter what happened, my child would have food. Would have shelter. That I would be able to be home to take care of her. I have been all she’s had. Her only parent. It is my job, and mine alone, to care for her. There has been no one else. If you would have preferred to come back to a life in ruin so that you could rebuild it again, I am sorry to disappoint you. When you left, my life was ruin. My father looked at me and called me a whore. I had nowhere and nothing, and I rebuilt it with what I was given. I will not feel shame for that.”
“Do you know what I think?”
I crossed my arms and took a step toward him, and I could see shock flickered behind his dark eyes. If he thought that I was still the young girl in love that he had met back then, then he was to be reeducated, and quickly.
Five years I had been without him. Five years I had been on my own in the world. Learning what it meant to live beneath the judgment of others, sleepless nights spent caring for my daughter, without any help when I found myself in a state of utter exhaustion.
>
And I had become strong.
Arguments in doctors’ offices when I knew my child had pneumonia and they simply wanted to send me home. Standing up for Lily when she had pushed someone to the ground in her preschool class because they had said her mother was bad since Lily didn’t have a father.
Standing up for myself when people sometimes didn’t let their children associate with mine for those same reasons.
Years alone and motherhood had sharpened me, and sometimes I resented it.
Because I had been soft once, and I had believed in love.
The only kind of love left that I believed in was the kind between a mother and daughter, strengthened when my own had attempted to mend the bridge that had been broken between us by my father.
Fathers I could do without, thank you.
Mothers I had found strength in.
But like a stone battered about, my smooth edges had been cracked against the hardships of life, creating hard, sharp edges.
And he was about to understand just how much I’d changed.
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me what you think,” I said, “because you think the world stops and starts on your word. Because once you were able to make my world stop and start at your word. But I made a life without you in it. And I will tell you gladly that there is nothing for you here. So whatever you say, it better be compelling, and not predictable as I suspect it will be.”
“I think that you didn’t want to hassle with me, and when you were offered a payoff, you took it rather than making sure you did the right thing.”
I scoffed. “The right thing? The right thing. To ensure that a man who goes about the world spreading his seed whenever he feels the urge knows about a child he didn’t even want? How many other women are like me, do you think?”
He drew back. “None.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I have always used condoms,” he said ferociously. “With every other woman.”
“Oh,” I said. “So I’m special. The woman who had never even touched a man’s hand before you is the one that you couldn’t be bothered to protect? I’m glad that our dalliance meant so much to you.”
