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“Thank you.”
I quickly grab Otto’s hand and lead him to the elevator. He lets me drag him along, and we pile into the elevator.
I press the button and wait. In the metallic walls, I can half see my reflection. My thick black hair looks knotted, and I push my hands over my shirt and pants to remove any wrinkles. I wore a blazer underneath the bulky sweaters I left in the car, and I’m hoping it hides the massive sweat stains that are growing around my pits.
“How do I look?” I ask Otto.
“Like twenty bucks,” he assures me.
“Don’t you mean a million?”
“No. I mean twenty.”
The elevator doors swing open. The hallways are white, nondescript, and I follow the receptionist’s instructions and hang a left. There’s a lot of empty conference rooms on this floor, the walls layered with glass, and luxury suite hospital rooms. I come to a stop at a door marked Dr. Leonard King, CEO.
The shutters hang down around his glass walls, but I can still see a light glowing from inside. There are a couple of chairs in the hallway, and I guide Otto to sit down in one.
“Can you sit here for ten minutes? I’ll be right in that room if you need me.”
“Okay…and then we can go to bed?”
“And then we can go to bed.”
He has a ketchup stain on his button-up shirt, and I lick my thumb and wipe the stain. He makes a face that says Mum, stop messing with me.
“You’re my bacon,” I tell him.
“You’re mine,” he replies.
No way but forward. I go to the door, take a deep breath. You can do this.
No way but forward. I knock on the door and hear a low “Come in.”
So I turn the handle and enter.
There’s dark carpet on the floors and a beautiful view of the lighthouse outside the large floor-to-ceiling windows.
At a stained-oak desk sits Leonard King himself. He’s gotten older since I last saw him—the salt-and-pepper look graduated to a full-on gray beard and white-tipped sideburns.
Still handsome, though. The kind of wrinkled face they only make in Hollywood. Piercing blue eyes, just like his son. Just like his grandson.
He has a pair of reading glasses on, and he’s examining papers on his desk. When I step inside, he looks up at me from underneath thick eyebrows and narrows his eyes.
“Hi…Mr. King?”
“How can I help you?” Not unfriendly, but curt. To the point. A man who doesn’t have time for small talk.
I force myself forward and extend my hand. “Kenzi Stratton. It’s been…thirteen years now?”
He takes my hand. Shakes it. “I’m sorry. I meet a lot of patients.”
“It’s okay. I don’t expect you to remember me…last time we met, I was eighteen and pregnant, and you were trying to buy off my baby.”
His smile falters. He releases my hand and immediately straightens up in his seat. The color falls from his face, but, to his credit, he keeps his composure, his mouth a thin line. “That’s not quite how I remember it.”
“No problem—I’ll refresh your memory.” I drop my purse down on his desk and invite myself into the plush chair across from him. He doesn’t move a muscle—I’m not sure he’s even breathing, honestly. “August 2005. A precocious, geeky teenager spends the summer on glorious Hannsett Island. Meets a charming, cocky boy—that’s your son, Jason King—and decides to lose her virginity. Three positive pregnancy tests later, she comes to you looking for help. You tell her—this scared, eighteen-year-old girl—that it would be better if the pregnancy didn’t exist and that you’ll help her take care of it. You bribe her. Threaten her. And then she and her mother vanish in the wind. Are you following me so far?”
His jaw is so tight, and there’s a vein crawling up the side of his forehead, protruding. “What do you want?”
