Chapter 8: What My Father Said
I stepped back and let him in.
He stood in the middle of the suite's sitting room and looked at everything in it — the blanket on the couch, Lily's shoes beside the door, the room service tray — the way a man looks at evidence of a life he wasn't part of.
"She's asleep?" he said.
"Yes."
He nodded.
He didn't sit down.
He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at the floor, and I waited, because I had spent twenty years of my life waiting for my father to say the right thing and had long since stopped expecting it.
"Gerald Frost called me this morning," he said.
"I know."
He looked up.
"He told me Alexander Sterling was planning to destroy Mark.
That if I filed the petition, Sterling would have to back down to protect his own reputation." He stopped.
"I believed him."
"I know that too."
"He told me you had taken money to stay away from Sterling.
That you had made a deal five years ago to keep Lily hidden and now you were trying to renegotiate it." My father's voice was dry.
Almost toneless.
"He made it sound like you were—" He stopped again.
"Like I was what?"
"Like you were running a scheme."
I looked at him.
"And you believed that," I said.
He didn't answer immediately.
"I signed the paperwork at nine this morning," he said.
"By ten, Chloe had called me in tears.
By noon, Frost called back and said the situation had changed and he was withdrawing." He sat down heavily in the chair near the window.
"I called my own lawyer at one o'clock.
Spent two hours learning what I had actually signed my name to."
"And?"
"And I was used," he said.
"By Mark Reynolds and a lawyer I'd never met, to file a legal action against my own daughter." His jaw worked.
"Using my granddaughter as the mechanism."
The room was very quiet.
"Dad," I said.
And then stopped.
Because I had a hundred things to say and none of them were going to come out cleanly.
"Your mother told me about the money," he said.
"The thirty thousand.
Where it came from."
"She only found out today."
"I know.
She called me after she spoke to Alexander." He rubbed one hand over his face.
"Emily.
Why didn't you tell us you were pregnant?"
And there it was.
The question I had been carrying for four years.
"Because of what you would have said," I told him.
He looked up.
"You would have told me I made a bad choice," I said.
"You would have told me I was irresponsible.
You would have offered to take me in on the condition that I did everything your way.
And when I didn't, you would have held it over me forever." I kept my voice level.
"And I could not spend Lily's entire childhood watching you use her to make me feel small."
My father was quiet for a long time.
"Is that what you think I would have done?"
"It's what you have always done," I said.
"To me.
And to Chloe.
And to Mom." I sat down across from him.
"Last night you shoved me into a fountain while I was holding your granddaughter.
And then you stood there with your drink and told me I always ruin everything."
He flinched.
"That's what you do, Dad.
That's who you have been my entire life.
And I stopped waiting for it to change a long time ago."
He didn't argue.
That surprised me.
He just sat there with his hands on his knees, looking at nothing.
"She's beautiful," he said finally.
"From what I saw."
"She is."
"She looks like—" He stopped.
"Like Alexander," I said.
"Yes."
"She looked at me when you came out of the water," he said.
"Before everything went sideways.
She looked at me and she wasn't scared.
She was—" He seemed to struggle for the word.
"Curious."
"That's Lily," I said.
"She's always curious."
He looked at his hands.
"I'd like to know her," he said.
"If you'd allow it."
The room was very still.
I thought about what that meant.
What allowing it would require.
What it would cost Lily if I allowed it and he did what he had always done.
What it would cost her if I refused and she grew up knowing I had made that choice.
"That depends on you," I said.
"Not on me."
He looked up.
"What does that mean?"
"It means that if you want to know her, you have to be someone worth knowing." I held his gaze.
"No more of what happened last night.
No more of what happened my entire childhood.
If you cannot be that person, she will not miss what she never had.
But if you can—" I stopped.
Let that sit.
"She asked me this morning why everyone was staring at her.
I told her because she was wearing a very important man's jacket and it was very big." A pause.
"She thought that was a reasonable explanation and moved on immediately."
My father almost smiled.
It looked like something that hadn't been used in a while.
"She sounds like a handful," he said.
"The best kind," I said.
He stood up.
"I'm going to make it right with Alexander," he said.
"Whatever that costs."
"That's between you and him."
"And with you."
I stood up too.
We looked at each other across the room.
He had pushed me into a fountain sixteen hours ago.
He had signed his name to a legal document designed to harm me.
He had also driven here alone, at night, without bourbon, to say the things he was saying.
It wasn't enough.
Not yet.
But it was more than I had expected from him in twenty years.
"Good night, Dad," I said.
He nodded once.
He let himself out.
I stood in the middle of the sitting room for a long moment.
Then Lily's voice came from behind the bedroom door, soft and half-asleep.
"Mommy?"
"Right here," I said.
May you like
"Okay," she said.
And went back to sleep.
