I didn’t realize I was pregnant until I went for a follow-up appointment for my shoulder, and the doctor asked me the date of my last period. I had thought it was stress-related, or perhaps my cycle was off because I had missed a few weeks of my birth control pills, but the blood test confirmed it. It had been a bittersweet revelation, given that the baby’s father and grandfather, Damian and Warren, were embroiled in a ceaseless battle that was being played out in the courts.
Everywhere I went, photographers flashed their cameras in my face. How would they twist the story if they knew I was having Damian’s child? If they knew I was in love with my kidnapper? What would my father say? He was convinced I was going through some kind of mental and emotional breakdown. Would he try to coerce me into having an abortion? Failing that, could he have a psychiatrist declare me incompetent? Force me to give up the baby? How would Damian react to the news? He was going to prison. For how long, I didn’t know, but I knew that it would only make it harder.
I kept the pregnancy to myself, and as difficult as it was, the thought of a new life emerging out of all the chaos was like a beacon of light that got me through the darkness. I sat through long sessions with Nick and my father, hugging my little secret, while they discussed the charges and legal strategies. I wanted the case wrapped up before I started showing so I went through the motions. Yes to this, no to this, yes to this. I sat through Damian’s sentence hearing, four months pregnant, knowing that I had a piece of him, and no matter how wrong or warped or crazy everyone else would think it was, it felt right.
When my father realized I was pregnant, he could not hide his disappointment. He was convinced Damian had used me to get back at him, that getting me pregnant had been a part of his plan, his ultimate revenge against my father. How deluded we become when we start believing that everything in the world is about us. How hard we work to make things fit into our made-up theories. How blindly we follow our worked-up emotions, the good, the bad and the ugly. My father would believe what he wanted. Damian would believe what he wanted. I could either let myself be ripped in half between them, or accept that I would never be able to change their way of looking at things.
At times, I questioned my own sanity. Was I wrong? Had I been naive and trusting? Had Damian played me all along? He couldn’t bring himself to kill me, so had he done the next best thing? Drive a wedge between my father and the one person that meant the most to him? Me. Had he really planned to send me back, carrying his child, so my father would have to live with it the rest of his life?
Used, my father said.
I thought of what Damian and I had shared, the way he looked at me, the way he touched me, and I thought no. An absolute, soul-rooted, emphatic no. I couldn’t think of anything more beautiful, more life affirming than Damian’s lips on mine—his body, my body, melded into one. And now I had a part of him, a part of MaMaLu, to look after, and that’s exactly what I did. Damian had hurt me, my father had hurt me, but I loved them both. No doubt, they felt I had let them down too, but I didn’t want to stay lodged between them, not when I had a new life to think about.
When someone started undercutting Sedgewick stock by selling significant shares at a lower cost and devaluing the company, I suspected Damian was behind it. Investors panicked and started offloading their stock, alarmed by plummeting figures. It didn’t take long for my father to trace it back to Damian, but Rafael had done such a good job of covering up the paper trail that there was no substantial evidence against Damian.
At the time, I didn’t know that Damian was reacting to something my father had done. My father had accepted that I was going to have Damian’s child, but he was never going to accept Damian in my life, child or no child, so he’d sent him a message in prison, a message that had provoked Damian into replying with one of his own. Theirs was a feud that put one man behind bars and another in his grave.
Sierra was a few months old when my father passed away.
“She has your mother’s eyes,” he said to me one morning. He’d been uneasy around Sierra for the first few weeks, but that day he bent over her crib and looked at her for the first time. “Yes. Adriana’s big, brown eyes.”