She shrugged. “I called Tommy. He said he’d get a message to you, but I never heard back.”
Tommy. He was a childhood friend, one of the guys who came to New York with me that summer.
“He never said anything.”
“And then the lawyer went to your house. He said he spoke to you. That you told him yourself that you didn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
“I never spoke to a lawyer. When did he go to the house?”
Julia thought about it for a second, her fork still tearing at that innocent chicken. “It would have been about February or March.”
“I was still at Stanford then.”
Tears filled her eyes again. “You never knew, then?”
“Knew?”
“I was pregnant, Harry. When you left, I found out a couple of weeks later.”
It was like she’d doused me with freezing water. Every nerve in my body just went numb. I stared at her, unable to truly comprehend what she was saying.
“Pregnant?”
“We were so careful. I couldn’t figure out…something broke or maybe that night in the shower…I don’t know. My parents hit the roof. My dad wanted me to have an abortion, but my mom grew up Catholic. She wouldn’t let that happen. I wanted to keep him, but they refused to help me if I did that. I would have been on my own, and I couldn’t make enough money with my job at the deli to take care of kid.”
“What did you do?”
“I gave him up for adoption.”
I felt seriously ill then. My head was spinning and my stomach felt as though someone had deposited a hot rock there. I leaned forward a little, trying to relieve the pressure that I knew, logically, was all in my head. Then I poured another glass of wine and swallowed a healthy slug, but that sat even heavier on my stomach and made the pressure worse.
“You signed the papers. At least, the papers the lawyer came back with had your signature on it. And I picked this great couple. They had a little girl they said was so excited to have a little brother. It seemed perfect. I’d been an only child and I didn’t want my son to grow up that way…”
She was babbling now, her words high pitched and so quick that I could barely keep up with her. I reached across the table and took her hand.
“Who were they? Where do they live?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know much about them. I was only given their first names—Dale and Robin. They lived in upstate New York then, but it was fifteen years ago.”
“Fifteen years?” I shook my head, trying to imagine that I was a father. And that my child was fifteen years old.
It was overwhelming.
I stood up and tossed a handful of bills on the table before walking out. I made it to the corner before I lost what little I’d eaten on the sidewalk.
I was a father. I had a child out there somewhere and someone chose to hide that information from me.
I knew who it was. My father. He’d never wanted me to teach. He’d never wanted me to have a normal life. He groomed me from the time I was a toddler to take over the business, to become the CEO I was now. He had all these grand plans for his children. My brother, Randy, let him down from the very beginning. So he put all his hopes and dreams on me. And his death—if I didn’t know it was impossible, I might suspect he got sick on purpose.
My father did this. He hid my child from me.
If he hadn’t, how different would my life be now?
“You have to go find him,” my sister, Libby, told me a few days later when I poured the whole story out to her. “He’s your kid. You owe it to yourself to know he’s okay.”
And that was exactly what I planned to do.
Chapter 1
Penelope
I rushed into the house, yelling at the top of my lungs.
“JT, get up! We’re late!”
There was no response. But I hadn’t really expected there to be.
JT was my fifteen year old brother. And, since I go to bed at eight o’clock every night because I have to get up at three to make donuts at our family owned bakery, he’s pretty much left to his own devices most night. And he takes advantage of that. He usually stays up until one or two o’clock, watching horror movies and eating everything in the house. The evidence of his late night escapades were scattered around the living room in the form of empty potato chip bags and several dishes with everything from congealed butter and melted cheese stuck to their surfaces.
I gathered dishes as I made my way through the house, dumping them in the sink with aloud clatter.
“JT, seriously,” I muttered as I shoved open the door to his bedroom a minute later.
“Penny, get out!”