“Why didn’t you tell me?” He put away the paper cone of peanuts he was holding with such calm and precision that goosebumps raced across my skin. For the first time, I noticed the folder on his lap. He opened it, scanned the top sheet, and threw it at me. It fluttered through the air and landed beside me.
Damian didn’t give me the chance to pick it up. He flung another sheet at me, and then another and then another, until they were floating like feathers around me. I grabbed one of them and skimmed over the contents. From the private investigator’s logo on the top, it looked like a report on me: my address, financial records, marital status. I picked up another one. It was a copy of Sierra’s birth certificate. The next one outlined my job, my schedule, my work in Valdemoros. Where I’d been, what I’d done, where I’d lived, my credit card statements, magazine subscriptions—everything and anything pertaining to the last eight years was laid out before me in letter-sized black and white pages.
Damian emptied the entire folder on me. When it was done, and the last sheet flitted to the bed, the fear I’d felt about his reaction was replaced by something else, a sense of outrage that he could presume to stuff everything I’d been through since the island, into one shiny, glossy folder and throw it all in my face.
“You want to know why I didn’t tell you about Sierra?” I asked. “Because this is what you do, Damian.” I scrunched up the papers in my fists. “You research, you plan, you plot your way to vengeance. I had a photo of Sierra when I came to see you in prison. I wanted you to know we had a daughter. My father was gone. I thought there was no one left to fight, but I was wrong. I was wrong, Damian, because you were still fighting. You’re always fighting! You put my father in the grave, but I came anyway, to give you a daughter. But there was no room for us because you were still the same. Still wrestling with your demons. And if you think you know everything there is to know about me from this report, I have news for you. You don’t have a clue, Damian.”
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.