Epigraph #6
“She found us. Found you,” Billie said, and she was beaming at the girl now. “She spotted us at the airport when we first arrived home. She followed me to the store. Thinking you were with me I think?” she asked, and the girl nodded. She squeezed the girl’s arm. “Babe, this is your daughter.”
She kept saying that, that this girl was my daughter, but that didn’t make sense.
“I also saw you at a country club,” the girl went on to say. “After I realized you weren’t with Billie, I did some digging. You posted a picture while playing golf and tagged your location.”
I did do that, and I blinked again when the girl took out her phone. She brought up one of those genealogy apps. In fact, it was the same app that I’d recently registered with. Both Billie and I did, for fun. We wanted to know more about our heritage.
“I got an email that my father registered on this app,” the girl said.
Her father.
“That’s you. You’re…” She paused, then looked at Billie. Billie nodded at her. Like my wife was her strength to push on. The young woman faced me. “You’re my father.”
I’m her father.
I stared at the girl’s phone, then the girl. I followed the lines of her face and features that did look like mine. In fact, she looked a hell of a lot like my sisters just, well, tan. It was a natural tan, like she was a mixture of races. Maybe Black or Latinx.
“You’re my…” I paused, then glanced at my wife. It was as if she was my strength now, and when she nodded again, smiling, I faced the girl. I blew out a breath. “You’re my daughter.”
My daughter.
“Lady,” she said, and I blinked again. She laughed. “My name is Lady. My parents were obsessed with Lady and the Tramp.”
Her parents. Her father. I’m her…
Lady put out her hand in a way that held nothing but confidence now. It was like she was just waiting for permission. I put my hand in hers.
“Lady,” I said, my mouth dry. “Nice to meet you.”
We shook hands for a moment.
We shook hands for a long time.
Lady’s full name turned out to be Lady Belmont. She sounded like royalty and her background wasn’t far off. Apparently, she was adopted into a very esteemed family as an infant.
“Your mother?” I asked her at one point. She and I were sitting in my office now, but I wasn’t behind my desk. We sat on my leather couches, and she continued to blow my mind. I not only had a child, but an adult daughter who I had no idea existed. I swallowed. “Your biological mother, I mean?”
Lady told me her name, and, though I remembered her, we’d only hooked up the one time.
It’d been at a party before I met Billie.
I threw so many parties back then. I remembered Lady’s mother was just as beautiful as Lady, but had rich, dark skin and the ability to captivate a guy from across the room. She had that night.
Lady chewed her lip. “She died a few years ago. Cervical cancer,” she said, and my stomach tightened.
She frowned. “I never knew her, but her family told me what happened to her. After I graduated from high school, I went looking for information about you and her. There was nothing about you in my file, but I had my mother’s information.
I found her family, and they told me she passed. ”
Apparently, they also told her why her mother put her up for adoption. Lady’s mom had been a young college student with aims for a career in business, just like me.
“I wish she’d have told me about you,” I said. I would have taken her. She would have been mine, and I wouldn’t have hesitated.
Lady smiled. “Maybe she didn’t want to bother you, and I could imagine she was scared too. She was young and in school.”
She was young. We both were, but I would have stepped up.
Billie came into the room then. She’d been in and out. She didn’t need to give me space, but she did for the majority of the conversation. Now, she had coffee in her hands and handed one to Lady.
“Thanks,” Lady said, my daughter. I couldn’t believe it. We both ended up looking at our apps, and she was listed on mine. I was just so busy with work and travel that I hadn’t noticed. I missed it. Missed her.
“I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there,” I told Lady. Billie brought me coffee too, but, instead of taking it, I took her hand. I squeezed it. “We would have both been there.”
Billie and I had both wanted children, but it just hadn’t been in the cards for us. Infertility was a son of a bitch, and it’d been hard back then when we were trying. And to find out I had a kid out there the whole time? One we could have both been there for? Loved…
Billie sat down beside me. She squeezed my hand back. “We would have.”
Lady simply stared at us. She did with a kindness and an air about her I just knew came from a kind soul.
This young woman was good and kind, and I knew that after only spending an hour or so with her.
She was also confident and self-assured now that the ice had been broken.
Something told me this girl had no problem standing up for herself in her regular life.
“I was okay,” she said, and it sounded like she was. Again, she’d been adopted into a pretty affluent family from what she explained, and they put her through the best schools. She also graduated top of her class in college and currently had a job in communications. She was all right. She was okay.
Even still, a part of me mourned for the time we didn’t have together. If only her mother would have told me, I would have been there. Again, no questions asked.
Lady and I exchanged contact information, and, even though I offered to drop everything and take her anywhere she wanted to go, she said she’d take a ride share back to her hotel.
“I already dropped enough on you two, stalked you,” she said, and both Billie and I laughed.
She’d popped up in places we’d been over the week, but that was okay.
Her running into us at the airport had been completely coincidental as it turned out.
Like happenstance had brought us all together.
Her determination to follow us also told me a lot about her.
Apparently, Lady had even found her way over to the kids’ housewarming party today, which was where she and Billie got to talking.
Lady grinned. “But if you’d both be willing to have breakfast tomorrow, I hear my hotel has a great one.”
“Forget the hotel. We’ll have breakfast at the house tomorrow,” I said. “That is, if that’s okay.”
Lady beamed and what a smile she had on her. It was probably her mama’s smile.
“That’d be great, LJ,” she said.
“Great.”
I didn’t want to let her go but walked her down to the street. I put her in a taxi and waved after the car took off into the night.
Billie walked up beside me, and I put my arm around her.
“How are you doing?” she asked me, and I didn’t have words at first. I was feeling so many things but one raised high above the rest.
“Complete,” I said, and when I gazed down at her, she smiled at me. She then hugged me, and I hugged her so tightly back.
“I know the feeling,” my wife said, and that only made me hug her stronger. The fact that she said that even though Lady wasn’t her kid… Somehow it didn’t matter in that moment.
Somehow, in the impossibility of a crazy situation, it was okay.
Billie
Breakfast with LJ’s daughter turned into a week-long celebration with friends and family.
LJ’s mom and sisters drove in, including his sister Dasha, who was married to LJ’s friend Niko.
LJ did not love that one of his good friends married his sister.
There was an age difference there, but it wasn’t that big, and eventually, he’d come around to it. Anyway, everyone loved Lady.
What wasn’t there to love?
LJ’s daughter was magnificent. She worked at a magazine in Chicago, where she was born, and was so stinkin’ smart.
Apparently, she’d graduated top of her class and was so driven.
She talked about her big plans for her life in communications and sounded so much like LJ in those early days of his real estate journey.
He’d turned a small business into a global empire, and I was so proud of my husband and the life we’d created together.
I actually worked with him in the business.
“Lady, when do you go back to Chicago? We should all go out before you go. There’s this wonderful club downtown,” Sloane said. She was completely jazzed to have another girl in the family.
“Yeah, we should, and we can all get dinner before,” Dorian, Sloane’s husband, suggested.
“We want to get to know you better.” Ares grinned. He had his arm around his fiancée, Fawn. Ares raised a drink to Lady. “Make up for lost time a little.”
They were all there today, our friends’ sons and daughters. They took Lady under their wing, even though she was a little older.
“That’d be great. I took a short leave from work so I can stay for a little while,” Lady said, and I watched LJ during the conversation. He hadn’t left Lady’s side of course. He was like a sponge wanting to know any and everything, too.
LJ smiled so wide watching his daughter interact with his friends’ kids. It was like everything was coming full circle for him, full circle for us. Lady may not be my daughter, but I imagined a reality in which she was. I would have raised her as my own.
That wasn’t where the cards fell, but that was okay. Lady seemed happy. She was okay and our friends’ children welcomed her into this family with open arms.
“Ah! This is so wild,” Bow said. A sweet little thing, she was sitting between her boyfriends, Bru and Wells.
It was crazy to think this whole thing began at their housewarming party.
Lady had told me who she was there, and the whole room had been there to witness.
I’d dropped my drink in shock and obviously gained attention.