23. Gavin #2
I sit up straighter, blood roaring in my ears. “What?”
“She sabotaged you. Quietly. Strategically.”
“But I thought—” My breath catches. Does it matter what I thought? One more lie to add to Vivian’s pile. “But she tried—I saw her chase down a casting director who said they went with someone else.”
“Did you hear the conversation or just see it from a distance?”
My stomach flips. “Distance.”
He nods. “Truth is, Vivian is a great actress. A pity she never used her talents for good instead of evil.”
All this time. The bitterness. This distance between us.
Manufactured by my mother.
I think of every missed opportunity. The scripts I never got to read. the times I walked away from something I loved because I believed I’d inherited his shame.
Parker. I let her go because I knew I’d hurt her the way my father hurt my mom.
“She managed me,” I whisper. “She controlled everything.”
“She still does, doesn’t she?”
A long silence stretches between us.
I finally look at him again, eyes burning. “Why didn’t you fight harder?”
“I didn’t want to mess you up more than I already had.”
“You didn’t mess me up.”
He smiles, faint and sad. “Didn’t I?”
I want to tell him no. I want to say that I would’ve found my way here either way. But the truth is? I don’t know. Because everything I built—all the control, the image, the cold logic—it started with that first lie I believed.
Now I don’t even know which parts of my life were mine.
He must see something in my face, because he reaches across the table and sets a hand on mine.
“I’m sorry, Gavin. I should have done more.
Been better. Been there for you. I let her have full custody because I thought that would be easier on you.
I’ve seen how split custody messes up kids.
I didn’t want that for you. But I’m still sorry I didn’t try harder. Or do something different.”
And I believe him. I nod once. Then look at him. “Why did you stay with her as long as you did?”
He smirks. “Because I was dumb enough to believe in her performance.”
I laugh, bitter and choked. We sit for another long minute.
Then he gets up, walks inside, and returns with an old-fashioned photo album. Sets it in front of me. “Your sisters,” he says. “And your little brother. Half -siblings, I guess. I figured if you’re here…you should meet them.”
The world tips onto its side, and my head is ringing. “I have siblings?”
“Two sisters and a brother. Olive, Clementine, and Basil.”
I blink at him.
His smile turns sheepish. “Odette had a lot of pregnancy cravings, and I just went with it. Happy wife, happy life.”
I laugh sharply, once, still reeling as I flip through the pages.
They have his eyes. My eyes. Dark brown.
We spend over an hour at the patio table.
He tells me about my half-siblings. Shows me pictures from Christmas, their birthdays, even one of them on a trip to Tokyo to see Odette’s mother.
Olive just started college. His second daughter, Clem, is a piano prodigy.
Basil wants to be a chef. They look like a family in the pictures, laughing and vibrant.
I didn’t even know they existed. “Why didn’t I know about them?”
“I do my best to keep their names and faces out of the press. It’s not easy, especially with Olive in college now. They?—”
“Mom has to know about them.”
The jovial glow in his eyes fades. “She does.”
And she never told me.
I sit there holding an old photo of the five of them on a beach somewhere in Malibu—Jamison in sunglasses, Odette smiling in a floppy sunhat, the kids climbing all over both of them—and realize that I’ve been mourning the wrong version of family for years.
I didn’t just lose my dad. I lost the possibility of this.
Not the money, not the house, but the closeness. The life he built without me.
He doesn’t try to explain it away. Doesn’t apologize for it. He just lets me take it in, then pours more tea and waits for whatever comes next.
“Family’s complicated,” he says finally, as if he can see my torment. “It doesn’t get simpler when you grow up. If anything, it gets heavier. More tangled. The older you get, the more you have to choose which threads to keep holding.”
I want to say something. Anything. But my throat’s too tight.
After a moment, he leans back and sets his drink down with a sigh. “We stopped talking to Odette’s father, you know. After everything.”
I frown. “Why?”
He raises an eyebrow, looking at me like the answer should be obvious. “Because once Viv started sleeping with him, it got a little hard to have him at Christmas.”
The words land like a wrecking ball.
The words spit out of me. “No, no, no. You have to be confused. Tom Pillsbury started Icon PR to smooth over Vivian’s hit piece on Odette.”
My father takes another deep sigh. “We aren’t sure when they started seeing each other.
Before the divorce, during, after…the timeline is something neither of them ever owned up to.
We didn’t know it was serious until she brought him to some foundation event and introduced him as her boyfriend.
Odette almost spit champagne down the front of her dress. ”
I’m shaking. I don’t know which way is up. “She’s involved with him ?”
“Was,” Jamison says. “It was a long time ago, and she likes to have a new boyfriend of the week, according to some mutual friends.”
I lean forward slowly, voice rough. “The founder of Icon PR? The man who vowed—and failed—to ruin Vivian? That Tom Pillsbury?”
“You really didn’t know?”
“Do I sound like I knew?” I don’t mean to snap. It just happens.
“Well. Guess you do now.”
It all makes sense now. Every piece of sabotage. Every shadow move. Vivian didn’t just fund Icon. She was sleeping with its architect. The whole rivalry, the calculated chaos, the noise—it wasn’t just personal. It was intimate. Twisted.
She’s been playing both sides for years. The instigator. The victim. Whatever suited her purposes in that moment.
“Plans within plans.” She said that a lot when I was growing up. This was her plan within the plan—using a so-called rival firm to shore up anything she couldn’t let sully VT Global.
I sit back hard in the chair, the plastic armrests digging into my elbows. My ears are ringing. My chest is tight. She didn’t just betray me.
She used me.
My own mother torched my name, sabotaged my career, and then whispered sweet nothings in the ear of the enemy. The enemy who sent Vanessa to destroy me.
Is that why Vanessa dated me?
“Gavin,” Jamison says gently, waving his hand in my face.
I look up, eyes burning.
He doesn’t say anything else. He just reaches across the table, covers my hand with his, and holds it there. The thing I always needed.
The thing Vivian convinced me I would never have.
For the first time in my life, I believe that my father didn’t leave me. Vivian took me from him. She took everything from me.
And I’m going to get it back.