Chapter Thirty Hanna
Chapter Thirty
Hanna
A body found. We’d been ordered to leave after that. The police cleared out the stray wanderers and the press. The street
shut down. Wealthy neighbors poured out of their ballrooms and indoor pools to whine about the inconvenience. News about the
discovery slowed down the rapid-fire complaints but didn’t stop them.
Jeremy and I rode back to our house in silence. He never asked about the documents I’d shoved into my purse or the reason
why I was at Xavier’s mansion. He took in information, deflected most of Aubrey’s nonsense, and kept moving.
My son. If this whole situation and all that inheritance broke him, I would set the last bits of Xavier’s reputation on fire.
I would step into the spotlight and start talking.
Jeremy stopped at the table in the dining area. He poked around in the open security alarm boxes. “What’s all this?”
“With the growing interest in our lives, I thought an alarm system for the house made sense.” The notes. They’d pushed me to make this happen, but he had enough to worry about without my adding one more thing I couldn’t explain.
His head shot up as I talked. “Are you afraid?”
Yes. Totally. “Just trying to be sensible.”
“Right.” He walked into the kitchen. Boxes forgotten. Food topped his agenda.
“I can make you something and—”
“I’m fine.”
Ah, we still weren’t talking. Got it.
“Do you want to say something to me?” It was a dangerous lead-in, but I fed it to him anyway.
He hesitated. Continued to stare. “No.”
The answer should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. His flat tone had my attention. “I didn’t tell you the truth because
Xavier and I agreed you wouldn’t know.”
“He didn’t want to claim me, you mean.”
Exactly the opposite. Telling the truth could sever my relationship with Jeremy for good, but I had to tell him a version
he could live with. “I insisted he keep his distance.”
“Why?” No anger. Jeremy’s emotions didn’t flare.
A trick or wishful thinking. Not sure which but I didn’t question the small lane he’d given me to drive through. “Xavier turned
out to be . . . problematic.”
Careful. I had to wade in, not jump in. Biology and genes. Jeremy knew enough to wrongly label himself in a way that had no basis
in reality. He wasn’t Xavier.
“But you had to know what kind of man he was and still you slept with him without birth control. Despite all those lectures you give me about being careful and smart. Using protection.” Jeremy shook his head.
“Ignoring the hypocrisy, you know what people will say about you. About Xavier’s fortune and that trust, right? ”
The last part was the least of my concerns. I’d been dodging the money hungry bitch accusations ever since I went to work for Patrick. “I used birth control. I had no intention of getting pregnant.”
“You were just having sex and having fun . . . with Xavier? An old dude?”
Fifty-nine but not the point. “I was nineteen then. You’re nineteen now. Do you want to talk about why you have sex and how?”
The look on his face could only be described as horrified. “That’s totally different.”
“It really isn’t. Sex hasn’t changed that much in twenty years. The mechanics and the risks are about the same.”
“Mom.”
Right. More tact. More tiptoeing. “I was terrified when I found out I was pregnant, mostly because I was so young and all
alone. Xavier had power and influence. I lacked both. I also didn’t have money or a plan. Not with my mom being gone.”
My grieving over her death made me vulnerable. Xavier capitalized on that. Offered stability. Not that I realized back then.
Six years of therapy and Irene’s support at the café helped me ferret out the root cause of my actions.
“I had other options about whether to be a mom, but I fell in love with you the second I saw you. I vowed to make it work.”
The road had been a lot bumpier than that but keeping him was the ending I never regretted.
Jeremy leaned against the sink, facing me. “What did Xavier think about having a baby?”
This part. Rifling through the pieces I could shade, then share, and the things I could never say stole my last drops of energy. “He was excited. He wanted to have another child.”
It’s another chance for me, Hanna. I can get it right this time.
His positive response terrified me more than the angry explosion I expected because I knew his acceptance meant he had a plan.
To survive, I had to put distance between us. The hope being he’d eventually lose interest, especially once my promise never
to bother him or ask for money proved to be genuine.
Instead of walking away, Xavier used the secret of Jeremy’s parentage as a way of controlling my life. When he figured out
I got an IUD after the birth, Xavier insisted on a no dating/no other men requirement. He talked about his right to sex on
demand but never tried once I had Jeremy. Rumor was he lost interest in Dea after she gave birth, too. Xavier possessed a
myriad of issues with women that I had no interest in dissecting.
No support, money or otherwise. No talking about him or the Tanners to anyone ever. Display a solid work ethic and be a good
role model. Demand excellence from our son. Those were just some of Xavier’s rules.
He considered himself an expert game player and engaged in one with me for almost twenty years. Always threatening to step
in. To ruin me. To make me disappear. Betting that I’d fail even though he had zero interest in the day-to-day of raising
a child on his own.
Xavier took pleasure in having a secret heir and suggesting he could unveil his spare without warning. Substitute Jeremy for
Patrick in a sick ta-da moment.
“Why couldn’t we be a family?” Jeremy shrugged as if the conversation topic didn’t matter even as the look in his eyes said my answer meant everything. “I can’t really imagine throwing a baseball with the guy but maybe something else. Did he at least pay support?”
“I wouldn’t have taken it. His money came with strings. It was one of the ways Xavier controlled people and I couldn’t give
him that advantage.” Honestly, I would have if I had no other choice. Jeremy meant more than my pride. If I hadn’t had Irene
and the café job for support. If I didn’t have a bit of money from Mom’s life insurance.
I will not have my son live like a beggar, Hanna.
You forget, Xavier. He’s not going to be your son. Not to anyone but us.
“But why did it need to be all or nothing? We didn’t need to live together. It could have been like my friends with divorced
folks.” Jeremy looked like he mentally was searching for the right question to ask. “I do remember seeing him. He’d come into
the café for coffee.”
That was the deal. Xavier watched from a distance. He’d swing through public events that made sense for someone of his stature
in town to attend. He saw Jeremy in the café and sometimes at the park when he was younger. “He kept tabs on you. You never
had sleepovers or visited his house, except for a community event here and there, but he’d see you.”
“You kept him away.” Jeremy’s voice grew louder but anger still hadn’t made a full appearance. He seemed too lost in confusion
to settle on another emotion.
I had to. I knew things. Dangerous things.
“That was to protect both of us.” I inhaled but the punch of oxygen didn’t help. Skip the particulars. Go with broad strokes. That was the only way through this that didn’t threaten the way Jeremy saw himself. “He enjoyed his ruthless reputation. Tried very hard to live up to it.”
Would anyone even notice if you were gone, Hanna?
Xavier repeated the line so often it imprinted on my brain.
He chipped away at my defenses and homed in on the hollowness I felt after losing Mom. At never having had a father. But—and
this part sucked—I let him. “I bought into the man he wanted me to see.”
“Vague.” Jeremy continued before I could respond. “Did he hurt you?”
He’d asked the question a different way before. This way was harder to answer because the answer was yes. Definitely. When
I figured out he messed with my birth control and had this disgusting bet with Patrick about which one of them would sleep
with me first I was furious. Humiliated. Sickened by the sight of both of them.
It’s the nature of men, Hanna. We compete for beautiful women, plant our seed, dominate the gene pool to prove our strength
and secure our dynasty. Patrick needed to understand where he stood. I showed him that he was weaker. Beneath me.
All of the negotiating I had to do. All the boundaries I had to draw. The threats I had to throw down. The dangerous game
I had to play while I dodged land mine after land mine.
Jeremy didn’t need to know any of that. Hating Xavier wouldn’t serve Jeremy at all. He could build up this pretend, better-than-reality
version of Xavier and miss him. The real version of Xavier didn’t deserve one minute of Jeremy’s time.
“Not physically, no.”
Jeremy was smart enough not to ask the next question. The obvious one. And I was grateful. One day we could talk about the
emotional devastation. Maybe. But not today.
He pushed off from the counter and headed back to the kitchen table, revealing the clock above the stove, ticking down the
hour. I’d had no idea how much time had passed since I sat by that fountain at Xavier’s house. The outline of a few stray
tree branches showed in the darkness outside the window over the sink.
“I’ll install the house’s alarm system tomorrow morning. We should have put it in when we did the one for the business a few
years ago.” He grabbed the boxes and his car keys and headed for the front door. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Hunkered down in the office. Away from me. Message received.
A knockout punch of sadness made the muscles in my knees give out. I grabbed on to the nearest chair and held on while exhaustion
flooded through me. Through the hazy mix of bad memories and new fears, I kept my focus on Jeremy and what he needed, which
sounded like space. “There’s food in the fridge down there. Daniela wrote out the cooking and heating directions.”
He stopped with his hand on the doorknob. Didn’t turn around. “I can’t imagine what would be so bad that would make you decide
it was better to go it alone with a newborn, not take a ton of money or live in the security of that big house.”
“I know.”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Will you tell me? Not tonight, obviously, but soon.”
“We’ll keep talking about what happened. About Xavier. About what his death will mean for you. About the trust and that house
and the money.”
Jeremy nodded, then left without pushing past my nonanswer.
Disaster avoided.
He deserved to know some pieces. Others might destroy him—how I got pregnant, why I stayed in Sleepy Hollow, why Xavier didn’t
take me to court and demand custody or steal Jeremy away. So many secrets.
How would I tell the most damning one? The one I figured out and it changed everything.
Xavier did kill his wife.