2. Stefan #2
“I didn’t want to ruin your life, Stefan, and everything that was in front of you. College, your father’s business, your big dreams. You would have lost it all if you stayed with me, if you had to be a father and support a family. You were barely eighteen. I did what I did for you.”
The pain of knowing she’d run from me in order to give me a chance to succeed in life made me sick.
“We would have figured it out,” I said bitterly.
She laughed. “Really? An out-of-work model and an eighteen-year-old kid? What, you’d just let your father disown you and go to business school on a scholarship? Let me sit at home all day in a shitty apartment and be a full-time mother while you worked on your MBA?”
“I mean, I don’t know…” I said.
“And then what?” she went on, leaning closer as her own anger rose. “You’d get your first job, maybe forty thousand a year, and I’d stay home with a toddler while we struggled to pay for groceries and diapers and health insurance? You think that would have been a good life?”
She wasn’t wrong. The first jobs I’d had were with KZ Modeling, and they’d paid well, but without my father’s help I would’ve had to start at the bottom somewhere, pay my dues with long hours and low pay.
We wouldn’t have been able to afford daycare or a nanny.
And Anja was independent. She’d have been the baby’s sole caregiver, with no life of her own.
“It would have fallen apart, Stefan,” she said. “We would have ended up hating each other. You’d be staying with me out of obligation and I’d resent you for being gone all the time.”
As much as I loathed to admit it, what she was saying did make a kind of sense. But that didn’t make her actions right. I went over to the bar to refill the glass, then handed it back to her. She sank back onto the couch and took a long drink.
“I thought you were dead,” I told her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just—”
“I don’t want apologies,” I interrupted harshly. “I want answers.”
Anja looked startled. She said, “Okay,” so softly I could barely hear her and then cleared her throat.
“The thing is…I was trapped in the world of KZM. The modeling, and the…other work. I’d been trying to figure out how to leave for a while.
Get out of the business for good. But there was never a way out.
So when I found out I was pregnant…it was my one chance.
I went to your father to tell him, figuring he’d fire me on the spot.
But he helped me get away. Start fresh.”
“He gave you money,” I said flatly. “To disappear.”
She nodded her confirmation. “The choice was mine, though. I wanted to go. I never told him the baby was yours but…I thought he knew, and that was why he let me go. To hide it. And then the way he’s supported us over the years—I figured it was because Max is his grandson.”
The way Anja was talking now, unspooling the facts one at a time, it was almost like listening to a robot.
I wondered how many times she’d imagined telling me the truth like this, if she was operating on autopilot now, or if maybe she was just disassociating from the difficulty of the moment between us and refusing to let her emotions leak through.
I took the glass back from her and gulped down the burning liquid.
“He didn’t just give you money to leave?” I asked, her words still echoing in my mind. “He kept on paying you to stay away, to hide from me?”
“It wasn’t like that.” Anja looked down.
“He sent monthly payments, enough for us to live on, but he supported me in other ways. Before I left Chicago he helped me get a new US identity. Social security number, birth certificate, new name, everything I needed to start over. I was glad for the change. The privacy. Nobody would ever know I was Anja Borjan the model.”
I nodded, finally lowering myself into the chair across from her.
“So all this time I’ve been searching the world for you, and you’ve been here in the US.
Not dead. Not kidnapped. Not suffering at all.
” I forced myself to keep my voice calm.
“And my father knew about the—knew about Max—the entire time. For eight years. Nobody thought I needed this information.”
We locked eyes, and I could see the tears glistening in hers.
She’d been right here all along. Probably right under my nose. Knowing my father, he would have kept her as close as possible, so he could keep an eye on her and Max.
I clenched my hands into fists. He’d known about the kid—that I was a father—right from the beginning, and he’d never said a word.
If I hadn’t hated him already, this would have pushed me over the edge.
And now that I knew he and Anja had worked together to conspire against me, it was hard to believe anything my former flame was saying.
“I know it wasn’t right to keep the pregnancy a secret,” Anja admitted. “But you were in school.”
“What about later? I wasn’t in school for a decade,” I shot back. “In fact, once I’d started working, I would have been even better able to take care of you. Both of you.”
Anja shook her head. “I knew you got a job with KZM right out of your MBA program—your father told me all about it—and you were building a life, a career. The last thing you needed was a baby to take care of. But finding out you worked for your father? That was one more reason to stay away.” She shot me a glare, getting just as worked up as I was.
“Do you seriously think I’d go back to you, when you were tied up with all the corruption and the lies?
How could you? I would never want to raise a child with someone like that—”
“But you were happy enough to take the company handouts, weren’t you?” I said, cutting her off.