23. Tori
TORI
Even though I was wearing a sweater, I couldn’t stop shivering as we sat in the hospital waiting room, my ass already numb from sitting so long in the uncomfortable plastic chairs.
Hours had passed, and I hadn’t seen my father since they’d loaded him into the ambulance outside his condo, his face covered with a mask, his limp body strapped to a gurney.
My husband had already called my stepmom, and she was on her way, speeding here in her little roadster. The drive from Springfield was a long one. Still, she should be here any minute. I looked forward to Michelle’s comforting southern accent, her soothing words.
“You hanging in there okay?” Stefan asked softly, his eyes full of concern.
I offered a weak smile. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I still love him, even after everything he’s done. I never got a chance to tell him that.” My voice broke.
“He knew you loved him,” my husband assured me, passing me a few tissues.
“All families fight,” Anja added. “The love remains.”
She was sitting across from us, trying to read the same trashy celebrity gossip magazine that had been in her hands since we got here, her gaze unfocused.
We were all shaken by what had happened, and had settled into silence after we arrived at the hospital.
Surely I wasn’t the only one who feared that confronting my father had been what triggered his second heart attack.
He was in surgery now, the nurse at reception had told me. She had no other news.
We were coming up on hour number four.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was a TV in the waiting room but it was on mute. Whenever I glanced up, my eyes were so teary I couldn’t even read the closed captions.
Glancing over at the reception desk, I searched the faces of the nurses, as if their expressions could tell me something.
As if they weren’t handling dozens of other cases, as if they were even thinking or talking about my dad at the moment.
I hated all this waiting. The not knowing.
The déjà vu was strong. It felt like I had just been here with him during his last heart attack. I was a mess.
Despite the fact that I was still mad at him, this wasn’t how I wanted my dad to go, with both of us up in arms with each other.
I prayed I’d get another chance to talk to him and tell him how I felt, despite all his flaws and past mistakes.
I also prayed he’d have the chance to do right by Anja and Max—not because he thought it was the only way to avoid blackmail or litigation, but because he chose to.
Because he wanted to do the right thing.
Maybe he’d even want to be an active part of Max’s life, as I did.
My stomach twisted as I remembered how he had hit the floor. My shaking fingers hadn’t been able to find a pulse, but I could still remember how cold his skin had felt. The whole thing kept replaying in my mind like a horrible movie that I couldn’t turn off.
I watched a doctor stop at the nurse’s station and I straightened, somehow knowing in my gut that this woman had information about my father. Sure enough, the nurse gestured to where we were sitting. I held my breath as she approached, adjusting the lapels of her white coat.
“Are you Senator Lindsey’s family?” the doctor asked. She was older, exuding calm competency, with a regal bearing and a kind face etched with wrinkles and deep laugh lines.
“We are,” I said, managing a nod.
“You can come with me now,” she said gently.
We followed her silently out of the waiting area. At first I thought we were going to be led to a hospital room, where my father would be lying there in bed, pale and hooked up to machines but still alive, just like he had been several months ago, right after my honeymoon.
Instead, we were taken to an empty room.
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor said once the door closed behind us. “I know there is a lot of press hanging around out there and I wanted to give you your privacy.”
I didn’t quite understand and stared at her, confused.
“And my father—?”
Her face said it all, and I felt myself sagging against Stefan already. Her words sounded like they were coming from very far away.
“…has passed away, unfortunately.”
My blood was rushing in my ears, my body going numb, and I struggled to listen to the rest of what the doctor was saying.
“…initial heart attack…sudden cardiac arrest during surgery…everything in our power, but ultimately it was fatal. I am so sorry.”
Anja sank into a chair, silent tears streaming down her face. I knew they were not for her, but for me and for Max. For the tragedy that her son would never get to meet his father. The doctor handed her a tissue and held the box out for me. I shook my head.
I had no tears. Not yet. They would come, for sure, but right now I was still in shock.
The door closed and suddenly I looked up and realized that both the doctor and Anja had left the room. I turned to Stefan, confused, but he just took my hands.
“They thought you might need to take some time,” he said.
I nodded. “It doesn’t feel real. He can’t just be…gone. This doesn’t make sense.”
“I know,” Stefan said, pulling me tight against his chest.
Then my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Michelle.
Where are you? her text read. I just got to the ER entrance. What’s the room number?
My stomach turned over and I showed the text to Stefan.
“I don’t even know what room we’re in right now,” I told him.
He gave me a firm nod. “Don’t worry. I’ll find her and bring her back here.”
I grabbed his arm before he could leave.
“Don’t tell her what happened,” I told him. “Please. She deserves to hear it from me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said, even though I wasn’t. “I should be the one to break the news.”
When he left, I dropped into a chair and let out a deep breath.
The reality of the situation was finally sinking in.
In just a few moments I was going to have to tell my stepmom not just that her husband was gone, but that he had left behind a previously unknown son. I would have to tell her everything.
I put my head in my hands, hating that I had to do this. Hating that my father had left this mess for me to deal with.
Finally there was a soft knock on the door, and when I looked up, I saw Stefan peering through the crack he’d opened up.
“Michelle is here,” he said.
“Okay.” I stood and gestured that he should let her in.
She tore into the room, eyes darting around, tear tracks down her face and her hair disheveled and windblown.
It was obvious she’d just driven the four hours from Springfield at breakneck speed, probably crying the whole way.
My heart broke for her. I was about to make this day one of the worst of her life.
“Michelle,” I said, voice wavering, opening my arms. She came toward me, enveloping me in a hug. Her heart was beating so hard and fast that I could feel it pounding against me.
“Tell me what happened,” she choked out, clinging to me hard. “Where is he?”
As hard as it was to do so, I pulled away and led her to a chair. We both sat down and I took her hands, barely able to meet her eyes.
This might be the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
Although I barely remembered anything about my birth mother, Michelle had been a constant in my life since I was little.
She’d been a true friend to me ever since that first day we’d met and made s’mores together.
It couldn’t have been easy, being such a young woman herself and coming into an already-made family, expected to be a trophy wife and a perfect politician’s spouse, as well as a parent to a precocious child.
I couldn’t speak to the marriage she’d had with my father, though I knew he held her up as the ideal in many ways, but she had been a wonderful mother to me.
She was family, and I loved her. And I was about to break her heart.
“I’m so sorry,” I began, my voice husky. “He had another heart attack. We rushed him right here but then, during surgery, he went into cardiac arrest. He…he didn’t make it.”
She closed her eyes, and her shoulders started to shake with the force of her sobs. The sight almost broke me, but I was far from finished.
“I should have taken better care of him,” she choked out. “I tried to get him to eat better. To stop drinking. But he was so stubborn. He didn’t want to change.”
“This isn’t your fault,” I said, rubbing her back. “There’s nothing you could have done. That any of us could have done. You can’t blame yourself.”
I passed her the box of tissues. Ever elegant, even with her makeup smeared, she pulled a compact out of her purse and carefully blotted her face, fixing it until it looked as perfect as it could. Still, her eyes were red and puffy, already welling up again. She cleared her throat.
“I’ll call his PR person and put together a statement from the family,” she said firmly, transforming into the politician’s wife she had been trained to be. “Does the media know yet?”
I shook my head and took a breath, tapping into my reserves of anger over the situation in order to keep from falling apart. I was barely hanging on. “There’s more.”
“More what?” Michelle asked, searching my eyes.
“There are some…things I learned recently,” I said slowly. “Things that Dad has done over the years.”
Michelle pressed her lips together, leaning back.
She looked wary, but not surprised. No doubt, my father hadn’t been able to keep all of his misdeeds a secret, and under her sweet accent and manners and charm, Michelle was sharp as a tack, and nobody’s fool.
I’d bet anything she was well aware that my dad had stepped out on her during the course of their marriage.
Still, I imagined the details would come as a shock.
But she had to know.
“There was another woman,” I said haltingly, taking her hand in mine again. She only nodded. “Her name was Anja. They met through Konstantin—Stefan’s father.”
I didn’t say anything about the trafficking—I didn’t know if it was safe for her to know too much about what was happening behind the scenes at KZ Modeling—but I told her everything else. About my father’s indisputable infidelity, and how there was a child.
“He refused to submit to a paternity test, and he swore Max wasn’t his, but…”
Michelle’s hand flew to her mouth when I showed her the photo—the same one I’d shown my dad. But instead of ignoring it or shoving it away as he had done, she gently took my phone from me and looked down at the screen with affection and awe.
“He looks just like Mitch,” she said. “And like you did at that age. He’s beautiful.” Her finger traced the boy’s face in the picture.
“He’s a really cool kid,” I told her. “Sweet and smart and…I kind of love him already.”
Michelle shook her head, looking devastated. “I knew your dad fooled around, and I accepted it, but…it’s just a damn shame his last act was to deny his son.”
She handed my phone back to me.
“I think it was kind of a shock, to be honest,” I admitted. “Maybe if he had more time to get used to the idea of Max, I don’t know…it could’ve been different.”
“Oh, I have no doubt,” Michelle agreed. “I think he would have realized how much he’d always wanted a son and embraced him full stop.
You know, we tried to have a baby back in the early days, thinking it might be fun to have a bigger family—of course we loved you to pieces—but we stopped after a few years went by. I just wasn’t able to get pregnant.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never knew.”
“I bet Max would have filled a hole in the family that always existed,” Michelle finished. She blotted the corners of her eyes. “Well. Maybe I never was cut out for motherhood.”
“You were great at it,” I said firmly. “You still are. I’m lucky to have you.”
Tears began to fill her eyes again.
“As much as it breaks my heart that your father didn’t step up for the boy, I’m not going to let that be his legacy.
Just because there won’t be anything for Max in the will, it doesn’t mean I won’t support him financially and emotionally.
And his mother, too. As far as I’m concerned, they’re part of the family. ”
We hugged and then went to find Stefan, who told us that Anja had gone home to be with Max. Michelle mentioned that she would like to meet him—if and when Anja was ready.
“I think she’d be open to that,” Stefan said. “It’s been just the two of them for so long, and to be honest, Max has welcomed all the new faces lately with open arms.”
The three of us went back to our condo, and Stefan helped me set Michelle up comfortably in our guest room. On the drive over, she’d already started making calls to my father’s staff, breaking the news and telling them to start preparing a statement.
I made a tray of tea and toast for Michelle and left it with her in the guest room, where she was still dealing with the logistics of everything. It wasn’t until I was in bed, makeup off, pajamas on, Stefan in the bathroom taking a shower, that the reality of the day finally sunk in.
Tears welled up in my eyes as I grappled with the drowning flood of my conflicting feelings.
My dad was gone, and I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye.
We’d long had a complicated relationship, and it had only become more difficult and strained in the past months.
I’d been mad at him for a while. He’d proven he was a not-so-good man, and he’d done a lot wrong over the course of his marriage and his life. He was as flawed as any human could be.
But even though he was a tyrant of a father, he was my father. He’d given me everything—even though it sometimes came with strings—and I loved him despite his flaws.
What was harder was trying to forgive his connection with my father-in-law and KZ Modeling’s illegal business practices. To forgive how he had treated Michelle and Anja and probably countless other women, and how he had denied Max. Maybe I’d never be able forgive those things.
Still, the tears flowed hot and fast when I thought about the fact that he’d never have a chance to make things right, to reconcile things with Anja or meet his son. He and I would never have a chance to mend our relationship.
I heard the shower shut off and I dried my tears, grateful that Stefan would soon step into the room and slide into bed with me.
I knew that he would hold me close when I cried, and that he would bring comfort to me when I needed him the most. I’d never been more thankful for his presence and his strength.