25. In Which Juniper Makes Another House Call #2
The lady leading us slows to a stop in front of a set of wooden doors, imposing and intimidating. She knocks twice, and a deep voice immediately responds:
“Enter.”
Seriously. That’s what he says. Not Come in , or It’s unlocked . Just Enter.
“This man might be more pretentious than you,” I say over my shoulder to Aiden, who looks affronted.
“I’m not pretentious?—”
“Bust of Shakespeare, Hamlet on the weekends, collector’s editions,” I say, ticking items off on my fingers.
“There’s nothing pretentious about collector’s editions?—”
But he falls silent when the lady clears her throat loudly, giving us a stern, pointed look.
I guess she wants us, her audience, to be paying attention when she opens these crazy-big fancy-pants doors.
So I nod with more deference than I feel, and she turns the handles, swinging the doors open wide.
And look. The interior of Lionel’s house is kind of the worst. But I have to admit: the man knows how to decorate a study.
There are floor-to-ceiling windows and warm wood paneling and bookshelves, so many bookshelves, lined with books in every size and color. It’s not quite Belle’s library in the beast’s castle, but it’s still gorgeous.
Aiden, the snob, looks impressed against his will, and I can see his gaze eating up those bookshelves. I bet he wants to explore just as badly as I do.
Unfortunately, we are not here to explore. We are here to talk to the man seated behind the mahogany desk at the head of the room.
He doesn’t stand up to greet us, even after the lady who brought us in has left and closed the door behind her. He just looks up, over the top of his glasses, and gestures to the chairs opposite his own.
“Hi,” I say, because someone has to say something. “Thanks for meeting with me.”
Lionel Astor’s bright blue eyes trail slowly over me and then Aiden. “I figured if I turned you away today, you would show up again another time,” he finally says, setting down the pen in his hand. “If you’re anything like your mother, that is.”
Aiden snickers under his breath, but I just nod.
“I’m not much like my mother, but you’re probably correct,” I say.
Lionel sighs. “Sit,” he says, once again pointing to the chairs. “And tell me what this is about. I don’t have a lot of time, so please be brief.” He reaches for the glass of water at the edge of his desk.
So I settle into my chair, and Aiden does the same. I take a deep breath.
And then I drop my bomb—keeping it brief, like he asked.
“It is my belief that you are either my father or my uncle.”
In hindsight, maybe I should have waited to speak until he wasn’t in the middle of taking a drink. But it’s too late now; I watch as the water he’s just drunk appears to go down the wrong pipe. He begins coughing, wheezing and choking and turning beet red.
Aiden rolls his eyes and then stands up slowly, rounding the desk. He thumps Lionel on the back several times, way harder than necessary. “Your delivery could use work,” he says to me.
Despite the violent hacking and spewing going on on the other side of the desk, Lionel still manages to push Aiden away from him.
Aiden just shrugs and then returns to my side of the desk, the corners of his lips tilted into a little smirk.
I wait for him to sit down, but he doesn’t; he moves to stand behind me instead, his hands coming to rest on my shoulders, his thumbs stroking lazily at the skin just past my neckline.
“He just has one of those faces, doesn’t he?” he murmurs to me. “So smug. Makes me want to piss him off, just for the heck of it.”
“Mmm,” I say, because he’s kind of right.
When Lionel finally stops coughing, he’s red faced and wide eyed and nothing like I’ve seen on any of his commercials.
“That,” he says in a choked but haughty voice, “is absurd. I am not your uncle, and I am very certainly not your father.” He settles back into his chair, folding his hands in front of him on the desk and staring at me.
“You and my mother?—”
“Were never intimate,” he says sharply. “We never had that kind of relationship.”
“But you wanted one, didn’t you?”
If it’s possible, Lionel’s face flushes even redder. “I did,” he says, the words short and biting. “But Nora did not feel the same way, and I value consent. Now either explain yourselves, or leave.”
I stare at him for a second, looking for any similarities between us that might be hiding behind my clear resemblance to my mother. Unlike in the childhood photo, however, all I can see now that links us is our eyes.
I think I’m going to have to tell him.
“I am going to take a giant risk,” I say slowly, “and have a very frank conversation with you. I don’t care that you’re a hotshot politician or whatever. I don’t care. I just need to know the truth.”
He raises one brow at me but says nothing, and I don’t blame him. Who the heck do I think I am, barging into his office like this and saying these things?
But this is the only thing left I can think to do. So I’m going to do it.
“Do you know Sandra von Meller?” I say.
His eyes narrow, his forehead wrinkling with confusion. “Sandra…yes,” he says. “The daughter of Tonya von Meller. What about her?”
“She’s dead,” I say. It’s difficult to keep my voice so flat, so emotionless, but I think infusing my own feelings into this situation will only make it harder to read Lionel’s.
And his surprise is unmistakable. Unmistakable—and undeniably genuine. His brows hitch just slightly, his vivid eyes widening as his jaw falls open. “I’m sorry?” he says.
“She’s dead,” I repeat, even as I do my best to push away the mental image of her body. “She was killed, presumably because she asked to meet with me about my parents.”
Lionel’s eyes go from wide with shock to completely blank. “Your parents? Nora never said who your father was.”
“What did she tell you?” I say, and now it’s hard to keep a note of curiosity out of my voice. I’ve been wondering about this. If she thought she was assaulted by one of her friends but didn’t know which one, what would she have told them about her pregnancy?
“She told me she slept with someone that summer. Someone she met passing through town. I always assumed she was lying.”
“What did you think was the truth?”
“A friend of ours,” he says, his eyes narrowing on me.
“Thomas Freese? Another one of your Elite friends?”
The split second of hesitation is the only indicator of his surprise.
“Yes,” he says in a reluctant voice. A muscle twitches in his jaw, but he doesn’t look away.
“We were idiots. Teenagers give themselves stupid names.” He pauses, then goes on, “Nora knew I liked her, but she and Tommy were always on and off. I thought Tommy was probably the father, and she didn’t want me to be upset. ”
“I suppose it’s technically possible that Thomas Freese was my father.” I swallow before speaking again. “But when she died, my mother left behind the claim that she was sexually assaulted.”
Silence. Terrible, horrible silence. Even Aiden’s hands have tensed on my shoulders; I’m barely breathing as I wait for Lionel’s reaction.
But he seems to have frozen—not to ice but to stone, his eyes wide, his face draining of color. Even his gaze is unmoving, glued to me.
“That,” he says stiffly, “is not possible. She would have told me. She would have told us.”
“Maybe,” I say, “if she knew who had done it. But she didn’t. It happened at your home,” I go on, tracking every twitch of his muscles, every fleeting emotion that passes through his eyes. “Here, in this house.”
Oh my goodness. I didn’t think of it like that before this very second. I am sitting in the home where I was conceived, where my mother was attacked.
My stomach turns as bile rises in my throat, and I slap my hand over my mouth, forcing deep breaths in and then out until I’m positive I’m not going to hurl all over this man and his fancy desk.
Then I go on. “From what I’ve cobbled together, she was here with you, Thomas, and Cam Verido. It was the summer after your senior year, shortly before the three of you left for school. That night she was drugged and assaulted. She learned she was pregnant several weeks later.”
“In my—” Lionel says, and it sounds like he’s choking on his water once more, only he hasn’t taken another drink. “In my home?—”
“I believe so, yes.” I blink several times, trying to push back the tears that burn in the corners of my eyes.
And then Lionel erupts out of his chair—he stands so suddenly that I jump, and from behind me, Aiden’s hands tighten on my shoulders.
“We would never,” Lionel says through gritted teeth, bracing white-knuckled hands on the edge of his desk and knocking over his glass of water.
It empties quickly all over his desk, staining folders and papers and pooling under his keyboard, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“None of us would ever have done that. Ever. ”
The truth hits me then as his eyes blaze down at me: this man loved my mother. It’s plain as day.
Did he love the woman she became, sad and broken, whose best still wasn’t enough? Because that’s the unfortunate truth about my mother: she tried. I really think she did. And she loved me. But love and trying hard were not enough.
Sometimes those things are not enough.
And is love more than the sum of its parts? If you lose all the parts of yourself that someone fell in love with, will they still love you?
Is there a love that says simply I love you because you exist ?
I don’t know. I don’t know any of that.
But I think…I think I believe Lionel.
“Fine. In that case, what was my mother’s relationship with Rocco like?”
“With—with Rocco ?” he splutters.
I nod. “Your brother has a lot of feelings about you. But I’m not sure I believe what he’s told me.”
Lionel pushes off his desk, standing up straight and rolling his eyes.
It seems like he’s taking a second to collect himself; he runs his hand through his hair and takes a few deep breaths before returning to his seat.
Only then does his gaze return to mine, studying me and every now and then jumping up to where I know Aiden is standing behind me.
Finally he speaks. “I am not, strictly speaking, a good man,” he says. He sounds tired. “But I can guarantee that I am nowhere near as evil as my brother likes to claim, and I certainly am not a rapist.”
“Then tell me about Rocco,” I say softly.
“Your mother didn’t like Rocco,” he says. “He made her uncomfortable. So I never let him hang around us. I kept him away.”
“He made her uncomfortable?” I say, my pulse jumping. “How so?”
“Rocco was very open about his appreciation of your mother. She rejected his advances, but he still came onto her. Over-the-top compliments, little touches, that kind of thing. He refused to take a hint.” He pauses, disconcertion twisting his face, lending wrinkles to his brow.
“Explain to me what happened with the girl, please.”
“We aren’t—we’re not completely certain,” I admit. “I can tell you what I think might have happened.”
Lionel nods slowly but doesn’t speak, which I take as my cue to go on.
“I think your brother was sleeping with Sandra. I think he killed her when she threatened to tell me that he was my—my—father.”
The only change in Lionel’s expression is a slight narrowing of his eyes. “What evidence do you have for all of this?”
So I tell him. I start at the beginning, with the couple at Grind and Brew, and work through everything that has happened since then—Sandy’s note, her dead body, the texts Tonya is still receiving.
The manuscript my mother left behind, Thomas Freese’s suspicious death, Gus’s claim that Sandy was seeing a teacher, the fuchsia sweatshirts, the dead chicken—I take all my rambling thoughts and dump them out on Lionel Astor’s desk in a pile of word vomit and half-formed conclusions.
“So my question,” I say when I’ve finished, “is whether you think your brother is capable of those things.”
“My brother,” Lionel says through gritted teeth, his hands white-knuckled around the now-empty glass of water, “is capable of a great many things. He can be genuinely kind and charming. But he can also be genuinely cruel and manipulative. He’s volatile like that.
He’s not malicious—except toward me,” he adds with a bitter laugh.
“But I have no doubt that he will easily dispose of anyone who threatens him. I imagine—” He breaks off, swallowing hard.
“I imagine if my brother ever killed anyone, he would cry afterward. But he would do it again without hesitation if he thought he needed to.”
I just look at him for a second, trying to gauge his sincerity, trying to think through everything I know and everything I suspect. I jump, though, when Aiden speaks for the first time.
“You know this, and yet you’re letting him work at a school?”
Lionel bristles. “I keep an eye on him?—”
“Not closely enough, it seems,” Aiden snaps.
“All right,” I say, reaching up quickly to pat Aiden’s hand on my shoulder. “All right. Let’s calm down.”
Aiden sighs. “Are you willing to take a paternity test?” he says, and I’m not surprised to hear him still sounding abrasive, bordering on combative.
Lionel bristles again as his eyes jump back and forth between Aiden and me, but then he sighs. “If you’ll sign an NDA…then yes. I’m not your father, Miss Bean, but I do need to know if my brother is.” He pauses, then adds, “You’re absolutely sure that Sandra von Meller is dead?”
“Technically, no,” Aiden says. “We didn’t see a coroner pronouncing her dead. And the sheriff didn’t find a body. But she hasn’t been seen since, and I don’t see how it’s possible that she survived. There was…” He clears his throat. “There was a head wound, and she was motionless.”
“And not breathing,” I add quietly. “I held my fingers under her nose.” I pause. “And you’re absolutely sure that you’re not my father?”
“Your mother and I never slept together,” he says with finality. “But more than that…” He trails off delicately before saying, “I am unable to have children.”
I swallow. I wondered about that. “All right.”
Lionel nods briskly. “Let me see what I can do.” Then he looks at me. “Don’t move. I’ll call for my lawyer.”
* ? I know it’s lame to laugh at my made-up character’s made-up car, but Sunshine makes me giggle every time she’s on the page.