Chapter 1 #2
“Any minute,” I said, frowning.
She nodded, but when I met her eye, she quickly looked away.
Nope, it wasn’t me. “Nora, speak.”
She smiled again, but this time it wobbled. She was nervous. Shit, I’d thought she was going to tell me someone had asked her out at the library again. Or her brother was coming to town. That always threw her off. But suddenly, I wondered if it was something far more serious.
“Do you want to grab coffee tomorrow? At Betsey’s?” she asked.
“No.”
“No?”
“I want you to talk now.”
Nora glanced over at the door where my father was set to come out of, then the others, still wailing balls at each other.
“You’re scaring the shit out of me. Are you dying or something?”
“What? No!”
My relief at that was short-lived. She was okay. But something wasn’t. “Is it Christian?” Her brother was a pilot. I knew she worried about him.
“He’s fine.”
I wanted to keep grilling her. But right then, my phone buzzed.
I would have ignored it, but I knew it might be my agent. It was a call I’d been anxiously awaiting.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I warned Nora as I patted my coat for my phone.
But Nora was already backing up toward the others. “It’s fine, Jude. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I didn’t want to wait, but I’d found my phone. There was a plus sign on the screen, followed by a string of numbers across the top, indicating a foreign call.
“Jer,” I said as I picked up the call, unable to contain my nerves. I’d been waiting for my agent’s call. I’d pitched him about an idea, which wasn’t normally the way we operated.
“All?? Jude?”
Everything in the air seemed to contract at the sound of the woman’s voice, those words coming out in heavily accented French.
No. Not her.
I looked over at Nora, desperately needing an anchor. But Nora had rejoined the others, her back to me. Cap lobbed a snowball at me, but I didn’t even watch it go by, or smile like I normally would. I was too stunned to move.
“‘Ave I reached Jude Kelly?”
Nora lowered her camera, her face angled in concern. “Jude?”
I swallowed, my mouth dry. But Nora’s gaze gave me the strength I needed to finally speak.
“Hello, Farrah.”
I didn’t recognize my tone. It was hard. Cold. Unlike me by a thousand degrees. “Nice of you to return my calls, six years later.”
“Jude, I am…uh…”
What was she, nervous? How dare she be nervous when she was the one who’d walked out on me, and worse, our son?
I’d spent weeks trying to soothe a helpless baby who wouldn’t stop crying for his mom, trying to get him to forget.
Then I’d spent years trying to convince him it wasn’t his fault his mom wanted nothing to do with him.
Blood roared in my ears. “What do you want, Farrah? Do you want to talk to your son? You know he’s six now, right? You’ve missed six years of his life and now you’re calling out of the goddamned blue to—”
I hesitated first because everyone was staring at me.
I didn’t get mad like this. I was the happy guy in the family.
The easygoing one. Midway across the open space along the side of the hotel, I saw my dad, next to my sister Cass and her husband, finally out to meet us.
But Dad had gone stiff, staring at me with his eyes wide like I’d been replaced by some evil twin.
Which, apparently, I had. Because I heard crying on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry, Jude. Désolée. I want to explain. Please let me.”
It was Cap who broke the spell. Because of course it was.
My six-year-old son had just heard me ream out his mother over the phone.
I was being the opposite of the father I swore I’d be when I took him into my arms all those years ago, the ink still drying on the non-disclosure agreements Farrah’s parents had made me sign.
I could still hear him wailing over my dulled promise that they’d never hear from us again.
And every time I ignored that promise and tried to get in contact with my son’s mom, late at night, when I felt so lost and alone, a brand-new parent on my own.
“Dad?” Cap said, his little lip wobbling. “She found us? Why are you yelling at her if she found us?”
My heart seized then, into a tight, hard knot. Then it released, shattering at my feet as I took a step toward my son. But instead of running toward me and jumping into my arms like he normally did, he shook his head, then turned and ran the other way. “Cap!” I exclaimed.
“I’ll get him,” Nora said. She didn’t hesitate; she sprinted after him.
“He is there?” Farrah said on the other end of the line, her voice wobbly. “Jude, our son—Jack—is there?”
“It’s Cap,” I said, my voice wooden. I held the phone away from my face, Farrah’s voice tinny now in the night air.
Then I reared my arm back—my tennis arm, the one the press said devastated on the court—and threw my phone as hard as I could.
I’d been aiming at the streetlamp fifty feet away, and I hit it with a crash, my phone exploding into pieces.
Then, for the second time that night, I fell to my knees.