Chapter 12
Taz
Back in LA, five days after Molly leaves, the kid looks like he's going to puke on my kitchen floor.
Jensen stands in the doorway of the LA house, twenty-nine and rail-thin, his sandy hair in the careful part he's worn since I hired him out of business school, sweating through his polo shirt at nine in the morning, and I already know whatever he's about to say is going to ruin what's left of my life.
He's got that look, the one people get when they've been carrying a toxic secret and it's finally eating through the bag.
"Mr. Williams," he says, "I need to—can I come in?"
I step back from the door. "You look like hell."
"I feel worse." He walks past me into the kitchen, and his hands are shaking.
Actually shaking, the way a man shakes three days into quitting whiskey.
He stops at the island and grips the edge of the counter like it's the only thing keeping him upright.
"I have to tell you something. Before the lab calls. Before anyone else does."
My gut goes cold. "What about the lab?"
"The independent one. The one you ordered through your doctor." He swallows hard, and I watch his Adam's apple bob. "The results are going to come back tomorrow, maybe the day after, and when they do, I need you to hear it from me first. What I did."
I don't sit down. My feet won't move. I just stand there in my own kitchen, five days into the worst week of my life, and I wait for Jensen to blow up whatever's left.
"Hudson," he starts, and his voice cracks. "Hudson is mine."
The words don't land right away. They sit there, nonsense syllables, and then they flatten me.
"What did you just say?" I ask.
"He's my son. Mine and Kendall's." Jensen's face crumples, and for a second I think he actually is going to throw up.
"The paternity test you saw... I faked it.
The paperwork came through me, and I knew how to make it look legitimate.
The document I sent wasn't a genuine lab report.
The number on it came through me, and I arranged the callback.
You never spoke to the lab. The independent test you ordered through your doctor, that one's real.
It's going to show you're excluded. Because you are. You always were."
I'm gripping the back of a kitchen chair so hard the wood creaks under my fingers. "You're telling me I've spent months believing I had a son with another woman, and it was a lie?"
"Yes," Jensen whispers.
"You're telling me my wife left me—" My voice breaks, and I hate it. "My wife took our daughter and disappeared because of a night that never happened?"
"Yes." Jensen's crying now, silent tears tracking down his face. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I know that doesn't—"
"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Don't you dare apologize to me right now. Tell me the rest. Tell me all of it."
He nods, wiping his face with the back of his hand.
"Kendall came to me last autumn. She knew you trusted me to handle the paperwork.
She had a plan. She said if we could make you believe the baby was yours, you'd take care of us.
Both of us. She said you'd never let a kid of yours go without, even if you didn't want her anymore. "
"And you just went along with it?" I ask.
"I loved her." He says it like it explains everything, and maybe to him it does. "I was stupid enough to think she loved me back. She said once we had the money secured, once Hudson was older, we'd disappear together. Start over somewhere. She made it sound like a future."
I want to put my fist through the wall. I want to put my fist through him. But I don't move, because if I start I won't stop.
"The night in Santa Barbara," I say, and my voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere far away. "The hotel room."
Jensen nods. "She drugged your drink. At the table, when you weren't looking. You were barely conscious when she got you to your room. But nothing happened. She put you to bed and she left. She told me every detail, like it was funny. Like it was a game she'd won."
"And she was already pregnant when she did it," Jensen adds, barely audible. "With mine. Four weeks along that night. More than two weeks ahead of Molly. Hudson didn't come early. He came right on time."
I think about the bump under that fitted dress on my doorstep. About how easily I accepted the due date she gave me.
I think about that morning. Waking up confused, head pounding, no memory of anything after barely one glass of wine. The sick guilt that's lived in my chest ever since.
"Can you prove what she planned?" I ask. "I need more than another story from you."
He nods too fast. "I kept her messages. The instructions about the wine, the report. I'll hand them over. You can read them yourself."
I pull out the chair and sit down hard, because my legs won't hold me anymore. All this time. All this time I've been carrying the weight of a betrayal that never existed, and Molly's been carrying the weight of believing it did.
"The morning Molly and Clem were supposed to come home," I say slowly. "Hudson wasn't crashing."
Jensen shakes his head. "He was stable. His team hadn't called for you. Kendall called you because she knew it would work. She knew you'd come running if she said he was dying."
"And I did." I remember Molly's face in that hospital room. The exhaustion, the hope, the moment I watched it all drain away when I told her I had to go. A nurse offered to check. Molly asked for a plan. I ignored both of them because I thought running upstairs was easier than listening.
Jensen has to stop before the next part. "When Molly was in labor. Your mother found me, said they'd paged you and you didn't answer. Asked me to bring you down." He won't look at me. "I told her I would."
For a second I can't hear anything.
"I didn't pass on the message," he says to the floor. "I told the maternity desk I'd found you and passed the message on. Then I went back to Kendall and I—I just didn't tell you."
I think about Molly, terrified, waiting for me.
"My phone was off," I say slowly. "That's on me. I turned it off and I never checked it, not once in six hours." The words taste like ash. "But you looked my mother in the eye and lied to her."
My voice goes very quiet. "My wife was giving birth. You knew exactly what you were keeping me from."
He drops his eyes. "I have no excuse."
My hands curl on the table. I could hit him. I could hit myself harder for ever trusting him.
But I can't outsource the blame. I silenced that phone myself.
"Everything I kept goes to your lawyers," Jensen says. "Texts, emails, the communications between me and Kendall planning all of it. The drugging, the fake results. The police can have it too. I'll testify to whatever they need."
"Why?" I look at him, really look, and I see a man who's been hollowed out by his own choices. "Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because I can't live with it anymore." His voice drops to almost nothing.
"Because I looked at my son yesterday and realized I've spent his whole life lying about who his father is.
Because Kendall's never going to leave with me.
She's never going to love me. I was just a tool, same as you. And I can't—I can't keep doing this."
I sit with that. The house is quiet around us. This house where Molly and I were supposed to build a life.
"You're finished working for me," I say finally. "You're going to give everything to my lawyers today. Every text, every email, every document. You're going to cooperate fully with whatever investigation follows. And then you're going to leave my property and never come back."
"I understand," he says.
"I'm not done." I stand up, and Jensen flinches back.
"You're Hudson's father. That kid didn't ask for any of this.
So you're going to step up and be a parent to him, whatever that looks like after the lawyers and the courts sort through this mess.
But that's going to take time and assessment and you earning the right to be in that boy's life.
You don't get to waltz in and play dad just because you confessed. "
"Understood," Jensen says, nodding hard. "It's not—I have to prove myself."
Jensen keeps his eyes down. His hands shake as he slides the folder across the kitchen table—call logs, forged letterhead, wire transfers.
"Kendall paid me, too," he says. "When I tried to stop, she threatened to expose me. There's no excuse. I know there's no excuse."
I call my lawyer before he's finished talking.
"I need you to send everything—Jensen's confession, all the documentation—directly to Molly's lawyer. Today. And the independent lab result goes straight to her the moment it's available."
"You want to include a message, or—"
"No conditions. No request for a meeting. Just the facts." I pause. "She's free to ignore any apology I send separately."
I hang up and look at Jensen. "Get out of my house."
He goes. I hear his car start, hear the gravel crunch as he drives away, and then I'm alone with the rubble of everything I believed.
I don't remember the drive to the condo. One minute I'm standing in my kitchen, the next I'm pounding on Kendall's door with a knock loud enough that neighbors peer through their peepholes.
She opens it looking perfect, of course.
Full makeup, hair done, wearing a cashmere wrap I probably paid for.
Hudson's fussing somewhere in the background, and for one disorienting second I look at him and try to see myself in his face.
I can't. Nobody could. I just told myself I was bad at seeing resemblances.
"Taz." She smiles, not the least bit surprised. "Come in."
"I'm not staying." I don't cross the threshold. "Jensen told me everything."
The smile flickers, just for a second, before she smooths it back into place. "Jensen says a lot of things. He's dramatic."