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When it is, only then does he speak. “Wow, Janie. I… I’m sorry you’ve been through a rough time. Do you know what you’re going to do?”

I’m conditioned to think that question has specific subtext when I hear it from a man, and I bristle momentarily.

“I mean about the father,” he adds quickly. Maybe he’s been part of a conversation like this before.

I sink onto the couch and pull my knees up. They don’t go as far as they used to. I can’t wrap my arms around them comfortably anymore. It’s begun, and a petty sadness grips me in a moment of vulnerability; not normally enough to put me over or even register, but on top of everything else it’s that last flake of snow before the avalanche happens.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” I say, my voice tight. “He’s… not exactly a good man. I’m not even sure I want him to be a part of the baby’s life.”

“It sounded like you had a good thing for a minute,” Dad says. “Not that I’m defending him, mind you. It was awful, what he did. Thing is… sometimes people do things they can’t take back and… we don’t always have a choice. It sounds like you don’t have the full story yet. Maybe it’s exactly what it looks like, but maybe it isn’t.”

“Is there a difference between someone who does something shitty because they want to, and someone who does it because they need to impress their evil father?” I ask.

Dad’s quiet a moment. “What I mean,” he says more cautiously, “is that what’s done is done. The baby should have a choice in the matter, when it’s old enough to make that choice. You have to think about that now, while there’s time. We can all be terrible people under the wrong circumstances. That doesn’t mean we have to continue being terrible people, just that we have to find ways to make it better. To make ourselves better people.”

We’re no longer talking about me and Jake and the baby. Or at least, not only those things.

“Believe me, Janie,” he says, “not being able to reach out and hold your own children… it hurts. Jake may need a lot of work, a lot of growing up, but he doesn’t deserve tha

t kind of pain. Not just for being misguided and caught up in someone else’s madness, you know?”

“Yeah,” I whisper.

“But listen,” he says, “whatever you decide to do, can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“I know this is scary, Janie,” he says, his voice warm and genuine. “And I wish the circumstances were better for you. Happier, and less complicated. But if I’m being honest… I’m overjoyed to hear that I’m going to be a grandfather. And I think you’ll make a wonderful mother no matter how this all plays out. I get that it’s painful right now, but is it okay if we just… be happy for a minute? No strings?”

My tears are hot, and I can’t keep my eyes open. I try to turn everything else off and, to my surprise… I do. For a glorious few minutes, I’m actually excited, and I can hear my dad’s happy tears over the phone and it seems, just for that short time, like I have a real, happy family.

By the time we hang up, I can’t believe how much better I feel. Yes, things are terrifying. Any day now I expect some kind of retribution from Jake or his father. Who knows when this story is going to blow up, or what people will say about it. But I have a baby on the way.

It finally hits me.

I’m going to be a mother.

I sit down at my computer, looking over the list of contacts that have received invites to the launch party. Most of them are form letters.

With shaky fingers, I add Jake Ferry to that list, and type out an email to him — professional, but warm. It’s merely an olive branch, that’s all. Not a promise. Not a request for clemency.

Just Simply an open hand. Hopefully that’s enough to get the ball rolling.

Chapter 54

Jake

I’ve managed to go almost two full days without coming under Reginald’s scrutiny, and it hasn’t been easy. He hates it when I turn down his requests to go to this or that event — a strip club where he assures me the girls give head in the champagne room is the most recent invitation — but doing it gives me a high that I can’t get anywhere else.

It also distracts me from the near-constant anger that’s been boiling under my skin since I found out Janie was pregnant and didn’t even bother to send me a text about it. Then again, why would she after what I did?

It’s all so mixed up that I can’t easily separate my anger at her from my anger at myself, and the net result is that I’m furious with the whole goddamn world and there’s nothing I can do about it. I hit the gym, I drink, I defy Reginald just because it feels good to do it, I even leaked a rumor to a few blogs that Reginald and Toia might be on the verge of divorce from his infidelity. Getting a picture of him with another woman at a gentleman’s club wasn’t even difficult — I can’t believe it doesn’t get more media attention.

Reginald suspects I had something to do with it, but I have an alibi for that night and after all, it’s not like he doesn’t have enemies, right?

After he was done rampaging and screaming at Toia like she had anything to do with it, he brings in his team of PR people to sort it out and it becomes the focus of his life for what I hope will be a few precious days without any of his bullshit weighing me down.

And then I let myself fall into a depression. I drive past the beach house, and rent a place up the coast. It’s basically a shack, but I don’t care, and I start thinking about what life would be like if I just turned my back on the Ferry family fortune altogether and lived like a bum on the beach.