Page 2 of A Mother’s Love

The wedding was lavish but just restrained enough to be elegant and not overdone or pretentious.

Vogue had covered it. The guests were exuberant in a wholesome way.

They danced through the afternoon and into the evening.

Seth and Valerie’s friends were happy for them.

In their three years together they had built a solid relationship, knew each other well, had a wide circle of friends, and always managed to include Olivia.

Halley had written Valerie a letter, telling her how happy she was for her and that she was sure their union would be a success, and Valerie was touched by her mother’s faith in her.

Halley had given her the letter the night before the wedding.

Although Valerie rarely said it, both twins were fully aware of how much their mother had done for them, with no help from anyone.

They didn’t know a great deal about her childhood and youth.

She seldom spoke of it, and avoided discussing the details with them.

She was always reticent and discreet. Both girls had long since understood that she didn’t like to talk about her past, and never explained why.

But it was obvious that she had suffered more than she admitted.

She preferred to live in the present, and had buried the past.

Halley was talented, modest, and enormously successful in her own right, and didn’t make a fuss about it.

She had no one to rely on but herself. That had always been the case.

She was six years old when her mother left her and her father.

It had been a blow at first, but a mixed blessing, as it made her strong and resilient and self-reliant, traits she tried to impart to her girls, even though they didn’t need to be as independent as she had been as a child.

They had her to comfort and protect them.

She had never let them down, and they knew she never would.

She was as solid as a rock and had always been there when they needed her, at every age, and even now.

Whenever one of them called, she was instantly available to them, eager to listen and offer advice, if asked, or even if not.

But she knew she had to let them go and let them fly now, and she had to forge a life of her own without them.

Valerie’s marriage and the girls’ move to L.A.

provided a natural break for all three of them, and a time to grow up, for Halley too.

It was necessary, but nonetheless painful for her. It was a huge change.

—

Halley lay back in a chair on the terrace after everyone had left and she visualized the wedding again.

It had been entirely made up of the couple’s friends, and very few of Halley’s, which was the style of weddings nowadays.

Seth’s mother was there, although he wasn’t close to her.

He and his brother, Peter, were the product of her first marriage.

She’d had three husbands, and she lived in Palm Springs with her current one.

Seth and Peter had no relationship with their father and hadn’t seen him in five years.

He was married to his fifth wife. Halley had talked to Seth’s mother at the wedding and had nothing in common with her.

But Seth and his brother were close. They’d had very little parenting growing up in L.A.

Seth had made a big career for himself in television production.

And Peter was a tax attorney for several famous clients.

The wedding guests were attractive and successful, some of them celebrities with big careers of their own.

They were impressed by Seth’s dazzling success in TV.

He had fallen in love with Valerie the first time he laid eyes on her, when she walked into a meeting at the law firm that represented him.

He had been instantly enchanted by her and attracted to her, and fascinated when he discovered she had an identical twin, and met Olivia, who looked entirely the same, but was a completely different person.

Like everyone who knew them, he had a hard time telling them apart at first. Even Halley made mistakes at times, and they had loved playing tricks on their mother, their friends, and their teachers when they were younger, and even on the boys they dated in high school and college.

Olivia had never had a long-term serious boyfriend and few short-term ones.

Valerie had dated many men, but Seth was the first one she fell seriously in love with. He was her soulmate.

Physically, the twins were indistinguishable, but no two women could have been more dissimilar in personality.

Valerie’s steely determination served her well in her law career.

She was a strong woman with definite ideas, sure of her opinions and willing to defend them.

Valerie had her mother’s strength and perseverance.

Olivia had Halley’s warmth, compassion, kindness, and artistic nature.

Halley felt at times as though her traits had been equally divided between them, but not blended.

She could see herself in both of them, her weaknesses and her strengths.

But their history was not even remotely similar to hers.

She had done everything in her power to make sure of that.

—

Halley had followed in her own French mother’s footsteps when she modeled briefly in college and for a short time after.

She had no long-term ambitions in that direction, unlike her mother.

Halley only did it for the extra money. She’d been in the studio of a famous photographer, Locke Logan, who had been taken with her innocent charm when she modeled for him.

She was shy and retiring, always happy to disappear into the background.

He had taken an interest in her and had taken her under his wing.

He loved photographing her. She had an inner beauty that shone through.

She was twenty-two at the time, and he was forty-eight.

He was married and had three children. He fell in love with Halley, and took a spectacular series of nude photographs of her that became legendary.

You couldn’t see her face but there was an innocence and poignancy to the photographs and a vulnerability that touched him profoundly.

He never had any intention of getting divorced.

Halley was one of a long series of affairs.

His wife was well aware of and tolerated them, and had infidelities of her own in their stormy marriage.

When Halley got pregnant, she hesitated to have an abortion, and after the first sonogram, as soon as she knew she was having twins, she couldn’t do it, and decided to have them.

She asked nothing of Locke. He stuck by her and helped financially to the degree Halley needed.

A small trust from her grandparents gave her enough to live on modestly, and Locke’s contributions made up the difference.

Halley was careful and responsible, and took motherhood seriously.

She put her own youth on hold to take care of the twins and be a good mother to them.

Locke saw them from time to time and was warm and playful with the twins, but fatherhood was not his long suit.

By the time he got divorced a decade later, the affair with Halley was long over.

He remained a figurehead in the twins’ lives, and came to their birthdays and graduations.

He was never on hand for their daily lives.

He loved them, and Halley, in his own erratic, irresponsible way.

Halley made up for it by being everything to the girls.

He had been at Valerie’s wedding but Valerie had opted to walk down the aisle alone.

Locke had never been a father figure to her, but she was happy to have him there.

He was seventy-five years old now, still working though slowing down, and had come to the wedding with the young model he was currently dating, several years younger than the twins.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty.

He and Halley had stayed on good terms. He never interfered, and she hadn’t needed his help in nearly twenty years.

Once her second book became successful, she and the twins had been secure.

Halley never took her success for granted and was grateful she could do that for them.

The twins had lived a very comfortable life thanks to her.

The fact that their parents had never been married posed very little problem and hadn’t bothered them.

And Locke showed up when it was important to them.

He hadn’t been a very present or strong influence in their lives, but he had been good enough and a loving though distant presence at key times.

Halley supplied all the rest and was ever present, fully responsible, and always loving.

She had been the mainstay of their lives, and they of hers.

She had grown up quickly once she had them.

Valerie had been briefly critical of her as a teenager, but once they grew up, both girls agreed that she was a terrific mother, and she had never let them down.

If anything, she held on a little too tight, but their move to L.A.

would change that, which all three of them recognized.

Halley wasn’t fighting it, she was trying to adjust and love them with open arms, and fill her time in other ways.

Nothing would replace having them in her daily life, but she was choosing to view it as an opportunity to grow and to develop a new life of her own, a challenge she was determined to meet with grace, and without being a burden to her daughters.

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