Damian saw the snuffed out candles in Skye’s hands, the bags of decorations by Nick’s feet, the stunned looks on their faces. He was the outsider, the wild card who had upset the balance of their perfect evening. He had been let out of prison a few months early but he wished he were still behind bars, so he could lock out the pain. Not knowing had been hell, but this, this was a completely different level of torment.
Damian got up, crushed marigolds sticking to his jeans, and turned into the swell of people surrounding them. He was thankful for the nameless, faceless sea of bodies around him. He imagined this was what it felt like to be dead among the living.
“Get me out of here,” he said, when he found Rafael. “Get me far, far away.”
I SKIMMED THE SURFACE BETWEEN sleep and wake, half submerged in wild, crazy dreams, where Sierra, Damian, and I were green iguanas, sunning ourselves on a deserted island. I was the one with the tail chopped off, but it didn’t matter because it was warm and beautiful. We were eating ice cream beans, and Sierra kept chewing on the seeds instead of discarding them.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
“Don’t,” I mumbled, the sound of my voice nudging me awake.
It had been like that ever since I’d seen Damian at the cemetery two weeks ago—restless nights spent tossing and turning until the sheets ended up in a contorted pile at my feet. Seeing Damian again had set off tiny explosions that left me quaking in their wake. Learning he had bought Casa Paloma, and that Sierra had been spending time with him had come as a bigger aftershock. Being a single mum had always been a challenge, but now I felt both foolish and neglectful for thinking Sierra was going straight home after school, as instructed. The fact that there had been no sign of Damian since The Day of The Dead left me uneasy. On the outside it looked like I had it together, but on the inside I was a complete mess.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
There it was again. That damn sound. Exactly like—
I bolted upright and turned on the bedside lamp.
Damian was sitting on a chair by the foot of my bed, watching me. He didn’t move when the light came on; he just continued tossing peanuts into his mouth. It was impossible to ignore how he owned the space, how he molded it to suit his presence, a palpitation-inducing silhouette from my past, all dressed in black. He might as well have been sitting there all along, all eight years that he was away, because he was there in my head, insinuated in the cracks of my heart. I saw him every day in Sierra’s face, in the strong, white crescents of her nails, in the ends of her hair, that curled up when she twisted her finger around them. I heard him in her bedtime voice, battled him in the stubbornness of her spirit, and felt him in the warmth of her hugs. But pieces of him were nothing compared to the man himself—whole, real and commanding, a thousand suns fused into one, scorching me with his gaze, with whatever emotions were broiling beneath his coal dark eyes.
I clutched the covers to my chest, as if the fabric would keep me from incinerating. I’d always known this day would come, this confrontation, and I’d dreaded it. If there was one thing I knew, it was that you never,everlock horns with Damian. He had not forgiven my father for taking his mother away. What would he do to me, for keeping his daughter from him?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He put away the paper cone of peanuts he was holding with such calm and precision that goosebumps raced across my skin. For the first time, I noticed the folder on his lap. He opened it, scanned the top sheet, and threw it at me. It fluttered through the air and landed beside me.
Damian didn’t give me the chance to pick it up. He flung another sheet at me, and then another and then another, until they were floating like feathers around me. I grabbed one of them and skimmed over the contents. From the private investigator’s logo on the top, it looked like a report on me: my address, financial records, marital status. I picked up another one. It was a copy of Sierra’s birth certificate. The next one outlined my job, my schedule, my work in Valdemoros. Where I’d been, what I’d done, where I’d lived, my credit card statements, magazine subscriptions—everything and anything pertaining to the last eight years was laid out before me in letter-sized black and white pages.
Damian emptied the entire folder on me. When it was done, and the last sheet flitted to the bed, the fear I’d felt about his reaction was replaced by something else, a sense of outrage that he could presume to stuff everything I’d been through since the island, into one shiny, glossy folder and throw it all in my face.
“You want to know why I didn’t tell you about Sierra?” I asked. “Because this is what you do, Damian.” I scrunched up the papers in my fists. “You research, you plan, you plot your way to vengeance. I had a photo of Sierra when I came to see you in prison. I wanted you to know we had a daughter. My father was gone. I thought there was no one left to fight, but I was wrong. I was wrong, Damian, because you were still fighting. You’re always fighting! You put my father in the grave, but I came anyway, to give you a daughter. But there was no room for us because you were still the same. Still wrestling with your demons. And if you think you know everything there is to know about me from this report, I have news for you. You don’t have a clue, Damian.”
I didn’t realize I was pregnant until I went for a follow-up appointment for my shoulder, and the doctor asked me the date of my last period. I had thought it was stress-related, or perhaps my cycle was off because I had missed a few weeks of my birth control pills, but the blood test confirmed it. It had been a bittersweet revelation, given that the baby’s father and grandfather, Damian and Warren, were embroiled in a ceaseless battle that was being played out in the courts.
Everywhere I went, photographers flashed their cameras in my face. How would they twist the story if they knew I was having Damian’s child? If they knew I was in love with my kidnapper? What would my father say? He was convinced I was going through some kind of mental and emotional breakdown. Would he try to coerce me into having an abortion? Failing that, could he have a psychiatrist declare me incompetent? Force me to give up the baby? How would Damian react to the news? He was going to prison. For how long, I didn’t know, but I knew that it would only make it harder.
I kept the pregnancy to myself, and as difficult as it was, the thought of a new life emerging out of all the chaos was like a beacon of light that got me through the darkness. I sat through long sessions with Nick and my father, hugging my little secret, while they discussed the charges and legal strategies. I wanted the case wrapped up before I started showing so I went through the motions. Yes to this, no to this, yes to this. I sat through Damian’s sentence hearing, four months pregnant, knowing that I had a piece of him, and no matter how wrong or warped or crazy everyone else would think it was, it felt right.
When my father realized I was pregnant, he could not hide his disappointment. He was convinced Damian had used me to get back at him, that getting me pregnant had been a part of his plan, his ultimate revenge against my father. How deluded we become when we start believing that everything in the world is about us. How hard we work to make things fit into our made-up theories. How blindly we follow our worked-up emotions, the good, the bad and the ugly. My father would believe what he wanted. Damian would believe what he wanted. I could either let myself be ripped in half between them, or accept that I would never be able to change their way of looking at things.
At times, I questioned my own sanity. Was I wrong? Had I been naive and trusting? Had Damian played me all along? He couldn’t bring himself to kill me, so had he done the next best thing? Drive a wedge between my father and the one person that meant the most to him? Me. Had he really planned to send me back, carrying his child, so my father would have to live with it the rest of his life?
Used, my father said.
I thought of what Damian and I had shared, the way he looked at me, the way he touched me, and I thoughtno. An absolute, soul-rooted, emphaticno. I couldn’t think of anything more beautiful, more life affirming than Damian’s lips on mine—his body, my body, melded into one. And now I had a part of him, a part of MaMaLu, to look after, and that’s exactly what I did. Damian had hurt me, my father had hurt me, but I loved them both. No doubt, they felt I had let them down too, but I didn’t want to stay lodged between them, not when I had a new life to think about.
When someone started undercutting Sedgewick stock by selling significant shares at a lower cost and devaluing the company, I suspected Damian was behind it. Investors panicked and started offloading their stock, alarmed by plummeting figures. It didn’t take long for my father to trace it back to Damian, but Rafael had done such a good job of covering up the paper trail that there was no substantial evidence against Damian.
At the time, I didn’t know that Damian was reacting to something my father had done. My father had accepted that I was going to have Damian’s child, but he was never going to accept Damian in my life, child or no child, so he’d sent him a message in prison, a message that had provoked Damian into replying with one of his own. Theirs was a feud that put one man behind bars and another in his grave.
Sierra was a few months old when my father passed away.
“She has your mother’s eyes,” he said to me one morning. He’d been uneasy around Sierra for the first few weeks, but that day he bent over her crib and looked at her for the first time. “Yes. Adriana’s big, brown eyes.”
After a while, he picked her up and gave her three kisses when he thought I wasn’t looking. Our relationship had been strained, but he doted on Sierra. Eventually it proved impossible for him to hold a grudge against me for having her. She was the one thing that made him smile when everything else was collapsing around him. I was thankful that he died in his room, with his dignity intact, before we lost the mansion.
With his death, I was truly an orphan. I felt like a three-pronged hole in the wall, with empty spaces where my mother, my father, and MaMaLu had been. People plug in to you, and when they’re gone, you stop working for a while. You have to reconfigure yourself, rework your wiring, so you can get out of bed in the morning. Not only had I lost my father, but I had also lost the roof over my head, at a time when I needed it the most—when I had a little one to take care of. My father’s assets were long gone, picked over one by one to pay his debts. I collected all my designer clothes and shoes and bags, and dropped them off at a consignment store. Beautiful things are always hard to part with, but between the sales from that, and my jewelry and watches, I had enough for Sierra and I to get by until I figured things out. But first, I had to bury my father.
Nick came through in ways I never imagined he would. Things had changed after he found out I was pregnant. A child wasn’t something he had factored in, least of all one that wasn’t his. He backed off and stopped pursuing me, but when my father had a stroke, he showed up at the hospital. He tried not to stare at my round, pregnant belly and swollen ankles. He helped me wrap up my father’s estate after his death and flew with me and Sierra to Paza del Mar for the funeral.
