“Your mother made life impossible.”
“My mother? When you stole her money and disappeared? I’m having difficulty understanding how that was her fault. What reason makes that okay?”
“Your mother—” He stopped. Started again. “Catherine was—she trapped me. The pregnancy wasn’t planned. I wasn’t ready to be a father. I had ambitions, plans, a life I wanted to live?—”
“So, you ran.” The words tasted like ash. “You ran because having a child was inconvenient. Because my mother wanted to keep me, and you didn’t want the responsibility.”
“I was twenty-eight years old! I wasn’t ready for a family!”
“Then you should have used a condom!” My voice echoed off the walls. “You should have been honest with her. You should have done anything except steal her money and disappear while she was pregnant with your child!”
“I don’t need your guilt trip,” he said coldly. “I’m trying to save this hotel.”
“Really? By betraying your business partners.” I was shaking now, fury and grief warring inside me. “I want to hear why you did this. Why you worked with Orion and Leo and Ares for seventeen years and never once mentioned you had a daughter. Why you looked at me that first day and decided to destroy me instead of—” My voice broke.
“Instead of what?” Henri asked quietly. “Instead of telling you I was your father? I don’t owe you anything. I don’t know you and I don’t want to.”
“That’s right.” The words exploded out of me. “You took that from me. Just like you took the choice from my mother. Just like you’ve tried to take every choice from me since I arrived at this hotel.”
“The board meeting was business?—”
“It was personal.” I leaned across the desk. “You looked at me and saw the daughter you didn’t want. You saw me with Orion and Leo and Ares, saw me happy and loved and successful, and you couldn’t stand it. You couldn’t stand that I’d found people who actually wanted me.”
“That’s not?—”
“Isn’t it?” I pulled out my phone and showed him the documents Marta had found. “Mom never left New York. You could have reached out anytime. Could have sent a letter. Could have at least acknowledged my existence. But you didn’t. Not until I showed up here and became a threat to your plans.”
“Tashi—”
“My mother raised me alone. Worked two jobs to keep us fed and housed. Sacrificed everything so I could go to college. And she never once spoke badly about you. Never told me what you’d done. She protected me from the truth because she loved me more than she hated you.” My voice broke. “And now I know why she never told me. Because knowing you—the real you—is so much worse than imagining you.”
Henri stared at the documents, his face crumpling. “Get out.”
“What?”
“Get out.” His voice was barely a whisper.
“That’s bullshit.” The words came out flat. “Facing what you’d done would have required courage and responsibility and all the things you’ve never had. And then I showed up here by accident, and you saw it as a threat.”
“You don’t know. If people had started digging into your background, into your mother’s history, they’d find me.”
“Who?”
“People you don’t want to know.”
“Wait, you stole money from other people too?” The pieces fell into place with sickening clarity. “The harassment allegations. The board meeting. Voting them out of management. All of it was to get rid of me before anyone could discover the truth.”
“I was protecting myself?—”
“That’s all that matters, isn’t it!” I was yelling now, no longer caring about who heard me. “You were protecting the lie you’ve been living for twenty-five years! You let Kurt Wilder use me asa weapon. You let Marcus harass me and sabotage the hotel. You stood by while they tried to destroy the men I love—all to cover up your crimes!”
Henri looked at me with a coldness that would have made snakes shiver.
Silence fell like a guillotine.
“You shouldn’t have done this, Tashi. This will not work out well for you.”
“Me? You’re the one who failed as a human being in every way that matters.” I turned toward the door.
