With another chuckle, he strolled out of the library, closing the door behind him.
Without anything else to do but wait, I took advantage of the whiskey—though it tasted bitter to me, and did nothing to assuage either my anxiety or my irritation at my father.
By the time Anja reappeared, my anger was a hot fire burning in my chest. I wasn’t just pissed at my father, but at her too. Obviously she hadn’t been kidnapped or killed. She’d had free will in her disappearance, and in staying hidden. Had it never crossed her mind to reach out? Especially considering we had ason? Whatever her reasons were, she owed me an explanation.
“Hello,” Anja said, padding over to my chair and sitting on the couch across from me.
She’d put on yoga pants and a black T-shirt, but neither the clothes nor the years had changed her into anything less than the beautiful woman she’d always been. How easily I’d once been deceived into believing that her beauty was more than skin deep. Now I knew better.
“Where did you go?” I blurted, ignoring any attempt at manners or formality.
She looked confused. “I was putting Max to bed. Your father said—”
“No, where did you go all thoseyears ago?” I clarified. “And why did you keep your—our son—a secret?” The words felt strange in my mouth, the idea of fatherhood still foreign. “Do you have any idea how fucking hard I looked for you? The time and resources I exhausted?”
I was practically yelling at that point, and she flinched. I didn’t care. I had intended to ask one question at a time, to patiently listen to each response, but once I got started the words had poured out of me, one after another, filled with anger and bitterness. There was no explanation I could imagine that would justify the way she’d hidden herself and our child for all this time, without even a single call or email to let me know what the hell had happened.
Anja just looked at me, her cool blue-green eyes assessing me, appearing completely unmoved. The same way she’d always responded to any flares of temper I’d exhibited.
“His name is Max?” I added, starting to deflate a little in the face of her silence.
“Maxim Andreus Fischer,” Anja responded, crossing her arms and sitting up straighter. “And how dare you sit there and yell at me. I was a kid back then, Stefan. And so were you. I was pregnant and scared and I didn’t know where to turn. What was I supposed to do, just—”
“So you ran away?” I stood, too wound up again to remain seated. “That was your solution? God, Anja, I was in love with you!”
The room felt hot, and I loosened my tie and took another pull from my drink.
“I loved you too,” she said quietly. “With all my heart.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know how to feel about that statement. It sounded like bullshit. This whole evening was bullshit. “You loved me so much you disappeared from my life, carrying our kid,” I repeated sarcastically. “Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense.”
“You don’t believe me?” she asked. “You think I played you all along?”
She was searching my eyes, pleading for my forgiveness, a single tear slipping down her cheek. Years ago, that would have had me running to her side, taking her face in my hands and wiping the tear away. Asking her what I could do to make things right.
It wouldn’t work on me now.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what to believe,” I said. “Running scared, yes, I can understand. But having a kid you never told me about, evading me for almost ten years, and then showing up out of nowhere like this? The pieces don’t fit.”
Anja got up and walked over to me, then took the whiskey out of my hand and drank down all that was left. She winced at the taste but her gaze when it met mine was fierce.
“I didn’t want to ruin your life, Stefan, and everything that was in front of you. College, your father’s business, your big dreams. You would have lost it all if you stayed with me, if you had to be a father and support a family. You were barely eighteen. I did what I did foryou.”
The pain of knowing she’d run from me in order to give me a chance to succeed in life made me sick.
“We would have figured it out,” I said bitterly.
She laughed. “Really? An out-of-work model and an eighteen-year-old kid? What, you’d just let your father disown you and go to business school on a scholarship? Let me sit at home all day in a shitty apartment and be a full-time mother while you worked on your MBA?”
“I mean, I don’t know…” I said.
“And then what?” she went on, leaning closer as her own anger rose. “You’d get your first job, maybe forty thousand a year, and I’d stay home with a toddler while we struggled to pay for groceries and diapers and health insurance? You think that would have been a good life?”
She wasn’t wrong. The first jobs I’d had were with KZ Modeling, and they’d paid well, but without my father’s help I would’ve had to start at the bottom somewhere, pay my dues with long hours and low pay. We wouldn’t have been able to afford daycare or a nanny. And Anja was independent. She’d have been the baby’s sole caregiver, with no life of her own.
“It would have fallen apart, Stefan,” she said. “We would have ended up hating each other. You’d be staying with me out of obligation and I’d resent you for being gone all the time.”
As much as I loathed to admit it, what she was saying did make a kind of sense. But that didn’t make her actions right. I went over to the bar to refill the glass, then handed it back to her. She sank back onto the couch and took a long drink.
