“Okay.” I stood and gestured that he should let her in.
She tore into the room, eyes darting around, tear tracks down her face and her hair disheveled and windblown. It was obvious she’d just driven the four hours from Springfield at breakneck speed, probably crying the whole way. My heart broke for her. I was about to make this day one of the worst of her life.
“Michelle,” I said, voice wavering, opening my arms. She came toward me, enveloping me in a hug. Her heart was beating so hard and fast that I could feel it pounding against me.
“Tell me what happened,” she choked out, clinging to me hard. “Where is he?”
As hard as it was to do so, I pulled away and led her to a chair. We both sat down and I took her hands, barely able to meet her eyes.
This might be the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
Although I barely remembered anything about my birth mother, Michelle had been a constant in my life since I was little. She’d been a true friend to me ever since that first day we’d met and made s’mores together. It couldn’t have been easy, being such a young woman herself and coming into an already-made family, expected to be a trophy wife and a perfect politician’s spouse, as well as a parent to a precocious child. I couldn’t speak to the marriage she’d had with my father, though I knew he held her up as the ideal in many ways, but she had been a wonderful mother to me. She was family, and I loved her. And I was about to break her heart.
“I’m so sorry,” I began, my voice husky. “He had another heart attack. We rushed him right here but then, during surgery, he went into cardiac arrest. He…he didn’t make it.”
She closed her eyes, and her shoulders started to shake with the force of her sobs. The sight almost broke me, but I was far from finished.
“I should have taken better care of him,” she choked out. “I tried to get him to eat better. To stop drinking. But he was so stubborn. He didn’t want to change.”
“This isn’t your fault,” I said, rubbing her back. “There’s nothing you could have done. That any of us could have done. You can’t blame yourself.”
I passed her the box of tissues. Ever elegant, even with her makeup smeared, she pulled a compact out of her purse and carefully blotted her face, fixing it until it looked as perfect as it could. Still, her eyes were red and puffy, already welling up again. She cleared her throat.
“I’ll call his PR person and put together a statement from the family,” she said firmly, transforming into the politician’s wife she had been trained to be. “Does the media know yet?”
I shook my head and took a breath, tapping into my reserves of anger over the situation in order to keep from falling apart. I was barely hanging on. “There’s more.”
“More what?” Michelle asked, searching my eyes.
“There are some…things I learned recently,” I said slowly. “Things that Dad has done over the years.”
Michelle pressed her lips together, leaning back. She looked wary, but not surprised. No doubt, my father hadn’t been able to keep all of his misdeeds a secret, and under her sweet accent and manners and charm, Michelle was sharp as a tack, and nobody’s fool. I’d bet anything she was well aware that my dad had stepped out on her during the course of their marriage.
Still, I imagined the details would come as a shock.
But she had to know.
“There was another woman,” I said haltingly, taking her hand in mine again. She only nodded. “Her name was Anja. They met through Konstantin—Stefan’s father.”
I didn’t say anything about the trafficking—I didn’t know if it was safe for her to know too much about what was happening behind the scenes at KZ Modeling—but I told her everything else. About my father’s indisputable infidelity, and how there was a child.
“He refused to submit to a paternity test, and he swore Max wasn’t his, but…”
Michelle’s hand flew to her mouth when I showed her the photo—the same one I’d shown my dad. But instead of ignoring it or shoving it away as he had done, she gently took my phone from me and looked down at the screen with affection and awe.
“He looks just like Mitch,” she said. “And like you did at that age. He’s beautiful.” Her finger traced the boy’s face in the picture.
“He’s a really cool kid,” I told her. “Sweet and smart and…I kind of love him already.”
Michelle shook her head, looking devastated. “I knew your dad fooled around, and I accepted it, but…it’s just a damn shame his last act was to deny his son.”
She handed my phone back to me.
“I think it was kind of a shock, to be honest,” I admitted. “Maybe if he had more time to get used to the idea of Max, I don’t know…it could’ve been different.”
“Oh, I have no doubt,” Michelle agreed. “I think he would have realized how much he’d always wanted a son and embraced him full stop. You know, we tried to have a baby back in the early days, thinking it might be fun to have a bigger family—of course we loved you to pieces—but we stopped after a few years went by. I just wasn’t able to get pregnant.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never knew.”
