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“Cynthia believes your work comes before her.”
“It keeps me away from home a lot, but nothing is more important to me than Cynthia. Why do you think I hired so many people to take care of her?”
“I imagine what she wanted and needed was you, your time and attention, your assurance that she was more important than your work.”
“She knows that.”
“She told me she came here because she doesn’t want her having a baby to get in your way.”
That was such a ridiculous statement he could hardly believe his daughter made it. He wasn’t even sure what it meant. “Cynthia couldn’t possibly get in my way. I’ve hired four people to take care of her. If she wants anything, she only has to ask for it.”
“She still doesn’t believe she’s as important to you as your next merger.”
“Of course she is. If she wants, she can go to Switzerland with me as soon as school is out.” He realized with a terrible sense of guilt he hadn’t even considered that until the words came out of his mouth. If she had wanted to go vacationing with one of her friends, he’d have been happy to let her.
“She wants to stay here. She doesn’t want to hurt you or the baby’s father.”
“That’s something else I want to know. Where can I find the boy who did this?”
“I have several rules. One is I never ask the name of the father. Another is even if I know it, I never reveal it.”
“You’re a regular paragon of virtue, aren’t you?”
She must have a difficult time with her shelter. He didn’t imagine many fathers would have been as calm as he had been so far, but he couldn’t work up the will to rant and rave at Kathryn. He intended to take Cynthia home, but he didn’t think Kathryn was an evil person. She was just a well-meaning busybody who couldn’t keep her nose out of other people’s business.
“My only purpose is to help these girls. I want to give them a safe place to stay where they can continue their education, have their babies, then decide what to do with the rest of their lives. I don’t provide a permanent solution, just a temporary refuge from all the pressure.”
“All that sounds fine and noble, but what are you getting out of this?”
“I beg your pardon!”
“People don’t do things like this without a reason. You’re rich. I imagine your friends are building careers, going to parties and having children. There’s got to be some reason you’d give all that up to baby-sit pregnant teenagers. And there’s no point glaring at me. I don’t intimidate.”
“Neither do I.”
“Good, then answer my question. Why are you doing this?”
“Because something like this happened to my sister,” she said after a pause. “I saw the damage it could do when it was handled badly.”
She meant it happened to her, he thought. People always put traumatic events off on a relative, a friend, even a neighbor. They only reacted like Kathryn Roper when it really happened to them. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman to let her emotions get the better of her. But then who better to learn to control her emotions than someone who had failed to do so and paid the price?
He looked at her, sitting so stiffly in the chair opposite him and felt some of his aggravation melt away. It couldn’t be easy. She must relive what happened to her every time a girl came to her for help. Most people would want to put it behind them, to forget, pretend it never happened, but she’d had the courage to turn her personal tragedy into a benefit to the community. He had to admire her for that. And it was a real community service.
He wondered what had happened to her baby.
What did Cynthia mean to do with her baby? For the first time it hit him that he was about to become a grandfather. He had just turned forty.
“I want to see Cynthia.”
“As I told you before, she’s in bed.”
“I heard you the first time, but you can’t really think I’ll just get up and walk out that door.”
“It would be better if you waited until the morning.”
“It would be better if this had never happened, but it has and I’ll deal with it. Now I want to see my daughter.”
Kathryn didn’t move.
“You can get her for me, or I’ll get her myself. It’s your choice, but I’m going to see her.”
“I won’t let you yell at her, and I won’t let you force her to leave.”
“I hope I won’t yell at her. I imagine she’s extremely upset already, but I can’t make any promises. How would you feel about leaving your only child in the hands of a stranger?”
“I wouldn’t do it, but you’ve been doing that all her life.”
This female didn’t fight fair. “My work makes it impossible for me to be at home all the time. My staff has been with Cynthia for more than ten years.”
Kathryn got to her feet. “I’ll ask Cynthia if she wants to come down.”
She left the room before he could make it plain that in this instance, at least, the decision wasn’t up to Cynthia.
He was extremely tired, but he was too full of nervous energy to sit still. He got up and walked about the room. It was impossible not to notice that even though the furniture looked extremely comfortable and well used—the window treatments subtle, the carpets not new—everything had the look of being quite expensive. It was the kind of furniture that said I’m so expensive and well made I don’t have to look expensive. Ron had studied such things. The trappings of success he made sure he acquired. He hadn’t had anything when he was a kid. He was determined everybody would know that wasn’t the case any longer. He finished his water and set the glass in what looked like a candy dish.
He wondered how things had gone with the meeting in Geneva. He was sure his colleagues Ted and Ben would do an excellent job of explaining why the two companies would do better under new management. It was just that he’d never before left the start of negotiations to anyone else. It was essential to know people’s starting positions, prejudices and all, if he was going to bring them together in the end. Part of his reputation had been built on personal attention to every detail. If Ron Egan came after your company, you knew you were going to be meeting with Ron Egan all the time. He wondered what his absence now would do to his reputation.
Oh well, he’d be back in Geneva tomorrow. Or the next day. He could sleep on the plane if worrying about Cynthia didn’t keep him awake again. This was one merger that wouldn’t be easy. It wasn’t merely a matter of money or paperwork. It was people and politics. You had to find a way to bring both together, and nobody could do that better than Ron Egan. It was how he’d raised himself from a kid whose parents didn’t have enough money to buy him decent shoes or a winter coat to a man whose income had reached nine figures this last year.
He turned abruptly away from a mirror that showed him a much too realistic view of himself. He had the look of a successful man—the clothes, the carriage, the confidence—but right now that left a bad taste in his mouth. His daughter had become pregnant. Worse, she had turned to a perfect stranger for support rather than to him. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know something was wrong there. He was an expert when it came to analyzing people, figuring out what made them tick, knowing what to do to make them come down on his side.
How had he managed to fail so badly with his own daughter?
Why was she afraid of him? What would he have done if she had come to him?
The door opened, and Kathryn reentered the room. Cynthia followed. Ron felt almost as though he was looking at a stranger.
She had put on jeans and a T-shirt, allowed her dark-blond hair to fall over her shoulders. She displayed none of the sullen anger he’d seen the last time he was home. She faced him with a new calmness. Only her twitching toes—she was barefooted—betrayed any uneasiness.
Ron hadn’t realized how much her facial features had grown to resemble her mother’s. It was almost like seeing Erin the way she looked the first day they met. Cynthia was tall with slim bones, though right now she carried some extra weight. He remembered how much being overweight had affected his life. It had to be worse for a girl. They were under so much more pressure to be slim.
Like Kathryn.
He cursed silently and brought his mind back to his daughter.
In his mind she’d remained his little girl. He’d been too busy to realize she’d gone ahead and grown up on her own. And now she was in trouble, and he had to figure out some way to help her.
“Why did you come?” Cynthia asked. “I don’t want you here.”
“I’m your father.”
“I’m sixteen.”
Was there a single teenager in America who didn’t think turning sixteen made him or her an adult? “I’m still your father. If you hadn’t come home soon, Margaret would have called the police. I would have had the SBI and the FBI combing the state looking for you. You should have told me you were in trouble.”
“You can’t do anything about it.”
“I could have tried to help.”
“I don’t need your help. I can do this on my own.”
Despite the twitching toes, she didn’t appear frightened or overly angry. It was almost as though he were a momentary obstacle she had to deal with before she could move on.
“When were you going to tell me about the baby?”
She didn’t answer.
“How were you going to keep it a secret?”
“I’ll stay here until after it’s born. I don’t have to go to school when I really start showing. Miss Roper has people come teach us. I can get my GED.”
He spent ten thousand dollars a year to send her to the best private school in Charlotte, and she was talking about a GED! Didn’t she have any idea how important it was to graduate from the right school? No matter what he had to do, he was determined Cynthia would do that.
“We’ll worry about that later. Are you okay? You look pale.”
“It’s because I’m pregnant.” Cynthia stumbled over the word that described her condition. “Mrs. Collias fixes meals especially for pregnant girls. She says she can make sure I have enough for the baby without getting fat.”
Ron had almost forgotten Kathryn was still in the room. She had taken a seat near the door and was leafing through a magazine. She didn’t trust him alone with his daughter, but at least she had the decency to pretend she wasn’t listening to everything they said. He wondered if she was this protective of her other girls.
“All expectant mothers are supposed to gain weight.”
His wife had gained forty pounds then lost it within a few months.
“If I get fat, I’ll never get it off.”
Ron didn’t know how the conversation had drifted onto something as trivial as weight.
“What about the boy?” Ron asked. “The baby’s father.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“You have to tell him.”
“No, I don’t. It’s my baby. Besides, I don’t want to ruin his life, too.”
“This is not going to ruin your life. I won’t let it.”
“I’m a pregnant, unwed teenager,” Cynthia said, anger now rising to the surface. “There’s nothing your money can do to change that.”
He felt as if he were being punished for working so she would never have to endure privation. “You still have to tell the father. It’s his baby as much as yours. He has a right to know.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
For the first time since seeing her, he sensed fear. “I’m sure he’ll guess when you don’t return to school.”
“I told everybody we were moving to Connecticut.”
Ron knew it would be impossible to keep her baby a secret even if they did move to Connecticut, but he would deal with that later. Right now he needed to get Cynthia home and settled into her own room. And he needed to get out of Kathryn Roper’s house.
“Get your things,” Ron said. “I’m taking you home.”
Cynthia pulled back from him. Something about her expression changed, something subtle that made her look less like a child and more like a woman.
“I’m not going home. I’m staying here.”
Ron knew his relationship with his daughter wasn’t the best in the world, but she’d never refused point-blank to do anything reasonable. “Why not?”
“I just told you,” Cynthia said, sounding impatient. “I don’t want anybody to know.”
“They’ll know soon enough.”
“Not if I stay here and you go back to Switzerland. They’ll believe we moved to Connecticut, just like I said. I told them we were keeping the house with Margaret and everybody else in case we didn’t like it. I told them I didn’t want to go but some of your Yale buddies had talked you into it because it would put you closer to New York, that it would be good for your business.”
Ron didn’t bother pointing out that such a story was so full of holes it probably wouldn’t last a day. The school would call if she missed more than one day without an excuse. Her friends would call. Neighbors would ask questions. There was no way she could keep her disappearance a secret.
“Why don’t you let me take you home?” Ron asked. “We can both get a good night’s sleep and try to come up with a plan in the morning.”
“A plan for what?”
For the rest of your life Ron thought, exasperated. She didn’t appear to realize nothing would ever be the same after this. She would be a mother. That was a barrier that would separate her from her friends almost as effectively as moving to Connecticut.
“Everything is going to be different after this,” Ron said.
“I know that,” Cynthia said. “I’m not stupid.”
“I never said you were, but even intelligent people can have trouble thinking through unfamiliar situations. There are so many things you can’t know at your age—”
“If you tell me even once I don’t understand because I’m too young, I’ll walk out of this room.”
“You don’t understand,” Ron said, “not only because you’re too young but because this is beyond your experience. Hell, your mother and I didn’t understand, and we’d been planning for you for three years.”
“Age and experience have nothing to do with it,” Cynthia said as she got to her feet. “You’ve been a father for sixteen years, and you still don’t understand a thing about children.”
“I don’t understand why you’re more upset about your friends knowing you’re pregnant than you are about having a baby. I half expected you’d be nearly hysterical begging me to help you get an abortion.”
“I’d never do that! I want this baby. I need this baby.”
“Cynthia, you’ve just turned sixteen. You’re in the tenth grade. How can you need a baby?”
