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“He has a son. My son.” It wasn’t a question. She wouldn’t ask. She wouldn’t let it be denied.
“Dani.” She heard pity in her father’s voice. The drum of her blood became louder.
“He’s my son. I saw him. I held him.” Her hands unclenched, reached out, pleading.
Mick exhaled. The stale smells of smoke and liquor came, clung to her. He tapped the cigarette on the ashtray’s edge. “That’s it? You held the boy in your arms and you decide he’s your child?” He kept tapping the cigarette after the ashes had fallen.
“The boy looks like Mom.” Her father stiffened, reached for his drink. “He looks like you.”
He set down the drink. His hand stayed curled around the glass. “Then he’ll have good luck with the ladies, but why would that make the boy your child?”
She looked away from the reasonableness in her father’s face.
“Reid Hamilton himself said the boy was his nephew.” Mick adopted a patient tone. “Why would he say that if it weren’t so?”
“You will have to tell me that. Tell me.” Her hand reached out, gripped her father’s hand holding the drink. Liquor sloshed over the sides of the glass. “Tell me.”
With that awful patronizing expression still on his face, her father pulled a fresh linen handkerchief from his pant pocket. No paper tissues for Mick Tate. Always a clean handkerchief, snow-white and starched. He ironed them himself. He had dried her tears with them. He now patted the whiskey off her hand.
“Today you saw Reid Hamilton with a child.” His tone stayed patient. “A child who’s about the same age as—”
She pulled her hand away. “I didn’t say anything about the child’s age.”
“No, but I’m guessing the boy isn’t five-foot-six and starting to shave or you wouldn’t have assumed he was your son, would you?” He smiled indulgently.
“He’s four. And he is my son.” She heard the plea in her voice and was ashamed.
“Dani, listen to me, five years ago, you weren’t much more than a child yourself.”
Five years ago. Her eighteenth birthday. Her father had been determined to mark the occasion. He had arranged the car, the dress, the engraved invitation that got her past the gate into Georgia Hamilton’s legendary pre-Derby dinner dance. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d strung the extra stars that seemed to light the sky that night over Hamilton Hills.
She stared at the man opposite her. His whole life Mick Tate had been trying to make fairy tales come true. That one night he had succeeded.
Three months later the pregnancy test had showed positive. Dani had stopped believing in fairy tales.
“What you did was the right thing to do.” Her father’s voice brought her back. “It was a brave thing.”
“To give my child up?” Pain sliced into her.
“To give your child more.” Mick lifted the cigarette to his lips, drawing deep, watching her. He picked up his drink. “Let me tell you what happened. Today you saw Reid Hamilton with a child about the same age as your baby would be, and it all became a bit too real. Much, much too real. Now the guilt gnaws at you. That’s what happened. Conscience.” He cradled his glass, looking into the amber liquid. “Such a liability.”
The waitress came to their table. Her father drained the glass and handed it to her. “Another double, darling. How ’bout you, Dani girl? Ready for that drink?”
She shook her head. Mick shrugged his shoulders and smiled at the waitress, watched the woman walk away. Dani studied her father’s profile. At one time, he could make her believe anything. It had been his charm. And her undoing.
He turned to her, saw her study. “You did the right thing, love. It’s no life for a child.”
“You didn’t give me up.” She spoke quietly.
“No, but after your mother died, I had Nanny to look after you until she got sick. By that time, you were old enough to come with me. Still, don’t think I wouldn’t have sent you to your mother’s family if they would have had you. Sons of bitches. With their fat bank accounts and their precious reputations, thinking they can pick and choose their kin like ordering from a Chinese menu.” He reached for the drink no longer there, the burn of anger and alcohol in his eyes. “No, I didn’t give you up. I was too damn selfish. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want more for you than bouncing from track to track, living in roach boxes, hoping for a triple to get us out of last week’s hole.”
The waitress returned and set the drink on the table. Mick lifted the glass, gave the woman a wink and took a long swallow. He put the glass down, the look he gave the liquor more appreciative than the one granted the waitress.
“Believe me…” He leaned back too far in his chair. He teetered for a moment, then steadied. “Your child has more.”
She looked at this man who had brought her to a magical place where horses flew and money multiplied and her mother had always laughed long and full while bits of betting slips floated through the air like confetti. “My baby had a birthmark. A small V-shape on his right thigh. The boy with Reid today has the same mark. He’s my child.”
Her father looked down, studied the liquor.
“He’s my child.” She waited. A song started to play on the jukebox. Sudden laughter across the room made her jump, but at their table, there was only silence.
“A blood test will prove it.”
Her father looked up, studied her. “I did it for the boy.” He looked away. “I did it for you.”
She sat perfectly still, fearing one wrong word, one revealing movement, and he’d stop. Her father took a drink, and then another until when he set the glass down, his hand didn’t shake anymore. She held her breath, the blood humming in her head.
“You were in trouble. I was always in trouble. You know all that.” His hand waved a dismissal before reaching for his cigarettes. “We both wanted to give the child more. The Hamiltons could give him more. He’s growing up well taken care of, never wanting. Plus these people aren’t strangers. They’re his real family. He’s with his father, for Pete’s sake.” Mick took a quick drink.
“Reid doesn’t even know the boy is his son.” The truth was worse in her own thin voice.
“If he’d known the child was his, he might’ve tried to find out who the mother was. I wanted to protect you.”
“He didn’t know who I was that night. No one did.”
“What if he’d decided to find out? What if he’d found out the mother of his child wasn’t some mysterious Southern deb but the gal who mucked out the shedrow stalls?”
It was true. She’d deceived Reid first.
Mick gestured, the ash falling off his cigarette on to the scarred table. “We’re talking the Bluegrass, darling. Where people are assessed just like the horses—by their pedigree. You know that.” He drank, the liquor going down faster. His glass hit the table too hard. “You know that.”
She watched him raise his empty glass as the waitress passed nearby. He’d never forgiven her mother’s family for not believing he’d loved their daughter. They’d thought he was after her money. But he had loved her. He loved her still.
He set the glass on the waitress’s tray, turned back to Dani. “I wasn’t going to see this child treated like the dung they tiptoe past on their way to the box seats.”
She wanted to protest Reid wouldn’t be like that, but she had no right. If she’d been sure, she would have gone to him when she first found out she was pregnant. She hadn’t. An elegant illusion named Danielle DeVries had bewitched Reid that night. The reality was a stable groom named Dani Tate. Once he had learned of her deception, why would he have had anything to do with her?
“The tests from the grandmother’s blood proved the boy was family, and that’s all they wanted to know. Now he’ll grow up a Hamilton. As he should.” Dani knew if her father had a drink, he would’ve raised it in a toast.
“Plus the price on the offspring of a dead son would be much higher, wouldn’t it?”
She’d surprised him, catching him before he could school his expression. She loved her father but she knew his flaws. She felt a whirling in her empty stomach and was afraid she was going to be sick.
He masked his surprise, lit a fresh cigarette, looked to see if the waitress was coming. “I was in trouble. You know that.”
Yes, she’d known that. They’d gone south the next day. Kentucky had always been home, but her father and she worked the East Coast circuit, their location usually dependent on how many miles her father needed between himself and the bookies he owed. Eventually things would cool off or her father would hit enough daily doubles to go home to Kentucky. They had been on their way to Florida when Dani had heard about the accident at Hamilton Hills. She had been working at Hialeah Park when she’d learned she was pregnant. After the baby was born, she’d run, working the circuit west to Santa Anita Park, then up north to Portland Meadows, never staying too long in any one spot. Eventually she’d circled back to the East, settling on Fox Run Farm in upstate New York. She’d never gone back to the Bluegrass.
“I had the lawyer who handled the arrangements only ask for what I needed. Not a penny extra.” Her father’s drink arrived. The drone of blood in Dani’s head became louder. She watched him take a long sip. He leaned back, laced his fingers together like a reasonable man. “What’s fair is fair.”
“You sold your own grandson.” She spoke from the pain and sorrow that always ran through her sparse veins.
His hand slapped the table. “It wasn’t like that.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “You couldn’t give the boy the life he deserved. I did.”
There was the rush of blood in her head, the sour taste in her mouth, and the terrible truth. She stood up too fast, her chair scraping the faded floor.
“Where are you going?”
She looked blindly at her father, shook her head. She didn’t know. She was working on instinct now.
“Dani, sit down. Listen to me.” His calm tone only made the confusion inside her worse. She gripped the chair. Her father’s eyes were bright from whiskey but his speech was still clear, his stare steady. “You wanted your child to have the best, and he does. He’s safe and he’s loved.”
“He’s healthy, too. And handsome.” She heard her own anguish. She looked away, her gaze darting about the dim room, unable to look directly at anything. The deep, frantic mix of emotions inside her threatened. She closed her eyes, afraid to make any movement at all. When she opened them, she saw the brightness in her father’s eyes had become moist, brilliant.
“You need a drink, Dani.”
“I don’t need a drink.”
“Something to eat.” She heard the caring.
She shook her head.
“You’re tired. Go get a good night’s rest.”
“I don’t want to sleep. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to drink.” She hung on to the edge of the chair, her knees buckling, her strength gone. Pain and longing were the only life left inside her.
“I want my baby.”
SHE WENT HOME. Not to the small anonymous room in town she’d rented with her percent of recent winnings, but to the only home she’d ever known. The night guard waved her through without a glance at the employee tag she wore around her neck. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her here after hours.
She parked in the almost empty lot and cut across the gravel and grass to the barns. The cinder block dormitories were dark. The 4:00 a.m. feeding always came too fast.
The shedrow was sleeping. Lights were minimal—the silent flare of a solitary cigarette; subtle security lights turned the night from black to gray; the wink of fireflies.
She walked on, the turf yielding, the gravel, graveyard gray. All paths led to the track. All ended at the winner’s circle. She breathed in the incense of unspoken dreams, the sweat of loss, the rare sweet sachet of success.
Home.
Where the stakes were high. And second chances few.
One stumble and it could be over. She’d seen it happen as recently as last Thursday in the fourth. Maybe it was the sloppy track? Maybe it was a small hole, a bad step? Who knows? One minute a thousand-pound machine is barreling toward glory; the next, a winch is pulling its carcass across the finish line.
She followed the bend of the training track, seeing horses and riders where there were none.
A son. Her son. She grabbed the track’s outside rail and held fast. In a world where second chances were rare, she knew she’d been given a gift.
She walked the track’s perimeter, circling with the phantoms of those who’d tried and won and those who’d tried and lost. It had been a night much blacker than this when her knees had pulled up and her body had clenched and pain at first not much more than a woman’s weeping had become a storm. Her legs had split, and she had stopped breathing, stopped thinking, stopped feeling until there was a rush of warmth and a wail of life to match her own. The night had ended then. The darkness had lifted and, in a haze, she’d seen a blood-streaked bundle, white and pink and so pretty, she’d held out her hands. They’d laid him naked on her breast. It wasn’t enough. She’d asked for a little more time. They’d brought him to her washed and wrapped in blankets. She’d inspected every inch of that tiny body, memorizing, promising not to forget, trying to explain. She fell asleep, cradling him in her arms. He’d been gone when she awoke. She’d never touched her baby again.
Until today.
Her hands held each other now as she walked with the night’s ghosts. She had no rights, she knew that. She had relinquished all claims. She would never demand anything—not family or love or forgiveness. She would ask for nothing from the child or his father. But would it be so wrong to be near, to watch the child grow from a toddler to a boy to a man? Invisible, silent, watching, protecting, she would be no more than the specters surrounding her now. Surely it wasn’t asking too much?
Her father was right. The child had a home, a family, a name. She would do nothing to jeopardize that. She would ask for nothing, expect nothing. She had no rights.
But she’d given her son up once. She wouldn’t give him up again.
NOW WAS the one moment Reid knew peace—when the morning was dawn, soft and moist and warm as the steam rising from the barrels of water heating in the backstretch. When all the world was vague and muffled—the hooves on the turf, the talk between the trainers huddled at the rail, watching their charges. It wouldn’t last long. The mist would break, and the horses, the people would no longer be illusions in the lavender August light. Everything would become real once more, and Reid would remember that what was one minute could be gone the next. A turn of the head, a chance look and whole lives could change. But, for now, moving though the morning haze, he might have been dreaming.
He joined his trainer, Smiley Woods, at the rail. Smiley had trained two of Hamilton Hills’ three Derby champions, and Reid knew the man would be welcome at any farm he choose. He’d even told him so when Hamilton Hills’ financial state became public, and the offers for Smiley’s services began pouring in. But Smiley had only shook his head and said, “This is where I belong.” Such was the spell Hamilton Hills could cast.
Reid nodded now to the one man he still trusted, then turned his attention back to the horse coming down the lane.
“What do you think?”
The horse trotted by, his ears pinned, his hind end bouncing, pulling so hard at the reins, his rider was gritting his teeth. “He’s a bombshell.”
About a hundred yards away, the animal reared up, but the exercise boy was ready for him and kicked him forward. A few lengths down the rail, the Fox Run Farm trainer leaned out over the rail and shouted, “Contain him.”
Smiley watched the horse head for the turn. He was a mammoth man with a perpetual scowl that had earned him his nickname. But despite his size and scowl, there was a constant calm around him. The horses had taught him to walk slowly and speak softly.
“I knew a gelding once who moved like that in the back end, and he—”
He broke off, a life at the racetrack having schooled him in superstitions and jinxes. “I would want to see some X rays,” was all he’d say.
Reid watched the dark colt, long-legged, tight-bellied, all reckless desire to run, and although a healthy respect for curses and hexes wouldn’t permit either man to say this aloud, both knew what they saw as the dark horse shot past them. It could have been Aztec Treasure flying across the soft soil.
“He’s a stall walker.” Smiley’s gaze never left the colt. “Guard told me he had a fit last night, pawing at the door and snorting, running in circles as if already on the track. The vets leave him to last. He’ll take a nip as soon as your head is turned. Imagine he likes to kick too, but the groom who’s with him now has been with him through the infections and the fracture, and they say he’s almost playful with her.”
They watched the animal go wide, grinding his bit, fighting the rider.
“Horse does love to run though.”
Reid looked at the trainer, saw his rare smile of secret delight reserved solely for Thoroughbreds and Kentucky bourbon.
Smiley looked at his stopwatch, then back at the horse. “Some that ornery are just mean or maybe scared. This one though, he thinks he’s superior. You can see it in his eyes. There’s no wildness there or fear. Just one hundred percent insolence.”
“His dam was Every Bit A Lady. Good grass mare. Had some success in the New York stakes.”
Smiley nodded. “As steady as they come.”
“This one though—he’s up, he’s down. The Foxes have about written him off as one big mistake.”
Smiley silently studied the horse.
“He’s running in a claimer tomorrow.”
The large man glanced over. “And I thought you came up to Saratoga for all the high society hoopla?”
Reid returned the other man’s wry smile. Both knew the invitations had been few after the accident and the investigation. Those that did come now went unanswered.
