The Fidelity Files (Jennifer Hunter #1)(44)

I only prayed it wouldn't happen as fast for her as it had for me.

"Jen." I heard my mother's voice calling me as we returned to the table. "Jenny, I need to talk to you." She patted the empty chair next to her and I numbly walked around to her side of the table and sat down. Here it comes. The family drama.

She put her hand gently on my leg. "Have you heard about your father?"

I wanted to close my eyes and disappear. The last thing I needed right now was to get into a discussion about my mother and father. But I knew that even if I did close my eyes, when I opened them again she would still be there. And the question mark would still be spray-painted across her face.

"Yes, I did. He left a message on my machine." I cringed slightly, waiting for the outburst, the flood of tears and aggression, and of course, the guilt that would never be spoken.

But it didn't come. Not this time.

Instead, my mother simply squeezed my hand in hers and said, "How are you handling it? Are you okay?"

I gave her an odd look. This was highly unusual. I had grown accustomed to packing my purse with extra Kleenex every time I knew I was going to see my mom, because it almost always ended in a discussion about my dad, which almost always ended in tears gushing down her face and me attempting to console her.

I blinked in disbelief. "Yes, I'm okay. I just don't think about it."

My mom frowned. "I'm not sure that's the healthiest way to deal with this, Jenny."

"Mom, I'm fine. Really. You don't need to worry about me."

She sighed and removed her hand from my leg. "But I do worry about you, honey. I really do. This dating thing is starting to concern me."

I crinkled my forehead. "What 'dating' thing?"

My mom fidgeted with her napkin and lowered her voice. She leaned forward. "Well, you know, you're getting older now, and I just worry that maybe the fact that you're still single has something to do with—"

"Oh, not you too!" I groaned.

"What do you mean, me too?"

"Never mind," I said quickly. "Look, Mom, I honestly don't want to talk about this. And I can assure you: The only reason I'm not in a relationship is because I don't have time for one. My work keeps me very busy. Love can come later."

It was something my mom was used to hearing because my love life was a topic she was known to bring up... often. Although the fact that she had just now paired up my father's love life with my lack of one was somewhat unnerving.

The obvious disappointment on her face was hard to miss. "Well, you know, women don't have the luxury that men do of putting love on the back burner. We have biological clocks to adhere to. And the longer you wait, the more likely that front burner is going to run out of gas."

I put my hand up. "Mom, I refuse to have the same conversation with you every time. When the right man comes along, that's when it will happen. And until then I'm not going to date just for the sake of my biological clock."

There was so much more I wanted to tell her. About Sophie and Eric, and Andrew Thompson's flight attendant fantasy, and Raymond Jacobs's wedding ring, and the real reason my date the other night was a complete disaster.

But I couldn't.

My mom wouldn't be able to know that side of my frustration, because she didn't know anything about that side of my life. A side I had kept secret from everyone for more than two years.

My family knew nothing of Ashlyn, what she represented, or what she hoped to accomplish. But the ironic part was... she was born out of a family affair.





10

The Origin of the Species (Part 2)


WHEN I was twelve years old, my dad became a stranger to me.

It only took one night, one moment, one look in the wrong direction for my feelings about him to change completely.

At that age I couldn't fully understand what I had seen or what exactly it meant. And at that very moment of seeing my father with my twenty-year-old babysitter, I didn't exactly make any conscious decision to feel differently about him. But when I finally drifted off to sleep several hours later, and woke up in the morning with the image still as fresh in my memory as if I were watching it happen all over again, something changed in me.

My dad and I drove to pick up my mother from the airport, and I didn't speak to him the entire way. Not because I was choosing to be angry; that kind of premeditated emotion was far too complex for me to understand, let alone produce. It was because I had no idea what to say to him. I feared that anything that came out of my mouth, anything at all, would end with an involuntary recounting of the truth, followed by tears, many, many tears.

"Is something wrong?" my dad asked as we veered off toward the Arrivals area of LAX airport.

I shook my head, staring intently out the window at the passing cars and world travelers.

To this day I can still see the airport signs above, meticulously sorting out those who were coming from those who were going. I distinctly remember sitting in that front seat, focusing all of my attention on the other side of that window, and utterly dreading the arrival of my mother and all that would come with it. All of the choices I didn't know how to make. All of the responsibilities I didn't know if I could handle. I desperately wished I could escape. Flee to the land of glorious "Departures." Fly away to Hong Kong, or Tahiti, or some other far-off place and never come back.