“So, your father,” Andre said, after they left Peter and Becky at the hotel and were on their way to meet Jenna’s mother for drinks. Jenna was driving Peter’s Cadillac, the LA traffic already giving her a headache. Or maybe it was the thought of the argument she was certain to have with Helen. “He’s really—”
“Self-centered, vain, narcissistic, borderline personality?” she finished for him. “It’s okay, you won’t insult me. Probably not him either. He’s heard it all before, decades of it, from my mother. He just tunes it all out.”
There was an awkward silence—unusual enough that she glanced away from the traffic over to Andre. “What?”
“I was going to say that your father is really excited about being a dad again. I was wondering how that made you feel?”
She shrugged one shoulder, saw an opening in the faster moving lane, and viciously cut the wheel and defied several laws of physics to take advantage of it. Then the lane stopped moving and the one she had left sped up. “It makes me feel like crap. But there’s nothing I can do about it. But,” she paused, thinking about it, “I have to admit, it’s nice to see him so happy. Like maybe this time he’ll stick around and get it right.”
He laid a hand on her thigh, squeezing the tension from it. “You turned out pretty all right, I think.”
“Oh, you do, do you? And you’re an expert?”
He smiled and nodded. “Yep. When it comes to you, I’m an expert.” He leaned back in his seat. “So, tell me about your mother.”
“Take everything wrong with my dad, multiply it by a hundred, and you still won’t even come close.”
“Seriously? She can’t be that bad.”
“Seriously, she is. At the courthouse they call her Judge Robot.”
“Yeah, but you want a judge to be logical and neutral. What was she like, growing up?”
“A robot.” Jenna spotted their exit coming up and maneuvered through four lanes of traffic to reach it. “You’ll see.”
Helen hadn’t chosen a restaurant near the appellate court where she might be recognized, Jenna noticed. Instead she’d picked a modest bistro on South San Pedro. When Jenna and Andre walked in, she spotted Helen waiting at the steel-topped bar. She was dressed in a simple celadon silk sheath, her auburn hair pulled back in an elegant French twist, and was twirling a Martini glass in her hand as if they were so late that she’d become bored. They were actually fifteen minutes early.
The bistro was half-empty—it was barely cocktail hour by LA standards—but Jenna didn’t care, she was hungry. Even though she knew the sparse patronage was yet another reason Helen had chosen to meet now. When Jenna had called to tell her mother that they were coming to LA and why, Helen had not suggested that they stay with her at the Galloway family mansion. In fact, they wouldn’t even have been meeting face to face at all if Jenna hadn’t insisted that her mother had ten free minutes somewhere in her crowded schedule.
“Mom,” Jenna made introductions. “This is Andre Stone. Andre, this is Helen.”
“Judge Galloway,” Helen corrected, not offering a hand to Andre and barely favoring him with a glance. Instead she turned to the bartender. “Do you have a bar menu?”
“Of course.”
“Put his order on my tab.” She slid down from her stool. “Feel free to order anything you like,” she told Andre. “We won’t be long.” She gestured to the hostess, who joined them.
Jenna began to protest. “Mom, he’s not the chauffeur—”
“No,” Andre interrupted her. “It’s fine. You two have a lot to talk about.”
Jenna followed her mother and the hostess through to the rear of the restaurant where there was a small outside courtyard with a dozen tables, only two of them occupied. The hostess began to show them to one centrally located, but instead Helen insisted on the most remote table, farthest away from the other diners.
“I’ve already ordered for both of us,” she told Jenna, as the waitress appeared with two glasses of pinot noir and steak Carpaccio but only one plate. “You eat. I have another engagement.”
The appetizer looked amazing, but Jenna didn’t take the bait. She knew if she began eating, her mother would take the opportunity to say whatever it was she wanted to say and then duck out before Jenna had a chance to speak at all.
“I need access to the Judge’s case files,” Jenna started.
“No. You don’t.”
“If you don’t arrange for it, I’ll go through my federal contacts. But I thought it would be more discreet if you got them for me.” She knew damn well Helen had access to everything the investigators had found.
“No. You don’t need them. You’ve wasted your time coming out here. Your Pittsburgh bomber has nothing to do with your grandfather.”
“You can’t know that.” Jenna tried another approach. “Mom,” she couldn’t remember the last time she’d called Helen that, “he’s targeting the people I care about. You might be next.”
“Jenna, trust me—”
The words, the tone, were exactly the way Jenna remembered them. “That’s what you said when you dumped me at the Judge’s house. ‘Trust me, it won’t be for long.’ But it was two years. Two years before you came back for me.”
Helen frowned, seemingly surprised by the sudden change of subject. “What choice did I have? Things were so busy at the firm, your father and I were trying to reconcile…”
Jenna wanted to hit something, or someone. She shoved the beef aside, her stomach soured, and tried to do the same with her feelings—showing emotion would only drive Helen away.
“So,” Jenna said, “having your only child around—the product of your and Dad’s great, undying love—would only get in the way of you two getting back together? Again.” It had been the pattern that had determined her entire life: Mom and Dad falling passionately in love, fighting and almost destroying themselves with Jenna caught in the crossfire, separating, then reuniting to fall in love all over again. A twisted melodrama, with their child paying the price for their passion and fury. “And you just left me there.”
“I needed your father.” Helen shrugged, as if Jenna’s stolen childhood was a small price to pay for her own happiness and freedom. “A love like ours, it’s simply larger than life.”
“That’s Dad’s line. By the way, you know Becky’s expecting? It’s a boy.” Jenna slapped the words down, hoping for pain, for some kind of reaction.
“Your father is wedded to a certain manner of living. If that child is his, he’ll never acknowledge it. He can’t. Not with our pre-nup. He’d be cut off from everything he values.” Her raised eyebrow made it clear that Jenna wasn’t among those prized possessions. “He’ll come crawling back. He always does.”
Jenna resisted the urge to roll her eyes. How many times had she seen this play out, a never-ending saga of infidelity, hostility, and manipulation? She took a large gulp of wine, feeling it burn all the way down, and forced herself to focus on why she was here. “How can you be so certain that the bomber targeting me and Andre isn’t the same man who killed the Judge?”
Helen made a tiny noise. Not a scoff or a sound of dismal; more like a deeply satisfied sigh. “I’m sure.”
Another long silence as the waitress brought a plate of oysters Rockefeller—more food that neither of them would be eating, mere props and set dressing for the staged theatrical production of a mother and daughter sharing a delightful meal in public so that nothing real could actually happen between them. The hell with that.
“You promised I’d be fine. When you left me. With the Judge.” Jenna crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself against the memories of exactly how fine she hadn’t been, alone in that house with her grandparents. With him.
Nights had been the worst. Waiting there, lying awake, hoping yet fearing, straining to hear the thud of his footsteps, the way he’d clear his throat before reaching her door, giving her just enough time to run her hands through her hair, spreading the copper strands he loved so very much over her pillow like an angel’s halo, and then closing her eyes, pretending to be asleep until he kissed her awake like Sleeping Beauty.
God, how she’d loved him. Had basked in the warmth of his affection like he was her only sun, the giver of life.
Now, as an adult, she could see the manipulation. The emotional coercion—showering her with the praise and affection she was starving for and never received from her parents. Alternating that affection with total dismissal, making her spend every breathing moment thinking of him, wondering what she’d done wrong and how to get him to look at her, smile, touch her again…
She blinked away the memories and focused on her mother, finally facing the suspicions she’d hidden so long and had fought so hard to deny: the Judge wasn’t the only monster in the Galloway family. “You knew. You knew what kind of monster he was, yet you left your own daughter there with him.”
Helen said nothing, eyeing Jenna over the rim of her wine glass. Her lips twisted hard enough that lipstick feathered into the creases around them, making her suddenly look older than she was. She set the wine glass down and placed her palms on the table. “Your grandfather, he was a good man. But he had his own demons; impulses he couldn’t control. When I was a little girl—” She stopped, and her lips clamped together, locking her words inside. She took a breath and tried again. “When I was young, he—”
Another abrupt stop. Helen’s gaze sought Jenna’s as if begging her to finish the thought for her.
“You knew! And still you left me there. All alone. With him.” Jenna felt like she was screaming, but her words came out in a strangled whisper.
“He promised you’d be fine. That he wouldn’t—”
So typical of Helen: not only avoiding the words that would prove her guilt, but also not offering any form of apology.
“How could you?” Jenna’s voice rose, drawing the gaze of other diners.
“He promised. He swore. A solemn vow.”
“Two years. Two years you left me there. Two years of his touching, his—” Jenna choked, unable to give a name to the torture she’d endured. In a warped way, the physical assaults were the least of it. The psychological manipulation was so much more cruel, the way he’d made her a willing participant in her own abuse… it had changed her. Forever. Jenna tried to meet her mother’s gaze, but Helen was focused on the napkin in her lap. “Your own father—”
“He made me who I am today. Strong. Because of him I have power. I have everything I ever wanted.” Helen looked up and reached a hand toward Jenna’s side of the table. But Jenna kept her distance, her arms still wrapped tight around her chest, and Helen’s palm lay there, open and empty. “He promised. I thought—I believed him. I thought he’d changed. He was so old by then. Jenna, I’m sorry.”
It was the only time in Jenna’s life that she’d ever heard those words from her mother. Yet they were meaningless.
Jenna shook her head, quick little jerks of denial. “It’s almost worse than what he did. You knew the monster he was and still—” Her vision blurred and she blinked away her tears. “My own mother. You gave him to me. Delivered me all dressed up, pretty ribbon and all.”
She scraped back her chair. Just the thought of one more moment in the presence of her mother made her nauseous. Bile burned in the back of her throat. She stood, gripping the back of her chair—otherwise she might slap the woman across from her.
“Jenna, wait.” Helen leaned forward but didn’t leave her seat. Of course not. Jenna wasn’t worth the effort—and a judge always gave their rulings while seated above the riffraff. Which obviously included her daughter.
“No. We’re done.” Jenna moved past her—it was the only way to the exit—but Helen grabbed her arm with a grip forged of steel.
“I understand. But know this. He paid. When I realized what he’d done, what he was doing—I made sure he paid.”
Jenna whipped her arm free and stood, looking down on the stranger who was her mother. “What are you saying?”
“The green pen? It was from your favorite coloring set—the one I gave you for your birthday. The ink matched your eyes. That’s why I chose it.” Helen leaned back, her face as placid as a still lake in moonlight. “I couldn’t let him get away with it. Not again. So I took care of it. I took care of everything. I took care of you.”