SEBASTIAN’S THROAT CLOSED up, and his insides . . . he didn’t know what was happening inside. His body had left but his mind was still active, and for some reason it was playing a clip from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon he’d seen as a kid—Bugs needing to make a quick escape and, when he did, speeding away like a bullet, a ghost version of himself remaining behind, hovering, before starting to waver, then drifting away, like smoke. That was exactly how he felt right now, this ghost version of himself sitting in his chair while his real self—his soul—had already departed.
Ava had turned in her chair, giving him her full attention.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “to hit you with this.”
Hearing her voice brought him back to the present. He was aware of his racing heart and the tightness in his chest and throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. Her tone was consolatory but also hesitant and cautious, and it made him think of a bomb squad guy he’d seen in a movie. Ava had seen him explode, knew how quick he was to anger.
But the anger didn’t come, even when he begged for it. He was in the right here, no question—she deserved to feel his full wrath for keeping something like this from him for so long—but he couldn’t summon his rage, or any other feeling for that matter, and it made him wonder if he had gone into shock. He probably had.
He opened his mouth, swallowed. Opened his mouth again and tried to speak but didn’t know where to start, what to ask first.
Ava wiped at her face. “Let me tell you when it happened,” she said gently. “How everything happened. Okay?”
Sebastian looked down at his hands, wishing he had a drink there, because this was a time when he should be able to drink. He listened to her explain how, on the night he ended up accidentally killing an undercover cop playing gangbanger, her period had been over a week late.
“I planned on telling you earlier in the day, when we went to the Jack in the Box,” Ava said, Sebastian remembering how they’d gone there to fill up on three-for-one tacos before hitting the house party. “I thought I might be pregnant, and I wanted to tell you, but I also wasn’t sure, and I was terrified of, you know, taking a test. When we sat down to eat, though, I couldn’t get the words out, so I decided I’d wait till later, at the party, after I’d had a few glasses of wine.”
But she realized she couldn’t drink if she was pregnant, and while she was at the party, sipping a Coke, the constant “Am I or am I not?” ate at her to the point where she thought she was going to scream. She ducked out, walked five blocks to a convenience store, and bought a test and took it with her into the store bathroom, the tiny space reeking of urine because someone, maybe more than one person, had pissed all over the floor and toilet seat. Squatting over the toilet, she peed on the stick as instructed, and then she paced inside the tight space, her heart pounding with dread and her gaze bouncing back and forth from her reflection in the scratched-out mirror to the crude drawings of genitals and names and numbers for blow jobs and hand jobs, Ava praying to God to please let it not be true—it couldn’t be true, because she had been careful.
Ava said, “I took the test with me outside and walked around the corner. I was so scared, I couldn’t breathe.”
Standing next to a dumpster that stank even worse than the bathroom, she looked at the plastic stick and discovered God’s answer. She couldn’t remember walking back to the party, but suddenly she was there, looking around, and when she saw him, she—
“Crying,” Sebastian said. His mouth was dry, his voice hoarse, hollow sounding. “I found you, and you were crying, and you said that you wanted to go home. That you weren’t feeling well.”
Ava nodded, her eyes down, Sebastian thinking how maybe their lives would have turned out differently if she’d told him at the party. How maybe he wouldn’t have walked her back home and that car wouldn’t have pulled up in front of her house.
“I knew something was wrong that night,” Sebastian said, still feeling separated from his feelings, a wall there. “You were upset, and you wouldn’t tell me.”
“I was trying to—I wanted to. Saying it out loud . . . it would make it real. Force me to acknowledge that every breath I took, cells were dividing and multiplying, forming limbs and a head. A heart.” She swallowed, eyes still downcast. “And then the car came and, well, we know the rest.”
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
“What do you mean?”
“You could have told me.”
“When? After the fight?” Her voice was sad now. “Cops were there in minutes, and they separated us, remember? They took you to the side and they—”
“You had plenty of opportunities to tell me afterwards.”
Ava took in a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then she said, “You’re right. I realized that later. I’m not making excuses, but at the time I was nineteen and scared out of my mind—terrified because I was pregnant, and terrified because they arrested you and the judge refused bail.”
“You tell my mother? That you were pregnant?”
“Of course not. Why would I do that to her?”
It was a valid question. But he wondered if knowing she’d be a grandmother would have kept his mother around for a while. Maybe if she’d known about her grandchild, she would have fought harder, instead of so willingly surrendering her fate to God.
The pieces from that time of his life—the things that troubled him, the ones he had no explanation for—were coming together. “That’s why you stopped visiting my mother, why you stopped visiting me in prison. Because you were showing.”
Ava nodded. “I didn’t want you to . . . Seeing me pregnant, me telling you it was yours—I couldn’t do that to you, what you were facing. Having you go away for life and knowing I was pregnant—”
“I would have found a way to help you.”
“You were nineteen.”
“So you kept it all to yourself. Shut me out, my mother—and Frank.”
“I thought that was for the best.”
“A clean slate.” Then he added, bitterly: “For you.”
“At the time, telling you . . . it seemed wrong. Cruel.”
No, Sebastian thought. It would have given me hope. A purpose.
“And,” Ava said, “the pregnancy was difficult, very touch and go. The doctor said I might lose it. If I came there and told you I was pregnant, and then I lost it? I kept thinking about how that would affect you.” She sighed, rubbed her face. “I thought breaking it off, it would hurt, yes—God knows I knew it would hurt you, because it destroyed me. I don’t expect you to believe that, given what I did, but my thinking was, if I broke it off, then you could hate me, and I thought hating me would make things easier for you.”
“And you.”
“Maybe.”
“No, not maybe,” Sebastian said, some steel finding his voice. “You got engaged pretty quickly.”
“I did.”
“Accident or planned?”
“A bit of both. I met Charles when I was out with a few of my girlfriends. Charles was nice. A gentleman. He was stable, and he had a good job, and he was and still is a very kind man. And when he took an interest in me, I felt . . . it was like I had an opportunity to have a huge burden lifted from me. I wouldn’t have to raise the baby alone. We wouldn’t be poor. I felt relieved—and grateful. I don’t regret my choice.”
That was the thing he loved the most—and hated the most—about Ava, her ability to never look back, because the past was the past, and the future was the future, and there was no point in discussing either, because the only thing life guaranteed you was the present.
“Charles,” Sebastian said. “He knows Grace isn’t his.”
Ava nodded.
“But he doesn’t know about me,” Sebastian said.
“No. I never told him who the father was. I wanted to keep that— I know this isn’t going to make sense, and I don’t expect you to believe me, but not telling him—not telling anyone—that was my way of holding on to you. To keep a part of you to myself.” Ava swallowed. Rubbed at her face, swallowed again. “I’m not doing a good job explaining this.”
“Grace?” Sebastian asked, his voice pinched tight. “Does she know the truth?”
Sebastian saw her pained look and knew the answer.
He said, “And you’re telling me this now . . . why? To give me an incentive to give you money to help find her, in case I turned you down?”
Ava shot him a look that said he was above such pettiness.
She said, “You mentioned earlier that the police focus their investigations on the families. They’re going to find out Charlie isn’t Grace’s biological father. They’re going to ask me questions. If I tell them about you, they’re going to come here and ask you questions. Given your . . . background, they might make your life a living hell. That didn’t seem fair, or right. And you deserved to hear the truth from me, not them. That’s why I came. To tell you the truth. I don’t want your money.”
“So,” Sebastian said, his gaze flicking to the driveway, to Agent Roosevelt, “the FBI doesn’t know.”
“No one does.”
“Then what’s he doing here?”
“He’s driving me,” Ava said. “Charles and I came up with a list of people who might be able to help with the ransom.”
“And how are you going to explain me?”
“I don’t know. An old friend, maybe. But I felt it was important to come here—and I couldn’t do it on my own. They insist on driving us everywhere.”
Sebastian exhaled as he leaned forward in his seat and, elbows propped on his knees, rubbed his face with his hands.
“A daughter,” he mumbled into his palms.
“We all make mistakes when we’re young,” Ava said. “Some mistakes you can’t come back from when you’re young and scared—and I was terrified, Sebastian. I was pregnant, and you were in prison. I wanted to give my baby a good life, not the one you and I had. And I did. I made that decision, and—”
“Stop. Just . . . stop.”
She did. They sat in silence, Sebastian trying to wrap his mind around everything she’d said. In the midst of the confusion and the rising anger and loss and grief and everything else he was feeling, a small but powerful voice kept whispering to him, You have a daughter. With Ava.
Grace. Her name was Grace.
A daughter with Ava. Mother, father, daughter. A family. The life he’d wanted but not the life he had. His real life consisted of a psycho quasi stepson who had tried to kill him and was, without question, going to try to do it again. Then he would turn around and take everything he had worked and sacrificed for and burn it to the ground.
“Please,” Ava said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“The kidnappers.”
“They called Charles the following morning, using some device or piece of software that changes their voice. Don’t know if it was a man or woman. The person said they had Grace and they wanted twenty million dollars in unmarked bills, some other things.”
“When did they ask for delivery?”
“They haven’t given an exact time yet. They said they would be in contact.”
“How much do you need?”
“Charles is in the process of liquidating his portfolio. That’ll give us, by the end of the business day tomorrow, roughly six million, which leaves us fourteen million to—”
“You’ll have it.”
“Sebastian,” she began.
“It’s done. I’ll have the money in a couple of hours. All I ask is two things. First, when we bring Grace home—and we will—I want to get to know her.”
“You can take that as a given.”
“Second, I would rather not invite the police into my life at this point.”
“I understand.”
No, I don’t think you do, he added privately. The police would start poking around, asking questions not only of him but of the people around him, and that would lead them to wanting to talk to Frank, who was “on vacation,” and to Paul, who was hiding. All a cop needed was to catch the slightest whiff that something was off, and Sebastian would have every aspect of his life put under a microscope.
“Don’t tell them yet that I’m going to give you the money,” Sebastian said. “I need to think about how I can do it without it coming back to me. Have someone else do it.”
Ava nodded. “They want us to take a polygraph. The FBI. To rule us out as suspects.”
“They want you to, or they asked you to?”
“Asked. Said it’s normal procedure—I get that—but still, it makes me nervous. What if they start asking questions about Grace’s biological father?”
“Has Charles told them he isn’t the biological father?”
“No.”
“Then keep it that way.” Suddenly Sebastian found himself on his feet. “I need to get to work on this. How many other people are on your list to get money?”
“Four more. Maybe five.”
“Go speak to them. Better to have as much money available as possible when the time comes. Sometimes banks screw up.”
Sebastian felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, reached for it. A text, from Ron: candice jackson flying to la later tonight.
Candice Jackson? Then Sebastian remembered: Paul’s last girlfriend. Ron had wanted to talk with her for a while.
“I need to take this,” Sebastian said. “How can I get in touch with you?”
“I wrote down my number for you.” Ava reached into her pocket, came back with a scrap of paper. He took it, and she placed her hands against his chest, leaned up, and kissed him on the lips—not a quick peck, and not the long, sultry kiss of two people madly in lust, but something more mature, more permanent. It was a kiss that said, You’re still in my heart. It said, I still love you. He inhaled the smell of her skin and hair, and in that moment, he felt like the before Sebastian, the original version, the boy who believed he was in possession of the kind of once-in-a-lifetime love that held the power to shape his destiny any way he wanted.