Thread of Hope

It was clear to me through the vocabulary that she was using that she had completely re-imagined, maybe even dressed up, what she had been. I didn’t know what her circumstances were back then and it was none of my business, but listening to her attempt to dignify her work, I was embarrassed for her.

“Did Meredith threaten to go to her father?” I asked.

Something flashed through Olivia Jordan’s eyes and was followed quickly by anger. “Yes, she did, as a matter of fact.”

“You obviously didn’t want her to.”

“How very astute of you.”

“You bribe her? Threaten her?”

I expected an immediate denial, but got a moment of silence instead.

“Yes. I threatened to tell her father about her relationship with Derek. The truth about it. That she was sexually active.”

“He knew she was having sex,” I said. “He told me that himself. You talked to him about getting Meredith birth control.”

She nodded. “Yes. But he didn't know that she was dumb enough to pick up an STD. Jon would've freaked out and she knew that. I told her I'd tell him.”

I didn't say anything.

“You have to understand something about Meredith,” she finally said, the lines deepening on her forehead. “About the relationship I have with her. It isn’t the greatest.”

“That’s not what you told me the first time we talked.”

She hiked her shoulders as if that was ancient history. “I answered your questions.”

“I asked if you had a good relationship with your daughter and you said you did,” I reminded her.

“What I said was that I liked to think so,” she said.

My stomach tightened. I had misread Olivia Jordan after my initial visit with her. She had carefully chosen each word she’d spoken to me, in case it came back on her. It had and she was prepared.

“Tell me exactly what that means,” I said through clenched teeth.

“It means, Mr. Tyler, that my daughter can be a serious pain in the ass and that we don’t always get along,” she explained. “She’s a teenager. She doesn’t like her parents very much.”

“Her father has the same problems with her then?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

I took a deep breath. “So basically everything you told me the first time we spoke was a load of crap? The happy family, the great daughter. All of that?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Do you even want to find your daughter?” I finally asked.

She made a face as if I’d defecated on the rug. “What kind of question is that?”

“You don’t seem to miss her,” I said, watching her. “You weren’t terribly worried the first time I came here and today you seem as if you don’t really care whether you see her again.” I paused. “Either you don’t care or you know where she is.”

I hoped she would respond to the last part, but she didn’t. If she knew where her daughter was, she was doing an excellent job of hiding it. What she couldn’t hide, though, was what a hateful human being she was.

“I don’t want to lose this, alright?” she said, leaning forward. “Any of this. I worked extremely hard to leave my old life behind and I’m not giving any of this up.”

She was veering off course, but I didn’t interrupt her.

“She wants to run away and hide, fine,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Go. Be gone. But there’s no way I’ll let her destroy my marriage.”

“You think she ran away?”

“I don’t know what happened,” she said, her jaw tightening. “I don’t know where she is. But as long as she’s not here, she can’t tell Jon the truth.”

“Lovely,” I said, wanting to vomit. “That’s a beautiful sentiment.”

She sat back in the sofa and sneered at me. “It is what it is. Every time I see her, I remember how far I’ve come. I’m not going back.”

“Your husband doesn’t feel that way,” I said.

For all the things that I didn’t like about Jordan, I had no doubt that he would do anything to get his daughter back. He was acting like a normal parent. Unlike his wife.

The sneer spread to every inch of her face. “Of course he doesn’t. He lives and breathes for her, thinks she is the greatest thing he’s ever seen.”

“Jealous?”

The sneer morphed into an explosion of anger and she leapt off the sofa. “She’s not even his child!our

SIXTY-SIX

Olivia Jordan, perhaps stu

After a few moments, she glanced at me, as if she was making sure that I was still in the room. She looked around, maybe checking to see if anyone else had been listening. Finally, she clasped her hands together and brought her unfocused gaze back to me. “I’ve never said that out loud.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She’s…not his daughter,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth slowly and awkwardly, like she was relearning the language. “He’s not her father.”

“Okay,” I said.

Whereas her face had been a mask of anger one minute before, she now bore the expression of a scared and confused woman who was wading into unfamiliar territory.

“I was with Jon,” she began, her hands rubbing together like she was trying to clean them. “We’d been together for a year. I got a call from…” She paused, staring at her hands, unable to find the word she was looking for.

“Your old manager?”

She looked up from her hands, her eyes vacant. “Yes, that’s right. He called me. An old client of mine was in town, asking for me. He was persistent and offering a larger than normal fee.” Her hands started working again. “Thomas…my manager. Thomas called me, explained the situation, asked if I’d do him a favor.” Her hands stopped. “I told him to fuck off.”

She laughed at the memory, though I didn’t see much humor in it.

She laid her hands flat on her thighs. “So Thomas told me if I wouldn’t help him out, he’d tell Jon. About my past.” She shook her head, her lips pursed together in a sour remembrance. “So I did it.”

“And you didn’t tell Jon?” I asked.

“That was the whole point,” she said. “To not let Jon know. About any of it.”

“Didn’t you think he might come back at you again? Thomas?”

“It wasn’t going to happen again,” she said.

“You couldn’t have known that.”

“Trust me,” she said, leveling her eyes with mine. “It won’t happen again.”

I dropped it and moved on. “Okay. So, the client. He’s Meredith’s father?”

Her eyes slipped away again and she nodded slowly. “When I found out I was pregnant, I assumed it was Jon’s. But when I went to the doctor for confirmation, I realized the timing was off. Jon had gone to Europe on business for a few weeks. When I tracked back, I knew it wasn’t his.”

I tried to sort out the questions in my head and get them in an order that would make sense.

“I was protected, like I always had been,” Olivia said, answering one of the questions. “It was a fluke circumstance, the pregnancy.”

“Why didn’t you just abort?” I asked, then corrected myself. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean just, as if it were an easy thing. But given the situation…”

“I was going to,” she said. “That was the plan.” She shook her head. “But a phone call came to the house from the doctor’s office. Jon answered. This was before doctors started taking privacy seriously. He was ecstatic.” A thin, empty smile crept onto her face. “No going back at that point.”

“Did you tell the father?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. I’m sure he didn’t use his real name.”

“Wouldn’t…your manager have known?”

She leveled her eyes with mine. “Probably.”

I left it alone. “And I assume Meredith doesn’t know?”

“Of course not. It was bad enough that she learned what I used to be. There was no way I’d tell her the truth.”

“You didn’t worry about her finding out?”

She frowned. “How would she find out when I was the only one who knew? And why would I have wanted to know him? Introductions would’ve been a little awkward, don’t you think?”