At Any Price(108)

I shook my head. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

She shot me a curious glance and she rubbed her index finger along her bottom lip like she always did when she was hesitating. “You were dating someone.”

I glanced away, fidgeting in my seat. I’d allow five more minutes of prodding and then I’d excuse myself. “I was. It was nothing. It’s over.” All the truth. Just not the whole truth. But I couldn’t find it in my heart to tell her that so much had changed along the way. That I’d lost something—a vital piece of me that felt like a gaping hole right at the center of my being. And that it might take a while to learn how to fill that up.

“What happened?” she asked in a quiet voice as if she might startle me out of my uncharacteristic forthrightness by speaking any louder.

I shrugged. “I had to study and my jobs. He had to work. There was no time.”

“Do you want to talk about him?”

I leaned forward, rubbing my forehead with my hand. “No. Not really.”

She sat silent for several minutes and I closed my eyes, preparing to make an excuse to go. She surprised me by dropping the subject and reaching for my half-empty plate, standing to take it to the sink.

“Mom—” I stopped her when she would have walked away. She halted, looking at me expectantly. “The Biological Sperm Donor…” I began shakily. “I think I’m ready to find out more about him.”

My mother sank back to the chair across from me, setting the plates down. I studied her for a moment. She was a lovely woman. She had the olive skin and dark coloring of her Greek ancestors and had been quite the stunning woman in her youth—had taken a turn at modeling as a teen. In her early forties, she was still striking, and before the cancer, she’d looked at least a decade younger than her actual age, with hardly a line marring her skin. But that harrowing ordeal had etched lines at her mouth and a few into her forehead.

We held each other’s gaze for a long, silent moment. She straightened, squaring her shoulders. “Okay.” She nodded. “What do you want to know?”

“What’s his name? Who is he?”

And so she told me. Patiently, evenly, she answered all of my questions. I kept my inquiries away from the private details of her life with him. I already knew he’d completely won her over at first before casting her aside like garbage. I didn’t need to know anything more about that. But he had a name, now. He was a person. Not just some anonymous figure upon which I could focus all my hatred. His name was Gerard Dempsey. He was of Irish and English descent. He was a successful real estate entrepreneur and had gained his millions that way. He had one sister, no brothers and three other children, all much older than me.

I also learned that he had never contacted my mom after I was born. Never written her a letter or made a phone call, though he knew exactly where we lived. She told me I had her eyes and hair color, but that my skin, jaw and nose were his.

She offered to show me a picture—the one picture she had of him—of them together, but I declined. I didn’t want to see them together, happy. Her young face full of bright ideals, unaware that he was stacking lie upon lie on top of their relationship like a house of cards.

“Did you love him?” I finally asked.

Her eyes drifted away to focus off into the distance. They took on a dreamy quality. “I did. Or rather…I loved who I thought he was, when I thought I knew everything about him.”

I breathed in slowly. “Love is dangerous. Deceptive.” I shook my head. “No offense, but I think it’s for fools.”

When she returned her gaze to me, her eyes were hard. “Mia, you are far too young to be talking like that. You sound like a bitter and lonely old lady.”

I clenched my teeth. Maybe I was, on the inside. Older than my years, wasn’t that what they called it?

Mom spoke again. “There are nice men out there. Lots of them. Most of them. Don’t waste your life being bitter and angry about the one dud your mom screwed up on.”

I froze for a moment, strangely reminded of Adam’s words in the echo of my mother’s. Every single man you look at for the rest of your life is tainted by him. I shook my head to clear it. “Why didn’t you ever date again?”

She shrugged. “You were the most important thing in my life and I didn’t trust my judgment enough to bring a potential loser into your life again. So I just didn’t.”

“And now? I’ve been out of the house for four years.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been working on it,” she said cryptically and then stood, gathering the plates and scooting off to the kitchen while I gazed after her thoughtfully.