“I need to know what happened, Jo.”
“What do you mean?” she said, obviously confused.
“I need to know why everyone thought it would be a good idea to lie to me.”
Jo’s head dropped, her expression hidden from him. “It’s taken you eight months to ask the question,” she observed.
“Well there’s been a lot of shit going on.” He was back to being resigned. It was so difficult for him to hold on to the anger.
Jo lifted her head and took a sip of her drink. Peering into the glass as though it held all the answers, she shuffled the ice slowly back and forth between her hands, as if it were a hockey puck. “When you left, Lu was convinced that your plan would work. You’d go over there but that you’d come back for her and your child. Her faith in you never wavered.”
That made him smile. He and Lu had come to an understanding early in their lives that they would never lie to each other. Pete and Willa had been there too and some blood had been exchanged.
“It’s hard to look back on this. I’m trying to be objective.” She explained.
“Jo, just tell me your version. I’ll draw my own conclusions,” Lex said, the irritation clear in his voice.
“It was probably six weeks after you left that things got crazy. At the time, Lu was about to complete her first trimester. Amber began to pressure her to have an abortion. To be honest, I was very conflicted about everything. You know how I feel about abortion. I couldn’t allow that to happen, but I wasn’t ready for you to give up your dreams either. I imagine it won’t be long before you’ll understand what it’s like to be a parent.”
For some reason, her statement brought him right back to mad. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped.
“Just that you want things for your child. You want their dreams to be able to come true. You were on the brink. Coming home to be with Lu and the baby would have stalled your career. You wouldn’t be Lex Pellitteri if you’d known about Nina.”
“That’s fucking bullshit!” he said, hostility laced through his words.
“The person you are right now, the one who’s achieved so much, you wanted that from the time you could talk. Anything less would have chipped away at you. Anyway, Amber started to wear Lu down. She was sad, missing you, and she started to believe that she couldn’t be a teenage mother and fulfill her dreams. They made the appointment. And so help me Lex, I was OK with it. I thought that both of you were so full of promise that this was the best thing to do. I was relieved.”
That surprised him. His mother had always been pro-life.
“There I was, going against everything I believed so that you could get what you wanted.” She stopped and finished her drink. “Your father was very quiet during this. Amber was here almost every night. We’d talk through everything. I understood where she was coming from because I knew what would happen to you. Then, the night before the procedure, Lu came over. She was pale, drawn, looking every single one of her seventeen years. She begged me to talk to Amber. Lu couldn’t do it, she couldn’t have an abortion. She knew that I could sway her. I wanted to help Lu. I loved her like she was one of my own. And I just couldn’t, in the end, see that my soul could handle it if she had an abortion. But I still wanted to save you. So I convinced her that we should tell you that she had it.”
Lex continued to lean against the counter, although he wanted to move. Even though he had known that his mother had to be behind all of this, it still shocked him to the core that she had managed to conceal this from him for so long. She’d outflanked a seventeen-year-old.
“Lu was so grateful that I would help her that it took nothing to get her to agree to the rest.”
Lex nodded his head. Raising his eyebrow, he asked, “How’d you convince Dr. A.?”
“That was far more difficult.”
“I bet.”
“We pushed if off until it was no longer the first trimester.”
“Sounds like it was quite a busy couple of weeks for you. You don’t sound like you regret any of it.”
“What would you like for me to regret, Lex? Should I regret the fact that we have Nina? Or perhaps that you’ve been so successful?”
“You’ve been lying to me for nine years. Do you regret that?”
“I regret that I had to do that, yes.”
“You don’t sound very sorry.”
“I’m not sorry,” she said, her voice becoming higher. “You were one of the first Americans to play in the English Premier League. You’ve just signed a multimillion-dollar contract to do what you love to do. I did what I had to do to help you make that happen. I. Do. Not. Regret. It.”