The Swallow's Nest. Emilie Richards
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you.”
Anger was white-hot and immediate. “Why would you say that? It’s just as likely he didn’t tell me because he needed me when he was sick!”
“I say it because I’ve seen the way he watches you.”
She couldn’t let that pass, and she told him something she hadn’t told anyone else, because she had always been able to share her secrets with Eli. “Do you remember the last time we came here? Before we found out about the cancer? Graham and I had talked about having a baby of our own very soon. Then he came here and saw little Jonah.”
Jonah was Kai’s youngest son, a particularly beautiful child, who at birth had resembled his Georgia peach mother, rosy-skinned and blue-eyed.
She spoke faster. “Jonah had grown so much and suddenly he looked like an island baby. And Graham was shocked. He didn’t know babies’ skin color deepens, or that their eyes can change colors. Suddenly Jonah looked like our Polynesian ancestors, not his haole mother, and will probably look more like them as he grows up. Graham never said so, but I think he took a look at our beautiful nieces and nephews, with their rainbow diversity, and realized his baby might look like them because, hey, I’m Hawaiian, too. Like the rest of you. Same gene pool, right? So to spare himself that possible calamity, his baby’s mother is blonder than he is!”
Eli slowed because they had almost reached their destination. “I’m not surprised you’re angry.”
“I don’t think you believe me.”
“I believe everything you’ve said, but this man married you when his parents disapproved. He showed every sign of wishing he was Hawaiian, too, not wishing you were more like him.”
“Well, now he has a son who looks like him. And the baby has come to stay.”
He turned into the long unpaved driveway leading to their parents’ house. “The baby’s mama?”
“She dropped that little boy in my arms and announced he was Graham’s, then walked away and left me holding him on my own front porch.”
He surprised her and stopped, turning in his seat to look at her. “I know you hurt. I wish I could make that better.”
“Please, don’t be condescending.”
“It’s just that I understand better than you think.”
“How could you?”
He grimaced. “Amber kept a secret from me, too. Aleki is not my biological son, but nobody else knows it, although I think Mama suspects. Amber was pregnant when I married her. I knew she had been in a bad relationship before we met, but for months before we married she didn’t tell me she was pregnant. Then when hiding it was impossible, I wrestled with the pregnancy, the deception, the responsibility. Everything.”
She was stunned that in a family as close as theirs, this had been kept a secret. “But you married her anyway and never told us?”
“I married her, maybe because of the baby. By then I loved her and didn’t want her to go through that alone. And when he was born I loved Aleki as much as I love our other children. And after a while I didn’t hold Amber responsible for the hard choice I had to make. The whole thing? It made me think about what really mattered.”
Then he surprised her, because Eli was rarely demonstrative. He touched her braid, hanging limply over one shoulder, then he gave it a slight tug. “Maybe that’s what you’ll need to think about, too.”
Ellen Randolph had been wealthy all her life, so she knew for certain that having money did not automatically make anybody happy or widen their world. Protecting one’s assets was a cheerless, thankless task, and the narrower one’s world, the easier it was to stay at the top of it.
Having lived with Douglas Randolph for thirty-six years, she knew the view from the top was limited, too. Every single day as chairman of the Randolph Group, Douglas acted on his conviction that a wider view was an unnecessary distraction, and every single day he got wealthier and more rigid.
This morning Douglas stood in their designer kitchen, with its custom rosewood cabinetry and enameled lava countertops and pinched his features together in disapproval.
“I don’t quite know what you expect me to do about this, Ellen.”
She had caught her husband right before he headed for his corporate offices in Oakland, and from long experience she knew that this was exactly the wrong time to bring up anything personal. But truthfully there were no good times. Douglas was 99 percent business and only 1 percent father-husband-lover, and mentioning their son’s name at any time of day wasn’t just a distraction, it was an act of treason.
For Douglas, removing Graham from his life had been a business decision, and his business decisions were evenly divided between pragmatic and spiteful. He was not a man to cross, and Graham had crossed him one time too many. The spiteful Douglas would never forgive his son, and Ellen knew better than to ask him to.
But he still had to know the latest news.
Her tone was solicitous, more personal assistant than wife, which was the way he liked it. “I don’t expect you to do anything. I just thought you had to know that apparently we have a grandson.” She played her ace. “In case someone mentions it. I know how you hate to be taken by surprise.”
He made the same noise low in his throat that he made whenever he was skeptical or didn’t want to admit anybody else had a point. “And the person who told you the story is reliable?”
“Jenny Lurfield’s daughter is a friend of Graham’s, and she was at the party to celebrate his better health. She told Jenny about the baby.”
“Well, you have a little spy network everywhere, don’t you? You should have gone into the CIA instead of marrying me.”
“I needed the bigger challenge.” She moved on before he processed that. “I’m going to see Graham this morning. I just thought you should know.”
“Don’t expect anything from me. I don’t want to hear about this again, you understand? This has nothing to do with me. Nothing Graham does has anything to do with me. I thought that was clear.”
“You are the master of clarity. And now that I’ve let you know, I’ll keep the rest to myself.”
“What rest? I would like you to ignore this scandal and hold up your head if it’s mentioned. Can’t you do that?”
“Do you mean am I capable of doing that? Of course I am.”
“Don’t play games!”
She didn’t back away, not even when he stepped forward. At sixty Douglas remained a force to be reckoned with, in full possession of all his hair and a trim waistline, still erect and broad-shouldered, but Ellen had learned long ago that he would never raise a hand to her no matter how loud his voice. He intimidated by attitude and gesture.
She was nearly his height, and now she met his eyes, which were blazing with anger. “I’m just going to visit Graham today and see what I should do next. My head’s always up, but I’m not nearly as adept at ignoring our only child as you are.”
“You coddled him. If you had ignored that boy a little more when he was growing up, then maybe I wouldn’t be so ashamed of him now.”
The problem was just the opposite. She’d spent Graham’s childhood ignoring him. Between her own lack of experience, her inability to dredge up what she thought were appropriate maternal feelings, and her desire to please and placate her husband, hadn’t she ignored her son’s all-too-fragile development until he had finally developed without her and gone in his own direction?
She chose her words carefully. “Your son almost died this year. He’s still not out of the woods, and now he has a child