Page 37 of Unwanted Vows

I had not expected to come home to a situation that might easily be just as bad, if not worse. It is pretty hard to take when your own family are the baddies.

But I have something else to fix first.

I kneel down beside her. “Madeline,” I say, coaxingly.

When that gets no response, I say, “Maddy, please look at me.”

She sits up enough to rest her elbows on her knees. Her face is tear-streaked, and her eyes are wild. She looks as if she might run at any minute. Running would put her and the boy in even more danger than they are in now. If she hides, I might not know where she is to protect her.

“There are not enough words to say how sorry I am,” I say. “I was an irresponsible ass. I’ll be honest enough to say that I deeply enjoyed the send-off you gave me. I never thought that the result would be a baby. No, a handsome young man that you’re doing a hell of a great job raising.”

“Thank you,” she says. “I’m pretty impressed with him, myself. No, it has not been easy. I have no idea what I would have done if Kate and her family had not taken me in. Spindizzy was scarcely more than an idea ten years ago, and the Baileys were not rich by any means. I needed a job and some way to stay below the radar. They helped me to find both.”

“I am beyond grateful to them,” I say. This conversation isn’t going quite where I had hoped, but at least she is talking to me. “What happened back then? Can you tell me?”

She sighs, slides off the footstool to sit on the floor beside me. “I looked for you,” she said. “I tried to call, but the number said ‘out of service’. When I knew I was pregnant, I knew I needed help with the medical bills. Family services couldn’t seem to find anyone except your grandfather.” She gives a little shudder.

I lay my hand tentatively on her shoulder, hoping that she won’t shrug me off. To my amazement, she turns to me, scoots over, and leans against my shoulder.

“And then?” I prompted.

“I called him. He invited me to his office. He was all smiles, and sugar sweetness. He said not to worry. He would take care of all my medical bills, and see to it that I had the best of care. All I had to do was to let him adopt the baby when it arrived. Then I could turn my back on the child and get on with my life.”

She sucks in a breath at the memory. She is shaking. Gently, so very gently, I tighten my arm around her and stroke the hair on the back of her head. If the old man wasn’t already dying in a way that would torment him more than anything I could possibly do, I would kill him for this.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I said I needed to think about it. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I think I told him that my friends knew where I was, and were expecting me for dinner. No one was expecting me, but he didn’t need to know that. As soon as I got out of the building, I called Kate, and James came to pick me up. We drove to Kansas, to Spindizzy. In those days, it was a dying town with a bunch of windmills. It didn’t become a corporation until Kate met and married Charles.”

“You did the right thing,” I say. “Getting away from him. My father called me about six months after I left and said I needed to come home. But I thought it was just so they could get hold of me and make me part of the family business again. No one told me I had a kid on the way. No one mentioned you. Now that you are telling me all this, I’m guessing my father knew, and chose to disassociate himself from it.”

“Would you have come home if you had known?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I might have tried to persuade you to go back with me. At the very least, I would have sent money and I would have stayed in touch. My parents weren’t what you would call attentive, but we knew who they were and what they looked like.”

“That’s something, I guess,” Madeline says. Her voice sounds lost and forlorn.

“Oh, Maddy,” I murmur into her hair, “I dreamed of you. I just wasn’t sure if you were real. If I’d had any idea, I would have come back for you. Would you have gone to Africa with me?”

“I don’t know,” she says, honestly, tipping her head back, and looking up at me.

Her eyelashes are damp from crying, and the end of her nose is red. Her skin is pale, as if all the color had been bleached from it. A spray of freckles is scattered across her nose and cheeks, like tiny flecks of cinnamon. Her eyes…I could fall into them and drown. The limbal ring is dark grey. The crypts and ridges of her irises are a delicate, pale green, lightly flecked with specks of gold. Her pupils contract, and she squints against the bright central light of the room.

“I looked for you. He said you were dead. Then he threatened me, and all I could think about was getting away from him.”

“I should have looked for you,” I say. “If I’d had any sense, I would have.”

She sniffs, rubs her nose with the back of her hand, and looks around for something better. I long arm a box of facial tissues off a nearby end table, and hand them to her.

“Thanks,” she says. “I guess you were just a little bit busy. Why did you go to Africa, anyway?”

“To distance myself from Grandfather, and from Father. I worked for one week in an Aims Corp clinic. The staff were trained to over-charge and to turn a blind eye to gunshot wounds, gonorrhea, syphilis, and other STDs.”

“That stopped you?” Maddy asked.

I closed my eyes, for a moment reliving that ugly day. “I thought I could change that eventually, but when they brought in a woman who had been beaten and raped, the head of staff said she was a “working girl” and had got what was coming to her. I brought it up with Father, and then with Grandfather. They both told me I was too soft, that I needed to toughen up. That one day, I would marry a princess and that I would take over Aims Corp, grandfather’s ‘kingdom’, as it were.”

“Did you?” she asks. “Toughen up?”

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