Page 56 of The Billionaire's Accidental Legacy

“Maybe I am.”

“You don’t need to be prickly about it.”

“Why do you care? What I like, what I’m interested in...”

“It seems like I should know something about the woman who is having my baby.”

“Based on what? What do you or I know about functional families?”

“No. On something. Though I can’t say what. Movies I’ve seen or maybe Jiminy Cricket. Isn’t that what your conscience is supposed to be shaped like?”

She couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “All right. As long as a cricket told you to ask about me, then I allow it.”

“Good. Tell me about your mother.”

That brought a cascade of images. Her mother laughing, tossing her silky hair over her shoulder. She could remember every time she’d seen her mother do that. Down to the very last time. The time she had left then never come back.

“She was beautiful. Is beautiful, I suppose.” As if she had never looked up her mother’s picture. She was a socialite who very much enjoyed her visibility.

Jessie was always amazed that her father had let his wife go like that. But she supposed it had to do with starting over in England. Making his new life there. Why bring an American socialite who would offer him nothing in terms of social cachet? Never mind that she was the mother of his children.

But she’d walked out before that anyway. “She was not very interested in being a mother. She was very good at styling hair and letting us try on her gowns. I will give her credit for that. She wasn’t protective of them. She treated designer pieces like they might as well be our dress-up clothes. She enjoyed that part of having daughters, I think. She let us use her makeup. She let us play dress-up exhaustively in her bedroom. But then she had her own life to see to. And I can’t blame her. Except she left. And I kind of do blame her for that. Which isn’t fair because I also left.”

“But she left you,” he said.

“My father would never have allowed her to take Maren and me. We were too important to him. Too valuable. When we were fourteen and fifteen, he was already using us to crack codes for him and remember things. To run cons. We were better than a computer, he said.

“No. He would never let her walk away with us. She was beautiful. But that was all. She wasn’t a real asset to him. It would’ve put her in danger to bring us, and she never would’ve been able to start over. Though I think it might be easier for me to forgive her if I truly believed that she missed me.”

She felt a slight crack in her heart. It had been there for years. It was just that now she’d become aware of it.

She did her best not to let it show on her face.

“He taught us to be very analytical. Because our brains do hold so much information. And to access it rather than be bombarded by it you have to learn to use it a very specific way.”

“You mentioned files.”

“Yes. I keep my important thoughts in files. I can walk through the room that’s filled with file cabinets and I can go through them alphabetically. That allows me to put them away so that I’m not assaulted by them when I don’t want them, and it allows me to come up with a system to help me go through the vast amount of knowledge I have. The other thing he taught us to do was read body language. And manipulate people based on who we assess that they are.”

“There’s a term for that, isn’t there?”

“Yes. A mentalist. I suppose that’s what I am. I’m sure there must be some very good things that could be done with the skill set, but I was never shown them. It has helped me, though. To insulate me. Protect me from being swallowed up by my emotions. I learned early on what was important.”

“Protecting yourself.”

“Yes.”

“That’s how life is when the adults around you don’t protect you,” he said, his tone far too knowing.

“Yes.”

“But we are protecting our baby. He or she will never have to wonder. And he will not have to build up those defenses.”

“But she might need them,” said Jessie. “Imagine if she has a brain like mine. I hope she doesn’t. I hope she’s desperately normal. And I’ll think she’s exceptional all the same. All mothers do, don’t they?” She laughed. “How quickly I forgot my own story. My mother didn’t think I was exceptional.”

“And you were. Objectively. And so I think the conclusion to be drawn here is that when a mother does not find her child exceptional it is not a commentary on whether or not the child is. It is simply a commentary on the mother.”

“Maybe. What about your mother?”

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