Child by Chance

Regardless of the fact that Brooke had never told them that Kent wasn’t her biological child. Bottom line to them, he supposed, was that he wasn’t theirs.

With Brooke gone, with Kent being so emotionally vulnerable all of a sudden, he hadn’t known what to do regarding his adoptive status. Logic told him the boy would have to know at some point. You just didn’t keep something like that from a person for their whole life. Shortly before Kent’s tenth birthday he’d talked to Kent’s therapist, Neil Jordon, about telling the boy the truth about his parentage, and had been quite relieved when Dr. Jordon had adamantly advised against breaking the news to him anytime in the near future. Kent was in no state to have his security, his foundation, further rocked.

Of course the fact that Dr. Jordon thought it would have been far easier on all of them to make the adoption a part of their family story from the beginning hadn’t been as welcome a pronouncement.

It was lunchtime on Monday. Or rather, sixty minutes past the lunch hour, but the time that he and Brooke had set aside as sacred. Even if one or the other could only spare fifteen minutes, or five, out of a busy day, assuming they were both in the office, they used to meet at 1:30 p.m. every single day. If neither of them had had a lunch appointment, they’d share whatever they’d brought from home to eat. Sometimes, they’d just fill each other in on the fact that they’d catch up at home that night. More than once they’d locked his office door and made love.

Occasionally, they’d fought.

That last day, the fatal day, they’d fought. She’d made plans to have dinner in north LA with a nationally known reporter, Alan Klasky, from a not-so-reputable online news source—part of a plan the marketing team had come up with for damage control for a candidate who’d been caught on film at a strip club. The plan was to promise the rag exclusives from their office for the remainder of the campaign.

Brooke hadn’t been fond of the plan. Sherman had hated it, preferring to handle the blow they’d been dealt by the man’s penchant for lap dances by flooding the press with the candidate’s good deeds, of which there were hundreds. By getting good family press for him. From reputable sources.

Marketing had preferred to get in bed with a group that wasn’t going to go away. They gave in to the blackmail.

Brooke was the bait. Chosen by their CEO because of her professionalism, her intelligence, her ability to create on a dime and because she was female.

She’d been honored by the recognition. Felt herself up to the task.

Sherman watched the fifteen minutes tick by that he still set aside, every single day that he was in the office, to close his office door and give his heart, mind and soul over to the woman he’d vowed to love forever.

Even though he’d stopped making love to her more than a year before her death.

It was a fine line between honor, decency, integrity—and justification. A line upon which he had to balance every single day of his life.

* * *

“HI.”

In the end, that was all there was. One word. No grand introduction. Nothing at all remarkable.

The little boy looked up at her, and Talia’s throat closed as she recognized not only the blue-gray eyes studying her, but their intensity even more. He was a few years older than Tatum had been when Talia had left home, but that look was very similar.

“Hi,” he said, turning back to the workbook in front of him, the neat rows of pencil-written numbers in the three-digit multiplication problems he’d been solving.

“I’m Ms. Malone.”

The words won her another of those glances. He nodded.

Looking around for a chair, Talia prayed that she wouldn’t throw up again.

Snagging a chair and pulling it close enough to reach his desk, she sat down. Kent pulled back, his eyebrows drawing together and up.

“I’m going to be working with you all week,” she said, wishing she’d taken Mrs. Barbour’s offer to introduce them, after all. The principal had been busy. And she’d wanted the moment to herself.

“What, you’re, like, my monitor or something?” Belligerence, or derision, entered his tone as he gave a half scoff. As though he was too cool for words.

Or too old to need a babysitter.

“No.” I’m your mother. The words flew, unwelcome and without permission into her brain. “I’m working with the sixth-grade art classes and have an hour break each day, and since everyone else here already has jobs to do, I’ll be spending my break time with you.”

“Got stuck with me, you mean.”

“That’s funny, and here I was thinking you were going to figure you were being stuck with me.”

That gave him pause. And then, “So, what, you’re just going to sit there and watch me do my math?”

He eyed the thick satchel she’d set on the floor by her feet. And sounded as if he kind of hoped she had more in store for him.

He was bored. She figured that out quickly enough.

“Nope. I’m here to work, not babysit,” she said, wondering where the words were coming from. Surprised by the ease with which they slid off her tongue. The battered women hadn’t been such a leap for her, but she was still a bit stiff with the kids. Until she pretended they were all little Tatums. Or until they got going on their collages and then she got so engrossed in reading their picture messages, in helping them compose those messages, express themselves, that she forgot to worry about anything else.

But this was...a ten-year-old boy who just happened to have shared her belly for nine months.

Oh, God. She was going to throw up again.

“What, you brought papers to grade?” he asked, his nose scrunched as he glanced at her bag again and then frowned at her.

He wasn’t rejecting her presence beside him. Didn’t seem to dislike her being there.

“No,” she said, reaching down to her bag, thinking about putting her head between her knees while she was at it.

There was a trash can not far off. There if she needed it.

She wasn’t going to need it.

“We’re going to do an art project,” she said instead, and pulled out the stack of magazines. A motorcycle and car one. Travel. Surfing. Boating. Sports—but not the famous one with pictures of girls. Home and Garden. Tatum had laughed at that one, but Talia would bet a week’s groceries that Kent would use it. Maybe he’d home in on some brownies on a plate or a basketball hoop in a backyard display...

“What about my math and sentences for English?” There was no sign of the tough guy as Kent glanced down into her open satchel to see colored papers, markers, glue and a couple of plastic containers of assorted embellishments. She had his attention.

“What you don’t finish at school today you have to do as homework,” she told him.

“Cool.” Closing his book, he turned to her with eagerness in his smile. And Talia had the strangest urge to give him a hug.

* * *

MONDAY’S DINNER PRETTY much summed up Sherman’s day.

He’d had errands to run—a case of flyers to drop off at a candidate’s office, shirts and pants to pick up from the cleaners, and they were out of toothpaste—after picking Kent up from school and was still in his creased gray pants, white button-down and gray-and-white silk tie as his son dropped into his seat at the kitchen table and announced that he was starving.

“You never did tell me how school went today,” Sherman said as he dumped salad from a bag, tossed it with the chicken nuggets he’d just pulled from the oven, added some dressing and put it on plates for him and Kent.

“You never asked.”

The boy had dropped his book bag by the door and sat in his pants, button-down shirt and sweater vest, his hand supporting his head, looking grumpy.

“Yes, I did. When you got in the car.” And his phone had rung. He’d taken the call and...