Chapter 2: The Check
Seven years ago, I worked the front desk at the Whitmore Harbor Hotel on the night shift. Grant was thirty, already running the company, and he couldn’t sleep. He used to come down at two in the morning and sit on the lobby sofa with a laptop and talk to me about everything except hotels.
We were together for nine months. Quietly. He said his mother would make it a circus, and I believed him, because I’d met her.
When I found out I was pregnant, he was in Singapore for three weeks. I didn’t want to tell him over the phone. I wrote him a letter instead, the kind of stupid, careful letter you write when you’re twenty-four, and I left it at his office in an envelope marked Personal.
Two days later, Margaret Whitmore called me to her suite.
She’d read it. She held it up between two fingers.
“My son asked me to handle this,” she said. “He’s very sorry. He has obligations you couldn’t understand.” Then she slid a check across the coffee table. Fifty thousand dollars. “For the procedure, and for your trouble. You’ll find work in another city.”
I tore the check in half and put it on her table. Then I quit, packed my car, and drove to Providence. Grant called me eleven times that month. I never answered. I thought every call was him checking that I’d done what his mother paid for.
I’d told that story to myself so many times it had worn smooth.
Now it was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, and Grant Whitmore was sitting at my kitchen table in a charcoal suit with no tie, in a two-bedroom apartment over a laundromat, watching my son use his inhaler.
“Two puffs,” Leo told him seriously. “Then you wait one minute.”
“Got it,” Grant said. His voice cracked on it.
He’d told me his side twice. He never got a letter. His mother told him I’d run off with a guy from the bar across the street. He’d called me eleven times because he was frantic, and then he’d stopped because she showed him a photo of me loading my car with a man helping me. The man was my brother.
I didn’t know if I believed him. I didn’t know if it mattered.
“I want a DNA test,” he said quietly, while the twins were in their room. “Not because I doubt you. Because my mother will, and a judge will, and I want them to have my name in a way nobody can ever take away.”
I was still thinking about that when the doorbell rang.
Margaret came up my narrow stairs in an ivory tweed jacket, followed by a lawyer with a leather folder. She didn’t look at the dishes in the sink or the crayon drawings taped to the fridge. She looked at me the same way she had in the ballroom.
“Grant, darling. Go wait in the car.”
“No.”
She sighed and nodded to the lawyer, who laid a document on my kitchen table and set a gold pen on top of it.
“A nondisclosure agreement,” Margaret said. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You never contact my son again, you never use our name, and these children never claim anything from this family.”
“They’re his children.”
“They’re a waitress’s children,” she said pleasantly. “My son is marrying Sloane Ashby in June. If you’d like to make this ugly, I have a very good lawyer, and you have a night job and a sick little boy left alone with a neighbor four nights a week. I wonder what a family court would think of that.”
My hands were shaking. I put them flat on the table so she wouldn’t see.
“Sign it, Hannah,” Margaret said. “Your children are nobody’s business.”
Grant stood up so fast the chair scraped. “We’re doing a DNA test, Mother. Today.”
Something moved across Margaret’s face and was gone. “Of course, darling. Let’s do it properly. Dr. Fenn can take the samples this afternoon. I’ll have the lab rush it.”
They swabbed the inside of Lily’s cheek at three o’clock in Dr. Fenn’s private office on Beacon Street. Leo cried, so Grant let him swab Grant’s cheek first, and Leo laughed.
For four days, Grant called every night to talk to the twins. He read Frog and Toad to them over speakerphone, doing the voices badly.
On Thursday he came to my door without calling.
He had a single sheet of paper in his hand. His face was gray.
“Probability of paternity,” he read out loud, very flat. “Zero percent. Excluded.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It says she’s not mine, Hannah.” He held the page out to me like it weighed a hundred pounds. “You lied to me.”
