Jeff Shelby - Thread of Hope

I took a deep breath. “So basically everything you told me the first time we spoke was a load of crap? The happy family, the great daughter. All of that?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Do you even want to find your daughter?” I finally asked.

She made a face as if I’d defecated on the rug. “What kind of question is that?”

“You don’t seem to miss her,” I said, watching her. “You weren’t terribly worried the first time I came here and today you seem as if you don’t really care whether you see her again.” I paused. “Either you don’t care or you know where she is.”

I hoped she would respond to the last part, but she didn’t. If she knew where her daughter was, she was doing an excellent job of hiding it. What she couldn’t hide, though, was what a hateful human being she was.

“I don’t want to lose this, alright?” she said, leaning forward. “Any of this. I worked extremely hard to leave my old life behind and I’m not giving any of this up.”

She was veering off course, but I didn’t interrupt her.

“She wants to run away and hide, fine,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Go. Be gone. But there’s no way I’ll let her destroy my marriage.”

“You think she ran away?”

“I don’t know what happened,” she said, her jaw tightening. “I don’t know where she is. But as long as she’s not here, she can’t tell Jon the truth.”

“Lovely,” I said, wanting to vomit. “That’s a beautiful sentiment.”

She sat back in the sofa and sneered at me. “It is what it is. Every time I see her, I remember how far I’ve come. I’m not going back.”

“Your husband doesn’t feel that way,” I said.

For all the things that I didn’t like about Jordan, I had no doubt that he would do anything to get his daughter back. He was acting like a normal parent. Unlike his wife.

The sneer spread to every inch of her face. “Of course he doesn’t. He lives and breathes for her, thinks she is the greatest thing he’s ever seen.”

“Jealous?”

The sneer morphed into an explosion of anger and she leapt off the sofa. “She’s not even his child!our

Olivia Jordan, perhaps stunned herself that she’d spoken the words aloud, stood frozen for a moment before slowly moving back to the sofa. Her face held the angry outline of a frown.

After a few moments, she glanced at me, as if she was making sure that I was still in the room. She looked around, maybe checking to see if anyone else had been listening. Finally, she clasped her hands together and brought her unfocused gaze back to me. “I’ve never said that out loud.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She’s…not his daughter,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth slowly and awkwardly, like she was relearning the language. “He’s not her father.”

“Okay,” I said.

Whereas her face had been a mask of anger one minute before, she now bore the expression of a scared and confused woman who was wading into unfamiliar territory.

“I was with Jon,” she began, her hands rubbing together like she was trying to clean them. “We’d been together for a year. I got a call from…” She paused, staring at her hands, unable to find the word she was looking for.

“Your old manager?”

She looked up from her hands, her eyes vacant. “Yes, that’s right. He called me. An old client of mine was in town, asking for me. He was persistent and offering a larger than normal fee.” Her hands started working again. “Thomas…my manager. Thomas called me, explained the situation, asked if I’d do him a favor.” Her hands stopped. “I told him to fuck off.”

She laughed at the memory, though I didn’t see much humor in it.

She laid her hands flat on her thighs. “So Thomas told me if I wouldn’t help him out, he’d tell Jon. About my past.” She shook her head, her lips pursed together in a sour remembrance. “So I did it.”

“And you didn’t tell Jon?” I asked.

“That was the whole point,” she said. “To not let Jon know. About any of it.”

“Didn’t you think he might come back at you again? Thomas?”

“It wasn’t going to happen again,” she said.

“You couldn’t have known that.”

“Trust me,” she said, leveling her eyes with mine. “It won’t happen again.”

I dropped it and moved on. “Okay. So, the client. He’s Meredith’s father?”

Her eyes slipped away again and she nodded slowly. “When I found out I was pregnant, I assumed it was Jon’s. But when I went to the doctor for confirmation, I realized the timing was off. Jon had gone to Europe on business for a few weeks. When I tracked back, I knew it wasn’t his.”

I tried to sort out the questions in my head and get them in an order that would make sense.

“I was protected, like I always had been,” Olivia said, answering one of the questions. “It was a fluke circumstance, the pregnancy.”

“Why didn’t you just abort?” I asked, then corrected myself. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean just, as if it were an easy thing. But given the situation…”

“I was going to,” she said. “That was the plan.” She shook her head. “But a phone call came to the house from the doctor’s office. Jon answered. This was before doctors started taking privacy seriously. He was ecstatic.” A thin, empty smile crept onto her face. “No going back at that point.”

“Did you tell the father?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. I’m sure he didn’t use his real name.”

“Wouldn’t…your manager have known?”

She leveled her eyes with mine. “Probably.”

I left it alone. “And I assume Meredith doesn’t know?”

“Of course not. It was bad enough that she learned what I used to be. There was no way I’d tell her the truth.”

“You didn’t worry about her finding out?”

She frowned. “How would she find out when I was the only one who knew? And why would I have wanted to know him? Introductions would’ve been a little awkward, don’t you think?”

It was clear by her tone that she didn't care what I thought.

“You think that would’ve been easy?” she said, gathering steam, her anger fueling her. “You think maybe we could’ve solved our little problem if we’d all just sat down and talked about it? Maybe turned into some sort of Brady Bunch? Give me a fucking break.”

Her eyes were wide with fury. I wasn’t exactly sure who or what she was mad at, but I was getting a good idea.

“Every time you see her,” I finally said.

She stared for a long time at me and I assumed I would get some angry denials, maybe some more profanity. But her face finally took on an accepting expression, the resignation that she couldn’t-or didn’t want to-hide it any longer.

“Yes,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Every time I see Meredith, I am reminded of what I used to be. Of who her father is, of how she came to be. And every time I see her with Jon, when he’s gloating over her, spending time with her, telling her how wonderful she is…” She cleared her throat and ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t want to be reminded of that part of my life, but every day, I see her and I see it.”

“She’s your daughter, too,” I said.

“No, she’s not,” she said, shaking her head, looking right through me. “She’s the daughter of someone who no longer exists.”

I walked outside, the interior of the Jordan home feeling toxic and ugly.

I’d asked Olivia a few more questions. It immediately occurred to me that perhaps she had done something with Meredith, but I let go of it almost as quickly. She was interested in protecting her place in the Jordan family and was not going to jeopardize that. She may not have cared for the sight of her daughter, but I doubted that she played any part in her disappearance.