Page 28 of Flirting with Forever

“Just you and Tilli.”

“The cup of weak tea?”

“The very one.”

“And nary a love connection.” Mary shook her head in mock sadness. “For all her conniving plans, I’m starting to think your mother isn’t very good at this.”

“She’s not,” John said with a cold laugh that didn’t reach his eyes. “She doesn’t have so great a track record herself, except for Cormac. And she’s kept the poor guy in no-man’s-land for twenty-five years. I don’t think either of us should be taking dating advice from Estrella.”

Mary and John’s pace had slowed just a bit, going from a brisk stride to a medium-paced stroll. His shoulders were still tight, she could see, and his eyes were on the ground. But the silences weren’t quite so stifling. “Why won’t she marry Cormac? Is it really because she doesn’t believe in second marriages?”

“Yeah. And the divorce from my father definitely hit my mother hard. But there’s more to it than that.” John glanced at her, as if mulling something over in his mind. “I guess there’s no reason to put my best foot forward anymore, huh?”

“Your best foot—What do you mean?” She was confused. In her mind there was always a reason to put your best foot forward. She had no idea what he was talking about.

“I just mean that I’m not trying to impress you or anything, so there’s no reason to hide it, I guess.” He scowled, his frowny eyebrows and turned-down mouth back in full force. “My father isn’t exactly a stand-up guy. He’s a sleazeball. He left my mom right after she gave birth to me. Got another woman pregnant before he and Estrella were even officially divorced. Maddox is only my little brother by eleven months.”

“Wow.”

John was telling this story like it was someone else’s, like it didn’t have a hugely personal effect on him, his hands in his pockets, his strides long and easy. But Mary looked at the lines on his face. The same way she’d once seen the lives of his clients in the surly lines of his expression, now she saw the weight of his father’s betrayal there as well. Estrella’s inevitable pain at having been left.

“Yeah. He married Maddox’s mother and by all accounts was a pretty active father. At least in the public eye. And I think that my mother always just kind of thought that getting remarried herself would sort of put an all’s-forgiven stamp on what he did, how he left us like that. I think she wears her single status with a sort of pride. That he left and she carried on as a single mom just fine. Even though she paired up with Cormac when I was a kid.”

“What do you mean ‘in the public eye’?”

John grimaced. “Yeah. He’s, uh, John Whitford.”

Mary stopped walking. “Your father is John Whitford, the mayoral candidate?”

“Theformermayoral candidate.”

“Oh, my gosh. I’m such a dummy. You even have his name. John Modesto-Whitford. I never put two and two together.”

“The Modesto tends to throw people off the scent. If it were up to me, I would have just gone by John Modesto, but my mother hyphenated it, out of defiance, I think. She wanted to remind my father, in some small way, that he had a responsibility to me.”

She thought of the airbrushed subway ads she’d been subjected to for months during Whitford’s mayoral run. His smarmy expression and light brown hair. He looked like the exact person who would show up for a newscaster casting call in some B-level movie. His teeth were too white, his jaw too sharp, his smile ever present and dishonest. “Gosh. The two of you don’t really look much alike at all.”

“And therein lies the problem.”

“What problem?”

“It’s why he left my mother.”

“Because you don’t look like him?”

“Bingo.”

Mary stopped walking, her hands covering her mouth. “He thought she’d cheated?”Oh, Estrella.She could only imagine how devastating that must have been.

“Yeah. I have blue eyes. Both my parents have brown eyes. He thought it was clear that she’d cheated.”

“I didn’t think that brown-eyed people could have a blue-eyed baby.”

“It’s rare, but it depends on your genetics. I’ve got family members on both sides of my family tree with blue eyes. It was a pretty slim chance that I’d end up the family Sinatra. But here I am. John Whitford’s blue-eyed son.”

“That’s awful,” she whispered.

“It’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds, at least not anymore. He and I reconnected a while ago. Laid a lot of it to rest. That’s when I met Maddox.”

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