Page 25 of You Didn't Know Me Then

Chapter 8

The living room looked like it was ready for a Good Housekeeping photoshoot, mainly thanks to his brother’s ex-girlfriend and the designer that she had hired. If his life was in limbo, at least it had this serene setting—off-white sofas, plush sea-palette cushions and throws, rustic-looking wood furniture, and a second-line ocean view washing in through the large doors that opened to the balcony.

The silence was broken only by the far sound of the waves, the breeze, the seagulls, but in two hours, it would be replaced by music and the cheerful chatter of twenty people.

Jordan picked up the only things that were out of place—the two suitcases waiting to be relieved of their cargo of clothes, books, and other belongings that he had brought back with him from his short trip to Washington D.C.—and carried them to the back

Not wanting his assistant to handle his personal business, he had been forced to spend a few days there to pack up his apartment and return the keys after it had stood empty for weeks. He had never bought a property in the city, as if, deep down, he had always known it wouldn’t be a real home to him. Being back there had reminded him how sick he had become of it.

Yet, while there, he had met with a few people, knowing it would be easier to maintain some connections than building bridges from ashes later. His main goal had been to kill any rumor that Dana Brin had tried to spread for her client. Given his track record, reputation, and the fact that Dana wasn’t as good at her job as he was, no one really believed her, anyway. Still, he was glad that he had managed to avoid crossing paths with her or Sharon Rush while there. It was enough that everyone knew the congresswoman was pregnant, which had been brought up in almost every meeting he had held, rendering it impossible for him to forget.

Sharon’s words over the phone had delivered good news. It had saved them both a plethora of immediate issues and long-lasting problems, the media being the least terrible of them, which said a lot about the pit that they had almost dug for themselves.

Yet, there was this strange void in him.

Having time to think about it while performing the mundane task of packing up his apartment, he had concluded that the emptiness he felt was the kind of disappointment one felt when you let someone else decide between two options that you couldn’t choose from, and you only realized which one you preferred when they picked the other one. In some fucked-up way, he had wanted it to be his. A pregnancy that resulted from a momentary lack of judgment with a woman he respected as a professional but had no feelings for.

The only thing he hadn’t figured out yet was why.

Was it his age? Because, when he had accidentally impregnated one of his ex-girlfriends at twenty-four, despite having been willing to do whatever it took to care for her and a baby, her decision to terminate the pregnancy just two days after she had peed on a stick had been a relief. But now, knowing that a pregnancy that shouldn’t even have been his in the first place, indeed wasn’t his, stung. And that was ironic, because that hadn’t been his first reaction.

When Sharon had told him she was pregnant and didn’t know if it was his or her husband’s, who she had separated from, his instinctive reaction had been cold calculations of professional implications and damage control strategies—how to keep the media at bay, where to book a confidential paternity test, what to say, to whom, and when. Those tactics had become second-nature, imprinted in him. The fact that there was a child involved, potentially his, had penetrated his mind only after.

He had realized then that he didn’t know who he was anymore and, repulsed with himself, used his sister’s wedding as an excuse to leave.

And now he was an outsider in his own life.

Spending time with his family helped. So did being in his hometown, in the place that had known him before he had become what he was now. And, in some unpredictable way, so did reaching out to another outsider—a girl who had kicked a locker alone in a hallway, feeling like a public and private failure.

Jordan pushed the two suitcases into the bedroom’s walk-in closet then took his clothes off. Stepping into the shower, he thought about that girl’s mother. The look on her face that day had caught him off guard.

Every shred of her daughter’s hard-earned victory had been reflected on her face. This woman, who had experienced divorce from a man who probably still lived up to his reputation and who raised her daughters almost alone, fought to keep it all beneath the surface. But, at that moment, the maelstroms in her eyes had revealed it all.

He had seen it. The things you notice when you really look. Like the ocean through his window, with its sunken ships of hopes and dreams. Her artless, and sometimes awkward, honesty revealed time and again that whatever corroding powers worked against her, inside and out, she wasn’t bitter, ruined, or cynical like the miasma that had penetrated his soul. And this unvarnished, unscathed quality of hers should be left unsullied if it had survived until now. It shouldn’t be tainted by people like the horrid man who she had been with at Fred’s. It shouldn’t be marred by someone like him, either.

There was one thing he could do without much risk—let her know that her words had been taken seriously; that, although he had been amused by her open-bookishness at first, he wasn’t laughing at her.

Quite the opposite.

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