Close Up: Exposure Book Three (3 page)

“And what? You certainly do have the life of Reilly.”

At that, Asher looked pensive. “That’s right, you forgot all of that. All of my past, and what I told you about it, you forgot.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, when we were together before, you always hassled me about being spoiled. But you didn’t know what had happened to me when I was growing up. I’ll have to fill you in about that. At any rate, you’re going to have to know about it before you meet my father.”

“Are you so sure that I’m going to meet your father? After all, I still haven’t decided what to say to you about your proposal. I mean, I can’t just sweep under the rug the fact that you have fathered a child with somebody else. Especially since you did that right after you and I broke up. Not to mention all the other lies and omissions.” I felt my hackles rising again and I tried to shake it off, but it was difficult.

“CJ, please believe me when I tell you that you can trust me. Everything that I have lied to you about was for your own good.”

I opened my mouth to call bullshit on that, because there was no way that him keeping a pregnancy from me could be in my best interest, but we were interrupted by Stella and my mom.

My mom’s reaction to Asher was much like Stella’s, but she was more outspoken. “Oh, my,” she said, looking at Asher and the Tesla parked on the street. “Cordelia, you’re dating a rich man? And a handsome one at that.” She all but batted her eyelashes, and I noticed that she bothered to put on a bit of makeup before she joined us on the porch.

“Yes,” I said. “This is Asher Sloane.”

Asher bowed his head, and took my mother’s hand and kissed it. She giggled lightly and blushed.

I couldn’t help but think that there was the possibility that she was going to forgive me for everything I had done, because I was realizing her ultimate dream for me. I was dating somebody wealthy. Mom always wanted that for me.

But she gave me a look that told me that all was still not right. She was just putting on an act for Asher. That was what her look told me.

“Well,” I said, “now that everybody has met everybody, it’s time to address what has been going on with me.” I took a deep breath, and grabbed Asher’s hand and squeezed it. I gave him a meaningful look that I hoped conveyed my feelings – that I was about to address something very stressful, and I needed him.

“Go on, Cordelia,” my mom said. She was annoying me because, as long as she was calling me by my given name, she was subtly letting me know that she was still angry with me. “Tell us what you need to tell us. And then, I’m sorry to be rude,” she began, looking right at Asher. Of course she was only addressing Asher when she said this, because she didn’t care if she was being rude to me. “But I’m very tired and I need to go to bed. But go on, Cordelia, tell us what you need to tell us.”

I felt myself blushing, and I looked at Asher, who looked amused and concerned all at the same time. “Well, I don’t have a lot of memory left of the past two years. So, I might need Asher to fill in some blanks.” I looked at him. “Asher, tell them what happened with me after Nathaniel. I don’t think that we really talked about all of that.”

Asher cleared his throat. “Well, Mrs. Parker,” he began.

“Gianna,” she said. “Call me Gianna.”

“Gianna,” Asher began again. “CJ has had a rough time after Nathaniel passed. When I met her, she was suffering from severe panic attacks anytime she left the house. She was so distraught and blamed herself for what happened. She was afraid to leave the house because she was convinced that there was danger around every corner.”

My mom and Stella were listening, but it was difficult to tell if their attitudes towards me were softening or not. My mom still looked hard and pissed, but Stella was looking more like she always did before the whole thing happened.

“And, well,” he said, and then he looked at me. “CJ, I’m about to tell them something that you don’t even know. In fact, I don’t think that you even knew about your agoraphobia.”

That was true – I
didn’t
know about the agoraphobia. This was the first I was hearing about any of this, and it was fascinating. It was as if everything that happened to me had actually happened to somebody else. None of it seemed real, so it didn’t really affect me to hear about it.

Mom nodded her head. “Go on, Asher, tell us what else happened.”

“Well, CJ had agoraphobia and she got help. She checked herself into New York Presbyterian and was there for about six weeks. The therapists there helped her recover from her phobia.”

“CJ,” Stella said. “You were in the nut house?”

I groaned inwardly.
Real sensitive there, sis.
“Yes, I was. And I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t call it that.”

Stella just gave me a look. “Why not? You always called it that. Remember when Uncle Louie was in one? You didn’t have any problem calling that hospital the nut house then.”

“Well, I do now.” I was bristling because I still didn’t remember spending time in a psychiatric facility, and I suddenly was protective over how Stella was talking about it.

“Huh. Well, I guess it does run in the family then,” Stella said. She wasn’t joking, either, because she wasn’t smiling when she said that.

Asher narrowed his eyes at her. “Stella, please be sensitive to what CJ went through. She was having a tough time, a really rough time, after little Nathaniel was killed. And the two of you didn’t exactly help.”

And, with that, the tension between the four of us was thick. My mother and Stella had just met Asher, and he was already lecturing them. I loved him for that, though, because he was sticking up for me. But I could already tell that he wasn’t going to win any points for his candor.

“Don’t lecture me, young man,” my mom said to him. And then she pointed at me. “CJ did a really stupid thing. A criminally stupid thing, and my son paid for her stupid thing with his life. He was the light of my entire existence, and all of that was taken from me through CJ’s stupidity. I can’t forgive her for that. I would think that you would feel the same.”

“Regardless, she needed support, she didn’t need to be shunned. You’re her family. You should act like it.”

At that, my mom started speaking Italian again, and Asher was listening to her.

“No, Ms. Parker, I don’t think that you should be speaking about your daughter like that. Contrary to what you might think, she didn’t do that intentionally. She loved her little brother, and she would never intentionally hurt him.”

My mom looked stunned. “You speak Italian?”

“I do. So, you can’t get away with saying cruel things about CJ in a different language and hope that she won’t understand.”

I looked at Asher, marveling that he spoke Italian. I had no idea.

Then I looked at my mom. “You think that I did that intentionally? Why would you think that, mom?”

She sighed. “Cordelia, I think that you wanted Nathaniel out of the way. You want me to be unhappy. I have no idea why you would want that, but I sometimes feel that you enjoy my misery.”

I was stunned at the revelation. “Mom, for lack of a better word, you’re crazy. I’ve been there for you after all of your husbands dumped you. I’ve brought food to you for weeks on end because you couldn’t get out of bed because of depression. Why would you believe that I want you miserable, and why would you EVER believe that I would do anything to harm that beautiful little boy?”

Mom crossed her arms. “I think that you better leave, Cordelia. And you, too, Mr. Sloane. You have some nerve coming over here and butting yourself into the family business.”

Asher looked angry, but he just shook his head. And then he started to speak Italian, and my mom’s face turned to stone.

I felt like things were surreal when the two of them started a heated exchange in Italian. Stella and I had no idea what they were talking about, but apparently it wasn’t good.

Finally, after about ten minutes of the two of them going back and forth, Asher said, in English, “okay, we’ll leave.” Then he turned to me. “Let’s go, CJ.”

He took my hand, and he led me into his Tesla. And then he drove off.

“What was that all about?” I asked him as we drove through Brooklyn on our way to my apartment. At least, I assumed that he was taking me home. He might have been taking me to his home.

He shook his head. “Your mother is a piece of work.”

“How did you learn Italian so well?”

He shrugged. “I have a knack for languages. I guess you forgot that about me. It’s been in my interest to learn as many languages as I can, for obvious reasons. After all, my company is international, and I negotiate with companies around the globe.”

“Okay. Now, tell me what you and she were arguing about.”

“It’s pretty simple. I told her that she wasn’t being fair to you, and she came back at me with her nonsense about you somehow wanting to get rid of Nathaniel. I told her that she wasn’t being rational, and she basically told me to butt out. And the argument just went round and round like that.”

I sighed. “Asher, I don’t know what to say to you about any of this. I don’t really want to thank you, because I don’t want you getting the idea that it’s perfectly okay to just show up at places where you aren’t invited. In fact, I thought that I made it clear, when I left your DC hotel room, that I needed some space from you. Right now, you’re not exactly giving me what I asked for.”

He hung his head. “I’m sorry for that, but CJ, I can’t help it. I’m very protective of you. Especially now. You’ve gone through so much in the last year or so, and I know how you were. How much you suffered. You don’t have memory of a lot of that, but I do. I just didn’t want your mother and sister to devastate you more.”

“I know that you mean well. But you have to let me fight my own battles, at least when it comes to my family. We’ll get through this, I hope, but it seems that you made things worse with your meddling.”

“I know,” he said, looking straight ahead. “And I’m sorry about that. Really, I am. I should have had more control over the situation, but I let them get to me. That was my mistake, of course.”

I was silent for awhile, trying to process everything that had happened. It all went awry. It might not have, if not for Asher’s meddling. I might have been able to persuade my mother to at least hear me out. I might have even been able to convince her to go to family counseling with me. But no…Asher had to show up and ruin everything.

A part of me was extremely angry with him about that. Another part of me, though, felt that he meant well, and he did all of that because he cared about me.

Still, I was feeling, even more than before, that I needed to be alone. Apart from him. He was suffocating me, encroaching on my space and my boundaries, and I just needed to get away.

“Take me home,” I finally said.

“Okay.” Then he took a deep breath. “But CJ, I would like you to know why I did what I did. Why I showed up like that, and why I let your mother get to me.”

“I know why. You already told me why. You told me that you felt that I was vulnerable and you were worried for me. That’s great, but that doesn’t erase the fact that you’re crowding me. I feel that I can’t breathe.”

“No, you don’t know why. I want you, very much, to get back with your family because I don’t want you to end up like me. I don’t really have a family. I mean, I have a twin sister and a father, but my brother was brutally murdered and my mother committed suicide over it. And, believe me, family is something that is supposed to be your anchor. My anchor is gone, and I don’t want that for you.”

I blinked. Something about his words struck a chord with me. It was almost as if it conjured a memory in me. A memory of him telling me about all of that.

I reached my hand over to him and he took it. “I’m so sorry, Asher, to hear about all of that. That’s horrible.”

He nodded. “It is.” Then he sighed. “My father…I have a real hatred for him, but, at the same time, I know that he’s the only reason why I’m still alive. Why I am where I am. Without him, I would be on the streets of Russia right now doing God-knows-what. But I hate what he does, and what he stands for.”

“Tell me about him.”

Asher came to a red light. “Okay. But do you want me to take you home? Or go to my place?”

“Your place. I think that you need to talk about things, and Scarlett is probably around my apartment, so I don’t think that we’ll have the privacy that we need.”

“Okay,” he said, and then he took a U-Turn and headed towards his place. “I think that you need to know more about my father anyhow.”

We drove in silence until we got to his place, and then we rode the elevator up to his penthouse suite. We then walked into the den, and I sat down and Asher poured me a drink.

Ah, finally, the drink that I was craving.
I sipped the cool liquor, which was an Amaretto Sour. Asher knew how to make an amazing cocktail, that was for sure.

Asher had poured himself a scotch, and he was sipping it while he stared thoughtfully out into space. Finally, he started talking.

“I didn’t know my father until I was fourteen,” he said. “He had abandoned my family. It was just my mother, my sister and brother and me. It was quite a struggle to get by. Russia doesn’t have the same type of safety net as America does, so if you’re poor, you’re really, really poor. And we were.”

I tried to imagine Asher being poor, and I just couldn’t. He carried himself so well, and was so well-spoken and intelligent. He didn’t come off as somebody who had ever had any want for anything.

Asher continued. “My older brother Anton started to work for my father when he was fifteen. I didn’t know about that. I don’t know why my father chose to reach out to him when he did, or why. At any rate, he kept it all a secret.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was basically a soldier in my father’s group. He ran surveillance and sometimes rubbed out people who were threatening my father’s operation. That was why he was killed.”

“A soldier,” I said. “Interesting choice of words.”

“But accurate. I had no idea what he was doing, though. He lied to my mother, my sister and me and told us all that he was working for a local factory. We didn’t question it. It wasn’t until he was killed and my mother committed suicide that I found out the truth. And, in finding out the truth, I found out who my father was.”