PART 3: Raise Them Well
It took her less than a minute to break.
“I was already pregnant,” she said, sobbing. “When your father called me into his office and told me you and Camille weren’t working. I’d been seeing Preston, we’d been trying for years, and then he left me for his job in Dubai, and I found out I was carrying three babies. I was twenty-nine. I had nothing.”
“You told me it happened at the Christmas party,” Graham said, his voice flat.
“You were drunk. You don’t remember it.” She wiped her eyes. “I let you believe it. Winston wanted heirs. You were unhappy. It was so easy to say yes.”
“Nothing happened that night,” Graham said slowly. “I woke up on the couch in my office with my shoes on.”
Delia covered her face.
I felt something strange as I watched her. I had expected triumph. Instead I felt a long, tired sadness. Two years earlier she had sat across from me in that conference room, crying while Graham held her hand, and some part of me had known her tears were real. She had been terrified then, too.
“She used your fear of an empty dynasty,” I said quietly to Winston. “And you handed her the opportunity.”
He didn’t answer. For the first time since I’d known him, the old man looked his age.
Graham turned to me. His voice was barely a whisper.
“Camille. Is it true? All four of them are mine?”
“Look at them,” I said.
Theo, my oldest, had tucked himself behind my knee. Rowan stared up at Graham with enormous gray eyes. Josie, perched on my hip, held out a crumpled daisy. Hazel, the smallest, clutched a stuffed rabbit and studied him with the solemn suspicion of a customs officer.
Graham knelt on the stone, in his tuxedo, in front of four hundred guests.
“Hi,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I’m Graham.”
Hazel looked at him for a long moment.
“You have our nose,” she said.
The tests came back within a week, and nobody was surprised.
Delia’s three sons belonged to Preston Vale. The boys, Elliot, Wyatt, and Bram, were healthy, bright-eyed two-year-olds who had never done anything wrong in their lives and who now sat at the center of a legal storm they couldn’t understand.
I said so, loudly and in front of the Calloway lawyers, at the first meeting they called.
“Those children are not responsible for what their mother did,” I told Winston. “And if I hear that you’ve treated them as anything less than human beings, I’ll go to every board member and journalist in this city.”
“You’re defending Delia’s sons?” Beatrice asked, startled.
“I’m defending three babies who just lost a name, a home, and a family,” I said. “They’re not a problem for you to solve. They’re kids.”
Preston Vale flew back from Dubai the moment he heard. He turned out to be a lean, anxious man with tired eyes, and he walked into Samuel Reyes’s office and said the one thing no one expected.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “She told me she’d had a miscarriage. I would have come home. I would have raised them.”
He and Delia talked for a long time behind closed doors. I don’t know what was said. But three months later, a custody arrangement was filed in New York: shared custody, with a neutral counselor, and a court order keeping the boys in the same house as their mother until the transition was complete. Delia resigned from the Calloway Group and moved to a small town upstate. She wrote me a letter on cream stationery.
I don’t deserve a reply. I only wanted you to know that I’m sorry, and that my boys are loved. Thank you for saying what you said.
I wrote back a single line.
Raise them well.
Winston made one last attempt to buy his way in.
He came to the small rented house in Connecticut where the children and I were staying, and stood on the porch in a gray overcoat, holding a leather folder.
“I’m restructuring the trusts,” he said. “Four equal shares for your children. And a seat on the board for you, if you want it. Whatever you want.”
I looked at the folder without taking it.
“Winston, when I walked into that conference room two years ago, I was carrying four of your grandchildren and I didn’t know it. You offered me twelve million dollars to disappear. I took it, because I was too hurt to do anything else. But I want you to understand something.”
“What’s that?”
“Every dollar of it is in a college fund for the boys and girls you never knew existed. I never spent a cent.”
His eyes went wet. He looked down at his shoes.
“My children will have a relationship with their grandfather,” I said, “if you’re willing to earn it. You can see them on weekends, at my house, with me in the room. You can say hello. You can learn their names and their favorite foods. You don’t get to buy them.”
“And the trust?”
“Put it in their names, with an independent trustee. I don’t want control of it. I want it kept out of your hands.”
He nodded slowly, and for once he didn’t argue.
