Chapter 2: Who Said There's No Father?

Before it rang, the door opened and my mother came in with a thermos of soup she'd made at four in the morning because she couldn't sit still. She looked at the clipboard. She looked at my face. "Where is he," she said. My mother has never once raised her voice above a polite hum. "Landing," my sister said from the window. "In Aspen. With Camille." The thermos hit the floor. "Today?" My mother's hands were shaking. "He left today?" "He left last night," I said. "He told me today." My father came in behind her, still in yesterday's shirt, sixty-four years old, a man who built a plumbing business out of a van and who had spent all week practicing how to hold a newborn. "So we cancel," my mother said, already reaching for her phone, because that is what mothers do. "We'll say the baby came early. We'll keep the certificate blank and sort it out with a lawyer. It's embarrassing, but it's fine, it's—" "I'm not leaving it blank." She stopped. "Nora, sweetheart—" "My daughter is nine hours old. She is not starting her life with a dash where her father's name goes." "Honey. There is no father." "Who said there's no father?" The room went silent. You need to understand something about my family. My grandfather laid pipe for thirty years. My father still has a plumber's hands. My mother taught fourth grade until she was fifty-two. When Vivienne Whitlock first met them, she asked which agency they'd used to cater. The Whitlocks have a name in three history books and eleven dollars in the bank. The money's been gone for generations. All that's left is the surname and the sneer. And they'd spent four years making my family feel like they were being permitted into something. My phone buzzed against the blanket. Vivienne Whitlock. Speaker, because I am petty and I have never pretended otherwise. "Nora." Cool as a marble floor. "I hear you're being difficult with the registrar." "I'm being a mother." "You're being hysterical. Now listen carefully. No Whitlock name goes on any document until we have a paternity test. That's not personal, it's procedure. We have a lineage to protect." My father's jaw moved. My sister made a sound like a kettle. "Say that again," I said softly. "You heard me. Grant has a legitimate reason to be absent, and frankly, a woman who traps a man with a pregnancy—" I hung up. I set the phone face down on the clipboard. Four hundred people were supposed to come to her christening in six weeks. Half of them Whitlock guests. All of them ready to watch us be humiliated in high definition. I could lose the man. Fine. I'd lose the man. I was not losing my family's dignity to someone who couldn't be bothered to attend the birth of his own child. "Nora." My sister's voice was very small. "Who were you calling?" I turned the screen toward her. Her jaw dropped so far I heard it click. "Are you insane?" "Probably." "That's — Delia, that's Killian Rourke. That man fought you over the Ridgeline clinic for three years. He humiliated you on live television. You told me, and I'm quoting, that you'd rather chew glass than share an elevator with him." "I did say that." "So why—" "Because," I said, "he's the only person on this earth who might actually say yes." Here's what you need to know about Killian Rourke. Seven years ago I was a twenty-four-year-old resident in a blazer from a discount rack, testifying at a city hearing about why the Ridgeline free clinic could not be bulldozed for luxury units. Rourke Capital owned the block. Their heir sat in the third row with his arms crossed, six foot four, jaw like a mugshot of a Greek statue, and when I finished he leaned over to his lawyer and smiled. We have been at war ever since. Three years of hearings. Three years of him dismantling my funding models in front of cameras while I dismantled his. Headlines called us the scalpel and the wrecking ball. He also ruined every date I ever tried to have. A cardiology fellow once offered to carry my bag at a conference, and Killian Rourke appeared out of thin air and said, "Dr. Hale, did you break your arm, or is this a performance?" The fellow never spoke to me again. Everyone in this city assumed we hated each other. I did too. The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. Hang up, my brain said. Hang up, this is the single most humiliating thing you will ever— The line clicked. And that low voice — the one that had cost me sleep before every hearing for three years — said, carefully, almost cautiously: "...Nora?"