“Please,” she whispered. “I know it’s hard.”

I found myself sitting again, even though every bone in my body screamed for me to do something different. This wasn’t for this asshole. It was for Judith.

“Continue,” I hissed.

James looked at me with eyes full of pity and regret, two feelings I despised—especially from a man I’d known as my employee for the past few years, no matter how much power he had in my newsroom.

“I wanted to become an actor,” he said. “It was actually an audition, rather than a job interview, and I failed. Three drinks later, your mother and I were in bed. I didn’t know she was a newlywed. But that’s not the only thing she chose to omit from the equation. I would learn weeks later that this had been the day she first found out your father was cheating on her, which was why she had no ring on. She thought she’d never put it back on.”

Fuck. My. Life.

The similarities were endless. Uncanny. And yet I couldn’t help but pray to God that the outcome of our relationships would be very different. Because as far as my knowledge went, my mother and James spoke to each other once a year during the annual network Christmas party, and nothing more. Jude’s hand reached for mine—not tentatively, no, this time she owned it—giving it a squeeze.

“You were married, too,” I spat. Phoenix was only three years younger than me.

James shook his head. “No. I met my ex-wife the following fall.”

Phoenix and I were half-brothers.

I wanted to throw up. My girlfriend rubbed my thigh now, trying to soothe me. James hurried to pour us all a drink—I think just to do something with his hands. The air wrapped around us in an awkward way, and maybe that’s what having a heart attack felt like.

“After the one-night stand, I told her about my audition. She said there was a vacancy at LBC. They needed someone for their morning show—to host a daily ten-minute slot with the news. Nothing primetime, but I knew it could pay the bills and—”

“Let me guess,” I cut him off. “You needed the money because one of your family members was sick.”

James’s face twisted in shock, his entire expression opening up, unlocking like a safe. “My mother needed surgery on her hip. How did you know?”

Judith and I exchanged looks. Atonement. I was hers, and she was mine.

She thought she could never love.

I thought I didn’t deserve love, and even if I did, I’d never find anyone half tolerable to spark this feeling in me.

“Just a wild guess.” I rubbed my hand over my face.

Judith bit on her lower lip, and my dick jerked to attention again. Really? Right now?

James looked between the two of us. “I went in the next day and got the job. I couldn’t believe my luck. I found out not long after that your mother was married, and she acted like I didn’t even exist anymore, which in retrospect I don’t exactly fault her for. She was in a very vulnerable state…”

I wasn’t Mathias’s son.

All this time, I’d thought I was inherently an asshole because of him, but really, I was more of a sociopath prick, like Maman.

The similarities were uncanny, much to my dismay.

“When did you find out about me?” I cut off his fluff-talk.

I hadn’t come here to hear about his journey as a junior anchor at LBC.

James reached for his drink and gulped it in one go, shaking his head and slamming the glass against the silver tray. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his robe.

“Your mother came to me about ten weeks after. She knew it was mine because she and Mathias weren’t…” He shook his head. “He’d cheated on her. She hadn’t wanted to be with him.”

I appreciated him not talking explicitly about anyone fucking Maman. That was one mental image I was happy to keep out of my brain.

“I told her I’d love to be a part of your life. I want you to know that not having you was never an option for either of us. But at the same time, your mother had decided to give her relationship with Mathias another shot, and she knew they could never explain such an arrangement to the press…”

“So Mathias knows?” I nearly laughed, though there was nothing funny about my situation. I was sitting in front of my biological father, a man I’d known all my life and hated for a decade, as I’d worked side by side with him for most of my adult years. He’d always called me son, and I’d always berated him for it. He’d tried to get close to me, but I’d repeatedly shut him down. He’d tried to talk to me, but I’d kept sending him on his way.

James bowed his head. “He knows. We were frank with him from the beginning. He was livid, of course—tried to get me fired. But by then, I had gained some momentum, and LBC was still working its way up. They needed me, and I needed them. But yes, Mathias knew about you. That’s why he could never stomach your presence.”

I smiled bitterly, though there was something liberating in knowing it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t specifically something I’d done. I’d grown up thinking I was so rotten, I’d become rotten. This changed everything. Mostly it changed how I looked at myself in the mirror.

Judith snuggled beside me, rubbing my arm.

“Mathias’s approach to you has always been the center of my beef with him. Every Christmas, at our network party, I would beg your mother to tell you about me. And every single Christmas, the layer of security and fake-friends padding her and blocking my way grew thicker. I couldn’t tell you this of my own accord. But I watched you grow from afar, and every night when I tucked Phoenix into bed, I prayed that one day I’d be able to make up for it with you.”