“It's not a duchess, Molly.” His voice was deathly quiet.
“Well, whatever title, it doesn't matter, really… Carey, you're being overly concerned about something that couldn't possibly affect us, anyway.” Molly was rushing along in a breathless flurry of words because Carey was too quiet, too starkly quiet, and she hoped to fill the awful void of silence. “Even if you are depicted in one of your notorious liaisons on the Star Inquirer, I'll discount it now that we've found each other again.”
When she stopped for a moment to catch her breath, Carey said, “Carrie's on the cover, with the usual spectacular headlines.”
“What headlines?” Molly whispered, struck with a terrible premonition of doom.
He read them to her in an even, modulated tone. The world was about to be introduced to Carey Fersten's natural daughter.
“Oh, God, no,” Molly breathed, suddenly nauseous. Carrie hadn't even been told yet. And Bart, she suddenly thought, terrified. He was not a benevolent man. “Can't you do something.”
“I've already checked with our legal staff. I can't sue; it isn't libelous.”
“My God, Carey!” And for the first time she was struck solidly with the impact of full-scale public scrutiny. Carey may have lived his entire life in a goldfish bowl, but she hadn't, and it mattered fiercely that her daughter not be recognized and inspected by everyone standing in the check-out line at the supermarket.
“Honeybear, you don't know how sorry I am about this. I'd never want to hurt Carrie.” The sincerity of his words held regret and comfort, his tender diminutive a message from the heart. “Molly, are you still there?”
She murmured some unintelligible sound, unable to articulate the overwhelming torrent of thoughts flooding through her mind.
“We have to do something before the paper is released. Do you hear me? Are you all right?”
“I'm breathing,” she said. “Just barely.”
“I know it's a shock, and I'm truly sorry, but we have to deal with this immediately. Allen and I agree we should call a press conference.”
“A press conference?” He could have said a rocket launch and not been any more alarming.
“As long as everything's going to be public information by the weekend, we might as well acknowledge it in advance and arrest the titillating waves of curiosity. Allen will arrange all the details, and it'll only entail twenty minutes of your time.”
“I have to be there?”
“You don't have to say a word. Allen and I will answer all the questions. Molly?” He could barely hear her breathing over the phone.
Dizzy, her stomach upset, Molly was resting against the headboard of her bed, visualizing dozens of klieg lights, scores of rude reporters, and her life spread out for all the world to see. How had her quiet life altered so suddenly?
“Answer, or I'm coming down,” he threatened.
“I'm here.” It was the smallest possible sound fiber optics could transmit.
“I'm sorry, darling… I'm so damned sorry.”
His own mind was a jumble of unsorted chaos. He could only deal with one problem at a time: Molly and Carrie first; the film schedule second; then came revenge on the Cerellis of the world who didn't see the human lives behind the dollar signs. “The press conference,” he firmly said, “is the only way to quash all the lurid speculation. I'll be there early tomorrow, and we can talk to Carrie before school. I was planning on coming down for Pooh's birthday, anyway.” Just not before the day's filming was over, he thought. “Allen will schedule this thing for eleven. Okay?”
What could she say? No, I won't. No, I want to remain completely anonymous. I want our daughter to continue to exist in an insulated world. Stop the Star Inquirer, darling, for me. Instead, she reluctantly said, “Okay.”
He was there by seven, driven over from the airport after an all-night session of editing. He was losing two more days, and Allen kept reminding him of the costs. But if he seemed remarkably composed for a bone-weary man it was because he was pleased to announce to the world he had a daughter he loved, and was eager to tell the media of his marriage plans.
Carrie was calmer than either of her parents over breakfast when Molly nervously said, “We have something rather unusual to tell you, darling.”
“I figured Carey was here this early for something, Mom,” she said, leaning her chin into her cupped palm and watching Carey spoon the seventh measure of sugar into his coffee cup. “That's seven,” she noted with a cheerful grin.
He looked up like a man waking from a dream, gazed into his cup, and pushed it away.
“Would you like a fresh cup?” Molly asked.
He shook his head, but noticed how her hands were clenched, white-fingered, in her lap. They were both scared by this placid little girl with her perfect chin cupped in her hands and her large, dark eyes moving slowly from one to the other.
“Would you mind missing school today?” Molly said after a fortifying breath to still the pounding of her heart.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“Well… no… but, well-” At a loss for words, she turned to Carey in appeal.
“Is it all right if I tell her?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he began, “I knew your mother years ago before you were born… and I loved her very much.” He stopped for a moment, his dark eyes tender as he glanced at Molly, and his voice took on a note of poignancy. “But sometimes things don't always work out.”
“So Mom married Dad.”
“Yes, she did.”
“I shouldn't have,” Molly said softly.
“And that's why you got a divorce. Mom and Dad always argued,” Carrie explained to the pale-haired man, dressed for a boardroom meeting, sleek and sophisticated at seven in the morning. “Did you get married, too?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Carey said. “For a while.”
“And you divorced, too.”
He nodded his head.
“Just like Dallas or Lucy's mom and dad, or Tammy's-”
Molly smiled ruefully. “We're not shocking her sensibilities.”
“Mom, you're more easily shocked than I am.” It was said with the authority of eight years experience in the world, and her own special brand of assurance.
“Well, sweetheart,” Carey went on, a small smile responding to her artless competence, “what we have to tell you may startle you, but I want you to know both your mom and I are very happy and love you.”
“Can I tell Lucy about it?”
Molly instinctively began to say no, until she recalled the reason for this conversation. After tomorrow the entire world would know-Lucy included. “If you want to, it's fine,” she said.
There was a lengthening silence, until Carey finally said very quietly, “Bart isn't your father. I am.”
She sat upright, her placid pose abruptly altered as she looked at her mother for confirmation. When Molly nodded, her gaze traveled to Carey. “Bart isn't my father?”
Molly expected confused questions like: Why didn't you tell me? What does Bart have to say about that? How will it change things? Why did you wait so long?
“Carey's my father?”
She nodded again.
“You're my father?”
“Yes,” Carey said, his heart thudding against his ribs, never in his experience so unsure and afraid. She was his only child, the child he thought he would never have.
Carrie leaned back against the painted kitchen chair, her hair like molten gold next to the swedish blue. Her small face was expressionless, and Molly thought for a moment how like her father she was, her feelings controlled and concealed behind the perfect symmetry of her features. And then her young face lit with the dazzling smile she'd inherited from her father, and she said, “Wow!”