come close to providing what that upper-class adoptive home could. Did. Love by itself was not enough to make everything come out happily, she didn’t care what all those feel-good movies claimed. She’d loved her son—loved him so much that she had sacrificed her relationship with him. It was the right thing to do.
She was pretty sure.
She snapped her seatbelt closed. Stupid conundrum, why couldn’t she let it alone?
Sometimes, when the heartache and guilt overwhelmed her, she pared off a piece for her mother, whose own questionable decisions had led to hers, and for Mitch, because if he’d hung on to her there would have been no other man, no accidental son. Still, the remaining portion was too large to swallow; she could only cover it with a pretty napkin and act as if it didn’t exist.
She would not be able to keep it covered, though, if the ravenous media sniffed it out—which could happen only if one of the few people involved decided to capitalize on it. This was the fear that dogged her in her quiet moments, had been dogging her ever since she’d contracted to do TBRS, the fear that had grown in proportion to her success.
If she’d had that ability to see into her future and to feel the way the guilt, the fear would bind her, she would have announced her history at her first employment interview. I’m not proud of myself, she might have said, but I may as well tell you … Except that there had been no benefit to telling; all the benefit lay in keeping the truth of who she was and how she lived out of sight, where it couldn’t affect the way people perceived her. She’d been using the strategy all her life.
The risk now, after having long ago established a child-free bio, was in being outed as a liar and a hypocrite. Her most ardent fans, the ones who watched her every day, who knew her so intimately (they thought), would feel betrayed—and, to paraphrase an old saying, hell hath no fury like a fan scorned. Especially these days, when the Internet gave anyone with access to a computer a giant-size megaphone with which to vent their anger. Others would delight in ridiculing her. Her competition would pounce on the opportunity to knock her out of first place—or worse. The show would suffer, maybe even fail, and then what? Who would she be if she were not Blue?
Only a court order could expose her son’s original birth certificate, and until her son had come of age a little more than three years ago, only his adoptive parents could seek such an order—and if any of them did, she would know about it when it happened. That was the law. She would receive notice, allowing her to protest or protect or defend. Of the few people who knew who she’d become and what she’d done first, none stood to gain anything by saying so. While self-protection was certainly not the reason she’d kept Marcy close all these years, she did rest more easily having her in sight, and happy.
The law that protected her was the same law that protected her son’s identity. Hence her hiring of Branford, whose job it was to find another route to the answer—not so that she could make contact, necessarily; just so she could know. That it was proving so difficult for Branford to find the midwife, the answer-keeper, was sometimes disheartening, sometimes reassuring, depending on which emotional lens she happened to be looking through when she let the thoughts idle in her mind.
She looked out the jet’s window, where six-inch-deep snow glowed pale pink as the sun approached the horizon, delineating the taxiways and runways, which were wet but clear. The day’s first commercial flights were already stacked up down the field, and the steady rumble of morning traffic noise was punctuated every few minutes by the roar of jets lifting off for New York and Minneapolis, St. Louis and San Diego, Raleigh, Denver, Las Vegas, Seattle. One of those jets, full of morning business commuters and eager vacationers, might, in a few hours, be landing in a city close to where her son would be waking up.
She’d played this imaginary game so many times over the years. At first she had imagined a snuggly infant in a soft blue sleeper, held in the arms of a woman who looked out her window upon San Francisco Bay. Then it was a toddler in footed pajamas, and Puget Sound. The parents and the midwife, Meredith, had said West Coast but, over time, Blue realized this was a generic descriptor; the family might as easily be in Sacramento or Olympia or Salt Lake City. And who could say whether they’d moved since then—or whether they’d truly been there to begin with?
Blue would wake up and, as she padded through her Chicago apartment, think of a dark-haired little boy waiting for the school bus with a Power Rangers lunchbox clasped in pudgy fingers. She would open the curtains of her New York City flat, and imagine a gangly boy hauling hockey gear into an ice arena for early morning ice time. She would sit on a stool as a stylist readied her for a Vanity Fair photo shoot, and see a teenager, hair falling into his eyes, choosing jeans and a Hollister sweater for senior pictures.
This morning she thought of a young man with slender hands and long eyelashes, still asleep in a posh private college dorm. With the life his parents had provided him, the care, the education, he could be at Princeton or Harvard or Notre Dame. In a coincidence too ironic to want to consider, he could this moment be across town at Northwestern University.
Northwestern; where Mitch Forrester had been teaching when she had met him. If her son had been Mitch’s son, if her wishes on Sirius had been granted … well, everything would be different, wouldn’t it? She would still be Harmony Blue Kucharski—or perhaps she’d have taken Mitch’s name; she’d practiced writing it both ways during those few short months when she’d seen her wishes edge tantalizingly close to reality. And instead of touring the Hemingway Home in Key West in front of a camera crew as she would do on Friday, she might have toured it with Mitch, whose aim it had been to become the preeminent Hemingway scholar. Mitch, who in effect had chosen to take refuge from the turmoil in his life with a dead literary idol, rather than a living young woman who idolized him. Well, it was his choice to make; it would be interesting to know if he thought it was the right one.
At the sound of Marcy’s “Good morning,” Blue looked up to see her, puffy-eyed and yawning, as she sat down in the seat opposite Blue. Stephen, so tall that his messy black hair brushed the aircraft’s ceiling, was right behind her. He took the seat across the aisle from Marcy and reached for her hand. Both of them looked sleepy, tousled, as if they’d climbed out of bed and straight into Marcy’s limo. Of limos, black Lincoln Town Cars with full-time drivers, they had four: one each for Blue, Marcy, and Peter, and one kept at large, for ferrying guests.
Blue would have preferred not to witness Marcy and Stephen’s bed-head coziness. But she smiled as though she found them adorable. “Morning. Looks like good weather for travel.”
“Do they have coffee ready?” Stephen asked, stroking one arm of his seat with his free hand. “Nice leather. I’m desperate for some caffeine.”
Marcy was nodding in agreement. “Vanilla-double-espresso-whipped, now that would be fab-u-lous,” she said. She rubbed her face and pulled back her hair. “But, holy Christ, it would be so much easier to just pop a pill.”
Blue flagged the flight attendant who waited in the galley pretending not to stare. “Easier,” Blue agreed, “but not as tasty.”
“Lower calorie, though,” Marcy sighed. “And fast-acting, which I could use. Peter called me at five-fifteen, insisting I log on to YouTube.”
“You—?” Blue started, then she knew. “The bit with Stacey and me, the tears, right?”
Marcy nodded. “It’s viral. You know how it goes. Peter sounded like he could use a tranquilizer.”
“Vultures,” Blue muttered.
The attendant came over and Blue requested coffee while Stephen stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle. He said, “Speaking of pills, last night Marcy was telling me all about the good old days.”
Blue shot Marcy a look of disapproval.
“We were doing tequila teasers,” Marcy said, her half-smile an apology. “A little practice, you know, for Duval Street. I told Stephen how we roomed together in our little house, and maybe got a bit wild a time or two. Nothing serious,” she said. Blue caught her look of