Waking Kylie Read online

  I had told her I wished he were in hiding. I would see him more often.

  Jason’s trademark thing was how companies could maximize profits by making corporate decisions based on principles of equality. It was perfect fodder for liberal Manhattanites—keep your one-percenter perks and be a good, moral person, all at the same time. His book spent nearly a year on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list before it was released in paperback to enjoy another forty-week run. In the time that passed, the media appearances to promote the book evolved into stints as a talking head, which led to the podcast. And at the suggestion of his best friend, Colin, he started an independent consulting company. I was happy for him—happy for us—but neither of us had adjusted to his newfound celebrity.

  My catering prize would no longer suffice for our auction give. Jen tried to soften the rejection by returning to her theme of letting Jason do his fair share of the work: “Every year, the moms bust their butts for this auction. Next year, we’ll let Dad do the work.”

  It was the second time she had referred to Jason as Spencer’s dad. I didn’t correct her. There was no reason to.

  When Jason and I, to my surprise, started to become serious the summer we met, I could tell how hard he tried to include Spencer. He taught him how to duck-dive waves at Atlantic Beach, played tennis with him at the courts in Amagansett, and climbed to the top of the lighthouse at the end of Montauk, a summer adventure intended for onetime tourists, but which Spencer never tired of.

  When autumn arrived, Jason asked us to move with him to the city. God, how I wanted to say yes. I was only twenty-four years old, and had only lived in two places: my parents’ house and a house in Pennsylvania I would have never gone back to, even if the city hadn’t torn it down. I had never really had a relationship with a man who had met me as an adult. I dated a couple of guys on and off who I knew from childhood, but nothing that would have ever led to marriage. The last thing I wanted was to be another generation of East Enders, barely scraping by in life, especially when I wasn’t in love.

  And Jason wasn’t just a good man who loved me. He was educated, intellectual, and refined. He had a good job, an apartment in Manhattan, and apparently enough money left over for a Hamptons rental in the summer. He wanted to take care of me. I could finally move out of my mother’s house. I could work year-round in the city instead of having to work my ass off every day all summer trying to squirrel away enough cash for us to make it through the off-season.

  But I couldn’t. I wasn’t the main character in a fairy tale, ready to be saved by Prince Charming. I was a mother to a six-year-old who didn’t speak until he was three. Whom the doctors said might be autistic, merely because of his silence and a tendency to avoid eye contact. Who required supplementary tutoring during kindergarten to “prepare” him for what I wasn’t supposed to call the “normal” classroom, rather than the “special” one his kindergarten teacher was suggesting. He was now about to start first grade at a school where he had friends, in the only stable home he had ever known. I couldn’t uproot him into the city for a man I’d known for three months. When I told Jason I couldn’t move, I was prepared to say good-bye, both to him and to our whirlwind romance. I tried to tell myself that other girls my age would have had a summer fling by now.

  Again, Jason surprised me. He rode the train out from the city every other weekend, staying in the cheapest room at Gurney’s, with a view of the parking lot. He helped Spencer with his homework. He even managed to endear himself to my mother, who doesn’t like anyone. In December, I accepted his invitation to bring Spencer into the city to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. We went ice-skating. It felt like a movie. For the first time since Spencer and I came home to live with my parents, my son spent the night under a different roof.

  Jason showed up unexpectedly the weekend before Memorial Day. The season would officially kick off in a week. I was already booked for twenty-seven parties. I was in the kitchen making hundreds of bacon-wrapped dates that I could freeze for future use when I heard the doorbell. He dropped to one knee on my mother’s front porch, opened the ring box, and asked me to marry him. I screamed so loudly that a passing bicyclist almost swerved into traffic.

  He had every detail planned out. We’d move into his rental for the summer. I’d hire extra helpers to work the catering jobs I had already booked, and would stop accepting others. We’d return with him to the city in the fall. He’d ask friends to pull strings to get Spencer into a good school. He wanted to get married at Gurney’s this summer, if it wasn’t too soon. Last October, he’d put down a deposit to hold a date in July.

  “You’re insane,” I told him. “I know what that place costs. You paid a fortune, all on a bet.”

  “I don’t bet. When you’re an economist, it’s called researching and playing the market.”

  “When you’re a normal human, it’s called being a dork.”

  “If it helps, they gave me a discount when I told them what it was for. They love you there. Almost as much as I love you. Marry me, Angela.”

  I asked him why it was such a rush.

  “Because I don’t want to see you every ten days. I want you with me every night.” He wrapped me in his arms and kissed my hair. “Besides, I don’t want some other summer guy laying his eyes on you at a friend’s party and stealing you away from me.”

  “And Spencer?”

  “I want him to have a father. I want to be his father. Jason, Angela, and Spencer Powell. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  At that point, Spencer had my last name—Mullen. There had never been any consideration of another option. Now that Jason was talking about marriage, I saw the benefits of becoming Angela and Spencer Powell, in a big, crowded city. He would still see his grandparents. He had adjusted to kindergarten and then to first grade. He’d be able to transition to a new school. The benefits would be worth it.

  I still remember Jason telling me how much his parents would have loved me the night after I said yes.

  We got married at Gurney’s on the date Jason had held, but at my request, there was no ceremony, just a dinner party for twelve. No puffy gown, no veil, no announcement in the Sunday Styles section. A nondenominational minister I found on the Internet showed up for cocktails to make it official. Jason’s lawyer and best friend, Colin, filed the paperwork to change Spencer’s name the following Monday. Legal adoption would take longer, but Spencer and I were officially Powells.

  Two years later, over a table at Eleven Madison Park, I asked Jason if Colin was still working on making it official. His face immediately fell, as if I’d interrupted dinner to ask him to take out the garbage. “Is this really what you want to talk about on our anniversary?”

  “Of course not. It’s just the date—it’s a reminder.” I wasn’t a lawyer, but it didn’t seem possible it could take this long. There was no other father in the picture. “Did Colin tell you what the holdup was? I can get police reports if he needs them. I’m sure Detective Hendricks could explain—”

  Jason rested his fork on the plate next to his half-eaten duck breast and held up a hand. “Please,” he whispered, looking around as if anyone had been listening. “You’re always the one saying you don’t like thinking about that. That the past doesn’t matter. So can we please not talk about it on our anniversary?”

  “Fine.” It was a reasonable request. He was right. I’d seen a counselor a few times when I first came home, but nothing that anyone would call real therapy. It was almost like I started life over again at the age of nineteen. I didn’t need counseling. The only thing I ever needed was for people to understand that I was fine. I am fine. The couple of times Jason suggested that I “talk to someone,” I shut down the possibility, and not gently. For me to raise the subject in passing over the dinner table was unfair.

  But I couldn’t ignore my suspicion that something had changed. What sounded like a pile of annoying paperwork a couple of years ago felt like an actual hurdle now, a line Jason n
o longer wanted to cross. Maybe it had seemed easier to imagine being a permanent father to Spencer two years ago, when we both assumed we’d have another child, a little brother or sister for our son, together.

  I got pregnant the second month after our marriage. Two months after that, I wasn’t. I had never seen Jason cry before. That night in bed, we said we’d try again. I was still so young. It only took four months to get another plus sign on the stick. Then after two months: gone. Two miscarriages in a year.

  The third time lasted almost to the first trimester mark. I was starting to look forward to sharing the news. But then we lost him . . . or maybe her. The doctors remained optimistic, telling me that my chances for a successful pregnancy were still over 50 percent. But I felt like I had already flipped that coin too many times, and it was going to keep coming up on the wrong side. I, of all people, needed predictability. I needed to know what was going to happen, and because I knew that about myself, I really only had one choice—to give up. I asked for the insertion of an IUD so I could have control over my body again.

  Jason did his best not to seem disappointed. He said that no matter what happened, we still had Spencer, and he was enough. But I could tell that he was trying to convince himself more than anything. And I noticed that I was the one holding him. I was the one doing the consoling. Because we both knew that in some ways, the loss was more his than mine, because Spencer would always be more mine than his. Jason didn’t have a child of his own.

  And now Spencer still wasn’t adopted.

  “I thought maybe we’d gotten an update,” I said softly.

  He reached across the table and held my hand. When he looked into my eyes, he was no longer frustrated. “I love our son. And that’s who he is now—our son. You know that, right?”

  “Of course.” I smiled. “It’s been two years since you locked this down.”

  “Best decision I ever made.”

  “Just figured we’d have locked down Spencer legally by now, too.”

  He gave my hand a squeeze. “Time flies when you’re happy. I’ll call Colin tomorrow. I promise.”

  He kept his promise. When Colin sat me down and explained the process, he said it would be easy. We simply needed to notify Spencer’s biological father and get his permission to terminate his parental rights. “Or,” he explained, “if he never had any real ties to Spencer, we can argue abandonment and potentially skip the notification if you think it’s going to be a problem.”

  I tried to keep my voice completely neutral. “He’s dead.”

  “Oh, even better.” He immediately offered an awkward apology, and I assured him it was fine. “Condolences, I guess? Anyway, all we need in that case is a copy of the death certificate.”

  “But the father’s not listed on the birth certificate.” I didn’t explain that he was already dead and that Spencer was already two years old by the time that birth certificate was issued, listing me as his only parent.

  “Huh, okay.” I could tell that Colin was waiting for a more detailed explanation, but I didn’t offer one.

  “Well, that’ll be a little more complicated. The judge might ask if you know who the father is, in which case we could offer up the death certificate. They need to make sure there’s not some guy out there getting his kid taken away. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

  I nodded, knowing that Spencer was never going to have a legal father. When Jason got home that night, I told him everything I had learned about the adoption procedure. That was the last time we talked about it.

  The paperwork isn’t important. Spencer knows who his parents are. We have Jason’s name. As far as anyone is concerned, Jason is Spencer’s father, and that’s all that matters, right?

  About the Author

  Alafair Burke is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven previous novels, the most recent of which, The Ex, was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. She also coauthors the bestselling Under Suspicion series with Mary Higgins Clark. A former prosecutor, she now teaches criminal law and lives in Manhattan.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Alafair Burke

  Long Gone

  If You Were Here

  The Ex

  The Wife

  The Ellie Hatcher Series

  Dead Connection

  Angel’s Tip

  212

  Never Tell

  All Day and a Night

  The Samantha Kincaid Series

  Judgment Calls

  Missing Justice

  Close Case

  The Under Suspicion Series

  (with Mary Higgins Clark)

  The Cinderella Murder

  All Dressed in White

  The Sleeping Beauty Killer

  Every Breath You Take

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  waking kylie. Copyright © 2017 by Alafair Burke. Originally published in slightly different form under the title “The Mother” in Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance, a story anthology published by Mulholland Books. Excerpt from The Wife copyright © 2018 by Alafair Burke. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  first edition

  Cover design by James Iacobelli

  Cover photographs © Dean Mitchell/Getty Images (top); ©Rakic/Shutterstock (bottom)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Digital Edition DECEMBER 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-284981-6

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada

  www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

  Rosedale 0632

  Auckland, New Zealand

  www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF, UK

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com