The Better Man (Chicago Sisters) (17 page)

“Do you think Max likes Thanksgiving?” Simon asked, already moving on to the next holiday. She was happy he hadn’t skipped straight to Christmas.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him the next time you see him.”

“Can we see him tomorrow?”

Like most of his questions today, she wasn’t sure how to answer this one. She had no idea how long Max would need before he’d talk to anyone related to Paul. Kendall also had to make amends for the way she’d treated him.

“I don’t know, buddy. His mom is visiting him. We should let him spend some time with her before we ask him any more questions.”

Simon was too tired to argue. His eyes shut as he yawned.

“Get some sleep, Blanket Boy. I love you.”

“I love you more.”

“Impossible,” she said, shutting off his light.

* * *

W
HEN
K
ENDALL
GOT
back downstairs, she picked up her phone and scrolled through her contacts until she got to Paul’s name. She tapped the call button and listened to the phone ring. She had no idea what she was going to say if he answered, but something had to be said.

It went to voice mail. She tried again with the same result. He was avoiding her, she was sure of it. Kendall asked her parents if they’d stay with Simon so she could have it out with Paul, face-to-face. She needed some answers and she needed them now.

The drive north to Lake Forest was long but uneventful. It was late enough at night that the traffic was light. Kendall rarely drove her red Honda Civic except when she took Simon to visit his grandfather. Trevor most definitely rolled over in his grave the day she traded his yellow Mustang in for it. First, it wasn’t made by an American car company, and second, it was a boring sedan. It was a safe and reliable car, just right for her and Simon. But there was part of her that knew her motivation to purchase this particular vehicle had had a little to do with spite.

She pulled into Paul’s driveway just before ten. His enormous, all-brick estate sat on over an acre and a half of land. Trevor had come from a home where he always got what he wanted. She rang the doorbell twice and knocked on the door to be sure Paul knew she wasn’t leaving without seeing his face.

He swung the door open with a frown on his face. “What in the world are you doing here this time of night?” He stepped out to look behind her as if she might have brought someone else along. Whether he wondered if that someone was Simon or Max, she couldn’t tell.

“We should talk,” she said, letting herself in without an invitation.

“It’s late. It’s been a long day. Can we do this later?”

Kendall shook her head and kept moving deeper into the house. Every room was like something out of a museum. It looked like a model home rather than a place where someone actually lived. She made her way to the gourmet kitchen, which featured a huge center island that wouldn’t fit in any room in her house.

Paul said nothing. Like an old, familiar friend, Kendall welcomed the silence. She needed a minute to gather her own thoughts. She was angry with him and she wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe it was because Paul was always so full of himself. He knew best. Nothing Kendall did was ever good enough. Trevor had been perfect because he had the perfect parents. All of Simon’s weaknesses were obviously Kendall’s fault.

“Did you know? Did you know Max existed?” When he didn’t answer, she pushed harder. “I need to know, Paul. Max is important to Simon.” Important to her, too, if she was being completely honest.

“Are you in a relationship with him? How could you when he looks so much like Trevor?” His tone reeked of judgment. For a moment, she allowed him to make her feel guilty. Like being attracted to Max was somehow a betrayal of Trevor’s memory.

Then the anger resurfaced. There was only one person who deserved to feel guilty. “Did you know he existed, or not? Because he seems to think you did and chose to have nothing to do with him. That’s pretty unbelievable.”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” he said, sitting down on one of the stools that lined the island.

“Wrong,” she snapped, surprising herself. “Simon wants Max to be in his life, so I need to know if what Max said is true. If you did that, if you left his mother to raise him alone...” Kendall struggled to believe he could have done that. It went against everything she knew about him. “Max may not want anything to do with us now that he knows you’re Simon’s grandfather.”

Paul held his head in his hands and spoke to the granite countertop instead of her. “You could never understand.”

Maybe that was true. Kendall certainly couldn’t understand how someone could take no responsibility for his child. She couldn’t imagine walking away and never looking back. “Try me.”

He sighed and sat upright, rolling his head around to ease some of the tension he surely felt. “I knew Joanna was pregnant.”

“But she was just someone you slept with, so you just left?”

His back straightened and his cheeks flushed. “I was in love with her! She was like no one I had ever met. Certainly not like Nancy, who I was going to leave. But I needed to have a plan before I gave up everything and made a new life with Joanna. Things like that take time.”

Kendall didn’t have any trouble picturing Paul doing exactly what his son—Trevor—had done, pushing his wife away until he worked up the courage to tell her he was leaving her for someone else. Trevor had been too much of a coward to admit he’d been in love with another woman, though. Not that it would have made his leaving any easier.

“Then Nancy announced she was expecting a baby, too. I couldn’t leave my wife when she was carrying my child. My parents, her parents, they never would have accepted that.”

“So you abandoned Max and Joanna instead.”

“I did what I had to,” he said defensively. “I offered Joanna money. I promised to help her if she needed it, but she refused. She said she didn’t want my money. She wanted me or nothing. She left me with no choice.”

Kendall’s emotions were all over the place. She felt sad for Max and heartbroken for his mother, who had undoubtedly thought Paul was going to start a life with her only to have that dream ripped away a couple of months later. At the same time, she could sympathize with Nancy. She knew what it was like to be in a failing marriage and clinging to any shred of hope that it could be saved. Nancy probably thought the baby would fix all their problems, and in some ways Trevor had, but it still didn’t change the fact that Paul was in love with someone else for the rest of their marriage.

“I thought about them all the time, though. Wondered where they were, if he liked the same things Trevor liked. Every time Trevor did something new, my thoughts returned to the child I didn’t know. I couldn’t be there for both of my kids, so I poured everything I had into Trevor.”

She would have felt bad for him if he hadn’t brought all of this on himself. His choices, his consequences. The problem was, he wasn’t the only one who paid the price for those choices. Max and his mother had suffered unfairly.

“I don’t know what to say.” How would Max ever be able to forgive Paul? If he couldn’t forgive Paul, would he want anything to do with her or Simon?

“I never wanted him to hate me. He hates me, doesn’t he?”

There was no reason Max shouldn’t hate him, but she had no idea how he felt about any of this. “I don’t know for sure, but you have a lot of work to do if you hope to change that.”

“He must be a good man if you let him around Simon.”

The twinge of guilt was back. She had asked Max to stay away for no reason except that she was afraid he was too much like the picture his ex-wife painted of him. The man she knew, though, was caring and kind. He was funny and polite. He knew how to make others feel comfortable and how to lighten the mood when it was needed the most. He admitted his wrongs and tried to make up for his mistakes.

“He is.”

Paul’s lips curved upwards for the briefest of moments. Max was a good man. He deserved good things. Kendall realized Paul wasn’t the only one who had some making up to do.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A
S
MUCH
AS
Joanna had wanted to process the events of the day, Max refused to discuss anything that happened on Halloween with his mother. Part of that was due to the fact that she was clearly happy about this predicament, while Max’s feelings were quite the opposite.

For Max’s entire life, he’d pictured his father as a guy who never settled down. Someone who didn’t have time for a family because he was too self-centered for that kind of thing. His leaving was more about him than about Max and his mom. He couldn’t be there for
anyone,
not only them.

Paul Montgomery, on the other hand, had chosen to raise another son. The better son. The son he wanted.

Not talking about it didn’t stop Max from perseverating on it, though. It crept up on him every time his mind got quiet. It didn’t help that he had no job to fill his time and occupy his thoughts. He only had his mother, who was getting on his last nerve after sharing space with him for two days, and his plot against Katie.

“Did you know that kale can not only lower your cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease, it has so much Vitamin K that it can help prevent cancer? It’s the miracle vegetable.” She dumped a glob of plain yogurt into the blender.

The small breakfast bar that broke up his kitchen from his living room was covered in notes he’d written for Wayne. Making a case against Katie wasn’t as easy as he thought, and every attack he jotted down made him feel more and more like the bad guy.

“I was never much of a vegetable lover...or did you forget?” he asked, crossing off the notation to have Wayne look into a DUI Katie got before she was pregnant.

“You used to love celery. I’d make you ants on a log after school. You’d gobble up a plate full.”

“Ants on a log? That sounds less appetizing than that kale concoction you’re making.”

“It was celery, peanut butter and raisins. You loved it. I remember.” She switched on the blender and all her ingredients mixed together into a dark green sludge.

She was respecting his wishes with regards to Paul Montgomery, but he knew her well enough to know that she desperately wanted to talk about him. His mother had been very much in love with Paul and probably still was to some extent. There hadn’t been any real closure for her. Every time she looked at or talked to Max, she had to think about him. Trevor and Max had both inherited many of their father’s features, hence the creepy resemblance to one another. Perhaps it was less creepy knowing they were related.

Max had mixed feelings about the brother thing. On the one hand, it would have been nice to know he had a sibling. Maybe they would have had some sort of a relationship. Trevor had been married to Kendall, and he was Simon’s father—he couldn’t have been a bad guy. Of course, according to Simon, things between husband and wife hadn’t been going so well before he died. Maybe he wasn’t a
great
guy, either.

It didn’t matter what kind of man Trevor was because he was dead, and Max was never going to know him personally. He could add that to the long list of things to hold against Paul Montgomery. Because of him and his lies, Max would never know his half brother.

Thinking about Trevor always led to thinking about Kendall and Simon. Simon was his nephew. Aidan had a cousin. These were family ties, ones Max would not let Paul’s lies destroy. The only obstacle he worried about was Kendall. She hadn’t wanted Max in Simon’s life when he was just some guy she knew. Would her feelings change now that he was Simon’s uncle?

Joanna set a glass of the kale “power smoothie” in front of him, a bright pink straw sticking out of it. She had her own that she was already sucking down like it was the tastiest milkshake she’d ever had.

“Does cancer or heart disease even run in our family?” he asked, hoping the answer was no. His grandparents were both still alive and in their eighties. He couldn’t remember either one of them having heart trouble or ever facing the evil “C” word.

“Not on my side,” she said, taking the seat next to him. “Just think—if it wasn’t against your rules, I could ask he-who-I-cannot-name about his side, and you could have a complete family medical history. But since you refuse to talk to him or about him, I guess you’d better drink up to be safe.” She nudged the glass in his direction and grinned like the brat she knew she was being.

Max picked up the smoothie and pulled the straw out. He downed the entire thing in a matter of seconds. It tasted as terrible as it looked, and he prayed it would stay down because he did not want to taste it twice. The glass made a loud thud as Max slammed it down on the counter. He went back to his notes.

“Don’t you wonder if all of this was some divine intervention? Maybe you were meant to meet your brother’s family. Maybe this is your chance to get to know him. I mean, even you have to admit, what are the chances?”

Max gathered his papers into a pile and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Not talking about it doesn’t make it go away. Your father is here. He’s the grandfather of a little boy who ran away from home just to see you. Your paths are going to cross again. You can’t avoid him forever.”

The door buzzer rang and offered an escape from this discussion. Max hit the talk button. “Hello?”

He pressed the listen button, hoping it wasn’t the man he wasn’t talking about with his mother. “Mr. Jordan, this is Jin. My father and I are here to speak with you. May we come in?”

Max buzzed them in, more than a little surprised by their visit. In a mad rush, he attempted to make the place presentable. He picked up some pillows off the floor and tossed them back on the couch, his temporary bed while his mom was here. He grabbed some garbage off the coffee table and shoved the pile of mail into one of his kitchen drawers.

“Who’s Jin?” his mom asked. “And why did he bring his dad?”

“Jin’s dad is my boss.” Is. Was. He wasn’t sure, but he was about to find out.

He ran a hand through his hair and caught a whiff of his unshowered self. Deodorant and a clean shirt were a must. His face needed a shave, but there was no time for that. The knock on the door came as soon as he finished checking his teeth in the mirror for green bits of kale.

Jin slunk in after his father, looking awfully abashed when Max welcomed them in. That had to be a good sign. He ushered them into the living room and offered them a seat on his couch. Snatching up the television remote before Mr. Sato sat down, Max introduced them to his mother. Thankfully, she excused herself to the other room.

Mr. Sato got right to business. His stern expression and deep voice always made Max feel like a child. “My son has something to tell you.”

This appeared to be the last place on earth Jin wanted to be. He reminded Max of a kid standing on his neighbor’s front porch, forced to admit he was the one who threw the baseball that broke a window. He bowed his head when he spoke. “Mr. Jordan, I am here to apologize. I was wrong to tell you you were not welcome back at Sato’s. It was a grave error and I hope you will accept my sincerest apology.”

Sincerest?
Max doubted it. Coerced was more like it. “Of course.”

Mr. Sato may have been pleased but his face didn’t show it. “Wait for me downstairs, Jin. I want to speak to Mr. Jordan alone.”

Jin did as he was told, scurrying out the door without so much as a goodbye. Mr. Sato’s head slowly shook side to side. “My son very much wants to prove himself to me.”

“Your son wants my job, sir. I need to know what that means for me in the long run.”

“Sato’s is yours to manage. My hope is you will mentor Jin so he can run his own restaurant someday. He thinks I’m the only one who can teach him something, but this is not wise. Life offers us many people. We can learn from them all.”

Max was surprised by Mr. Sato’s perspective. He seemed to be a man who liked being the authority on all things.

Mr. Sato stood, ready to leave. “I will explain to Jin that he is the student, and you are the teacher. If you and I work together, we can send him off on his own sooner than later. I expect you back to work Monday morning.”

Monday.
“I have a conflict on Monday. My ex-wife and I are ironing out a few details regarding the custody of our son. I need to be in court that morning, but I can come in later.”

“No problem. A good father puts his child’s needs first,” Mr. Sato said, making his way to the door. “We must be careful not to put the child’s wants or even our own desires above what is needed. But that’s not always easy.”

“No, sir. It’s not.” So not easy it made Max’s stomach hurt. He’d been spending a lot of time focusing on what he wanted and not what Aidan needed.

Mr. Sato left and Max sat back down at the breakfast bar. Joanna rejoined him and gently rubbed his back. He stared at his notes for Wayne. If he threatened Katie with all this, it would only make her hate him more than she already did. The more she hated him, the harder she’d fight to keep him out of Aidan’s life. The more she pushed, the more Max would push back. Aidan would grow up caught in the middle of a war. How was that what his son needed?

Max turned his whole body in his mother’s direction. “Why don’t you hate him?”

He didn’t need to say his name for her to know who he was talking about. “Because what good does it do to hate him?”

“He left you. He left us. He took no responsibility for me and you had to do everything on your own. How is that fair?”

Joanna laughed lightly. “Oh, honey. When is anything fair?”

“I know, but still, there had to be times when you hated him.”

“Were there times I was angry? Sure. Were there days I didn’t want to face the world and wished I could curl in a ball and cry all day? Absolutely. I had dark days just like everyone else does. But I can’t carry that all around with me forever. It wouldn’t have done me any good and it certainly wouldn’t have been what was best for you.”

“If he had come for me, when I was little, would you have let him have me?”

“Have you all to himself? No way. I would have shared you, though. Just like I’ll share you now, if you want to get to know him.”

That was
not
happening. There was too much on Max’s plate right now. Sorting out his daddy issues was at the very bottom of the list.

“This isn’t really about him. It’s about Aidan.”

Joanna’s eyebrows disappeared into her bangs. “I see. So, why do you think Katie hates you?”

“Because I wasn’t present. I was barely around when he was born and not at all when they left.”

“So why would she hate you now that you want to be around?”

Max rested his elbows on the counter and held his head in his hands. That was the real question. Was it her or was it him? Why was she so mad at him for wanting to be here?

Joanna grabbed the stack of papers off the counter. She flipped through them with her thumb. “Something tells me all the things you’ve written down here aren’t going to make her hate you less.”

“Definitely not.”

“Is that what you want? Or maybe I should ask, is that what Aidan needs?”

Max scrubbed his face. Since when was his mother so insightful? “Probably not.”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” she said, giving his back another rub. “You’ve always made your own decisions, and you’re a very smart guy. I’m here to support you, whatever you decide. Be someone you’d want me to support.”

He turned his head and narrowed his eyes at her. “When did you get so wise, exactly?”

She shrugged and smiled. “Kale is a magical vegetable. I’m telling you.”

She certainly had.

* * *

W
AYNE
WAITED
OUTSIDE
the courtroom on Monday. Dressed to kill and looking more like a million-dollar attorney than someone Max could actually afford, Wayne was ready to go. Appearances were important, he’d said, and he meant it.

Katie and her lawyer, a woman from the same firm as Jason, were sitting on a nearby bench. Max snuck a glance in their direction. Katie seemed tired. She was a beautiful woman, but he could tell she spent less time on herself now than she did when they were together. Ever since Jason had told him her mother was sick, Max wondered how often Katie was not only taking care of Aidan, but her mother as well.

“You ready?” Wayne asked.

“As ready as I can be.”

“I got everything you faxed over to me yesterday. I think things are going to go exactly the way you want them to.” His confidence was encouraging.

Wayne went to check how much longer it would be until they were up. Katie’s lawyer got a phone call and stepped away to take it down the hall. Katie was glued to her own phone, staring at the screen and sending off text after text. Max walked over.

“Can I sit down for a second?”

She sighed and refused to look up from her phone. “It’s a free country where you’re free to do all sorts of things. You know that better than anyone.”

He sat on the bench beside her. “I don’t want to fight with you, Katie.”

“And yet that’s all you ever do, Max.” Her phone beeped and whatever the text said made her somehow look more unhappy.

“How’s your mom doing?”

Her head snapped up and her eyes narrowed. “How do you know about my mom?”

“Jason might have mentioned that was why he was the one dropping off Aidan the other day.”

“You talked to Jason?”

Max was surprised she didn’t know. “He’s a nice guy,” he admitted.

She went back to her phone, running her finger over the picture of Jason and Aidan that acted as the wallpaper. “He’s an amazing guy. And an even more amazing father.”

Max nodded, glancing back at his mom. He understood where Katie’s digs came from and somehow that made them easier to take. “He’s really good with Aidan. I see that.”

Katie studied him with wary eyes. She had pushed and he didn’t push back. She didn’t seem to know what to do next.

“So, how’s your mom?” Max asked again.

Katie stared at her phone. “She’s having some tests done today.”

Her lawyer was headed back their way. Max put his hand on Katie’s knee and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sorry. I hope she doesn’t get more bad news. You guys have probably had enough of that.”