Page 54 of The Beekeeper

Blaze

“Mr. Stevens, how many times have you been arrested?” Angela’s attorney, Ms. Devereaux, had a voice like a paper cut, subtle but sharp.

“Four.”

“And how many of those charges were dismissed following a financial settlement?”

“Objection.” Wade didn’t even look up from his legal pad. “Relevance. My client’s record is a matter of public documentation, and none of it postdates his custody.”

“Goes to pattern, Your Honor.”

“Overruled. Answer the question, Mr. Stevens.”

“Three.” My jaw ached. I’d been holding it clenched for so long it had started to feel like part of the furniture.

Ms. Devereaux flipped to a page she’d already read and pretended to read it again. She did that a lot. So I’d have to sit here in the silence and marinate.

“Let’s talk about the summer of your Vanity Fair profile.”

And so we did. We talked about the profile. We talked about the hotel in Prague and the settlement that followed. We talked about my two stints in rehab and the one I’d walked out of after nine days. We talked about the nondisclosure agreements—thirty-one of them, a number she said twice, slowly, like she was reading a body count.

I answered everything. Wade had prepped me for weeks. Short answers. No jokes. Never explain unless they ask you to. And I did it, because the alternative was giving them ammunition, and they wanted ammunition more than they wanted the accuracy.

But then she said, “Mr. Stevens, in the years before your daughter came into your care, would you describe yourself as a serious person?”

I stiffened.

That wasn’t a lawyer’s question, but it was how the whole afternoon had gone. Devereaux would run twenty minutes of legitimate legal grinding and then slip in something with Angela’s fingerprints all over it. Was the child ever present when you drank? Did you know the names of her teachers? Do you consider yourself the kind of man who finishes things?

Angela never had to say a word. She’d just handed her mouth to someone with a bar card and let it do the work at seven hundred dollars an hour.

I glanced past the lawyer to the table on the other side of the room. Angela sat with her hands folded, wearing a sweater she’d probably bought for exactly this, and stared at me blankly—an expression that might fool a judge but not me. I acted for a living. I sure as hell recognized a goddamn poker face when I saw one.

Serious person. Those were Angela’s words. I could hear her saying them—that flat, faintly disappointed cadence she used the first time she’d met me and asked if I really thought that having a child in my life was best for me. Like the assumption was all I cared about was myself.

“Mr. Stevens?”

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have described myself as serious.”

“And what changed?”

“I found out I had a daughter.”

“Five years after she was born.”

“Yes.”

“Because her mother never told you.”

“Yes.”

The room got very quiet, and every single thing in it came to life. The hum of the light. The court reporter’s fingers. Angela’s hands, still folded, and her chin lifting just slightly like someone who knew they had the advantage.

“Mr. Stevens, in your opinion, why do you think Megan Eckhardt chose not to inform you of your daughter’s existence?”

Wade’s pen stopped.

Because you didn’t deserve to know. That was the answer they wanted me to hear in my own head, and the sick joke of it was that they didn’t have to plant it. It had been living in me rent-free since the day I found out. Since long before that. Since a man who gave me my last name decided which son he’d gotten his money’s worth from.