On My Knees (Stark International Trilogy 2)

“They had an affair. And he didn’t just walk away when he learned Penny was pregnant?”

“No. And she has always given him too much credit for that. I think she’s the one who should have run. Far and fast. But she had no education. No skills. She was a waitress in a bar when Jeremiah met her. And I don’t know how much you know about Jeremiah, but he was blue collar all the way. At least until he met Damien’s mother. She had money.”

“Really?” I hadn’t heard that. From the stories about Damien’s start in tennis, I had the impression that they were relatively poor, with the family’s hope resting on Damien.

“That’s not altogether wrong,” Jackson says when I tell him as much. “It’s just later in the story.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“So Damien’s mother, Carol, had family money that she inherited. They were married. Happy. Why wouldn’t they be? All Jeremiah wanted was money and a beautiful wife and he had it.”

“He burned through the money,” I guess.

Jackson touches his nose. “Right you are. Although to be fair, Carol got sick. So it was really the medical bills that eventually burned through it.”

I nod, because I understand that only too well.

“Meanwhile, before she became ill, Damien was born. I was two at the time, and don’t even remember the blessed event. But I know that Carol and Jeremiah had been trying for years, and now suddenly he had what he wanted—a legitimate son.”

“And you started to see less and less of your dad.”

His smile is thin. “Are you sure you haven’t heard this story?”

“Sadly, it’s not too hard to guess the plot. But go on.”

“That’s really the way it shook down. It started with my father simply shifting his attention to Damien. To his happy little perfect family. And I had to keep it a secret, because our money was Carol’s money, though I didn’t realize that at the time, either.”

He gets out of bed, gesturing for me to stay put, then pads out of the room. “Things coasted along for a while. I saw my dad, knew he had another family, tried to pretend I wasn’t jealous of my smelly, stupid little half-brother, and got on with my life.”

He returns with two bottles of sparkling water and hands me one. “Then Carol got sick.”

“Damien was about eight,” I say, remembering details from the various biographies I’ve not only read but edited over the years.

Jackson nods. “I was ten. Old enough to understand things I overheard, but not to really comprehend them. And what I came to realize was that she’d been declining for a while, but it really got bad that year. Their money was dwindling, and there was no more to be had. Jeremiah had actually started working on an assembly line and had moved the family to Inglewood.”

I nod, because I happen to know those are some of Damien’s earliest memories.

“But what I found really interesting was that Jeremiah told my mother that Carol wasn’t going to make it. And that when she passed away, he was going to be with her—my mother, I mean. Move me and her into the house he shared with Damien. And we were all going to be one big family.”

“Did you want that?”

His smile is so sad it almost breaks my heart. “I did. Because I saw how much my mother wanted it. And because I thought my father would want to be around me more if I was part of an actual family and didn’t feel so much like a side note.”

I reach out to hold his hand, the gesture seeming feeble against the weight of the pain I hear in his voice. And my heart is so tight that I’m afraid it’s going to break for the little boy he used to be. “Why didn’t it happen?” I whisper the question, somehow afraid that by speaking too loudly I’ll shatter the boy and the man.

“Because Damien turned out to be a goddamn tennis prodigy.”

The words seem to crack in the air like a bullwhip, and I can’t help but flinch from the force of them.

“But why—” I begin, then stop myself. I get it. Because Damien’s career took off. The golden boy. The young celebrity athlete. And even after Carol passed away, Jeremiah wasn’t about to risk that cash cow by tossing scandal into the ring. Another family. Another child.

And so instead he went the other direction. Told Jackson that if he breathed a word of the family secret, then Jackson and his mother would starve. And he justified his absences by his need to keep the meal ticket performing.

He drew upon and honed his skills as a con man, a player, and left his blue-collar days behind for good.

And in the end, both Jackson and Damien suffered.