“I think she loved you to the end,” Véronique said softly. She liked him better than she wanted to, and she could see why her mother loved him. He appeared to be a kind, affectionate man, although maybe he had mellowed with illness and age, and he seemed more than willing to acknowledge his mistakes, and regretted them.
“So did I,” he confirmed to their daughter. “It was always my dream to run for president. If I had to do it again, I would have given all that up. Men are foolish at times, and I certainly was. One of my children is running for Congress now. I tried to discourage him. You pay a high price for public life. What about you now? What are you going to do without your mother? You’re living in the apartment?” He had recognized the address on her letter. “You’re not married? You’re too young to be.” He seemed fatherly for a minute. “Do you have a beau?” he asked her, and she smiled.
“No,” and then she was serious again. “The man I was dating died in Brussels with us. And I’m not sure what I’m going to do now,” she admitted, “with this,” she pointed to the right side of her face. “Modeling is over for me. I’m trying to figure out what to do next. I studied literature and art history, but I’m not very interested in that. My mother made me go to the Sorbonne when I started modeling, so I could have a proper job one day. I don’t know what to do. Maybe photography.” She had been thinking about that, but hadn’t done anything about it yet. “I’m still having some surgeries, and I have to go back to Brussels for that.”
“You’re all alone?” he asked, she nodded, and for a minute, she wanted to cry but held back her tears. “I know that Marie-Helene had no living family. Well, now you have me. You know where I am. If you need anything, I want you to call me. I’d come to Paris if I could, but it’s too late now for that.” She had read that his wife had passed away a few months before, and he’d had a heart attack around the same time. But he had his three legitimate children. “Are you seeing friends in New York?”
She shook her head. “I’ve only seen one friend since I got back from Brussels. I don’t feel ready to deal with that yet. They’re all in fashion, and they’ll be horrified by my face. I came to New York to see you,” she said simply. “I wanted to know what you’re like, and why my mother loved you so much. I don’t think she ever loved another man after you.” But she had the same feeling about him now. His whole face lit up when he talked about Marie-Helene. There were several photographs in the room of him with his wife. She was a distinguished-looking woman, even when she was young. Not a beauty, but a handsome woman. They stood next to each other in the photographs stiffly, like strangers, and neither of them smiled. It had struck Véronique when she glanced at them.
“Your mother and I were soulmates from the moment we met. If I hadn’t been so foolish and ambitious then, we’d have married. But I was in my late fifties when we met, and I wanted to chase the dream before it was too late. It was a dream that evaporated in my hands. I enjoyed my time in the Senate, but it was poor consolation for what we gave up. And by then, it really was too late. It was too late to change my life in my seventies. My wife was ill by then, and our children would have been very upset.”
Marie-Helene had managed well without him. Véronique knew it too. She had never depended on anyone but herself, and had provided a strong, loving foundation for their daughter. Marie-Helene was never needy. She was a proud, intelligent woman who would never have begged him to come back. She had never asked him for anything, and what he had given, he had given from his heart, for their daughter. There had been no room in his life for them then, but he had broken two hearts in the process, his own and Marie-Helene’s.
He asked about her schooling and her friends, and she said that her mother had always been her best friend. He got a sense of the immensity of the loss for her, which was even greater than his own. He asked about the money she had made as a supermodel, and she said that her mother had invested it well for her.
“She had a great head for business,” he complimented her. “We couldn’t see each other, because of the press, but we spoke fairly often. I always asked her advice.” In an odd way they had been life partners for twenty-four years, even though they weren’t together. “My wife and I were very different. She was more interested in her horses than anything. She was a great horsewoman. She hated politics, and she wasn’t even very close to our children. She didn’t have it in her. She was more interested in bloodlines and horseflesh than people.” She got the sense that he had been a lonely man, and increasingly she was understanding the bond between her parents that even time and distance hadn’t been able to sever. She realized that she really had been their love child, in the best sense of the word.