He glanced at the end of his cigar then back up at her.
‘So the truth is, Nikki, yes, I did set it up. I never broke my word, you know. I promised I would give you a way of giving him a better life than you could offer him, and I did. Not doing badly, is he? Haven’t heard him complaining much, the past twenty-whatever years.’
‘I still don’t understand why,’ she said. ‘At first I thought it might be some mad coincidence, when he told us his birthday. Then I saw his birthmarks at the pool, and I knew that it wasn’t. But what I can’t understand is, Ron was paranoid about birth control when I was with him, so why would he want to secretly adopt our son?’
Ned rocked on his heels, took a swig of his drink, lifted his cigar to his lips.
‘DNA,’ he said.
‘DNA?’
‘If you’ve lived your life the way Ron Cox has lived his, it must have been a pretty scary time when all that paternity testing stuff started coming in, back in the late eighties. It stung a few of my clients, cited in some very expensive divorces.’ He made a whistling sound. ‘It was a new reality to adjust to for men like Ron. Not the prospect of child support – it’s the reputational aspect that’s the issue. The damage that a scandal might do to the brand. And you’ve got to remember how much your brand is worth, when you’re someone like Ron Cox. When you’re a director whose name people know, whose movies they go to see, in their millions, a guy who’s known as a family entertainer, a family guy – there’s a lot of money at stake. A lot of money. And it’s not just your brand, either. Marianne’s got her things going on, her public persona to protect. And they’ve got this set-up, the ranch, those kids – their kids, adopted kids – already. It’s always been her dream to have this big family . . .’
Her voice a mere croak, she asked if Marianne had known about Kurt, who his father really was.
Ned snorted softly, exhaling two plumes of smoke from his nose. ‘Not unless Ron told her, God rest her soul. Or she figured it out. Jesus, the state of the guy’s brain these days, he probably doesn’t know himself which kids are his and which aren’t.’
Nikki could remember trying to process this and feeling she was never quite going to manage it. She could remember the crash of the waves, the sound of distant voices, distant laughter.
Ned held up his hands – cigar in one, crystal glass in the other. ‘Look, don’t blame me. It was a favour, really. A favour to Ron. He was giving me, giving Home, a lot of money to keep it all quiet. He asked me to arrange it and I arranged it. I mean he paid, of course. And it wasn’t cheap, the agency, convincing them to adapt their . . . their processes.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why do Ron a favour, when you already had him over a barrel?’
Ned smiled patiently.
‘Because that’s how this works. That’s how this all works. Give and take. You scratch my back . . . Sometimes you help someone out of a situation. Sometimes you call in a favour in return.’
‘Sometimes you engineer a situation . . .’ said Nikki, understanding.
‘Exactly.’
There is perhaps no rage so compelling as the rage we feel on behalf of other people – or that we convince ourselves we are feeling on behalf of other people.
The final straw was the smirk Ned was wearing. Pleasantly drunk, on a night when a dream had come to glorious fruition, he could not keep that pleased-with-himself smile from his face, reflecting on how clever he had been, how deftly it had all been taken care of. My God, she thought to herself, he’s been waiting years to gloat about it like this.
‘He was evidence,’ Nikki said softly. ‘Kurt. To Ron.’
‘Exactly,’ said Ned, and made a gesture like someone dinging a little invisible bell with his finger. He finished his glass with a gulp. ‘I might have had his balls in a vice, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t also do the guy a favour. A little gesture of goodwill, you might call it. What Ron didn’t want was you popping up too, some hysterical girl, five years down the line, ten years down the line, and making a fuss and having the physical evidence to prove it was all true.’