I’m not going to judge you.”
Pete was up off the recliner and pacing. From time to time he would smack one balled fist into the palm of his other hand. He gulped for air. “It was a long time ago. The summer months, right before my senior year. I was working around the clock for tuition money. My dad told me there wasn’t enough money to send me for the last year because of some blight to the potatoes. I was on my own. I tried skimping on food, then I got sick. I was just about to drop out and look for full-time work when one of the summer guys told me about this clinic where I could sell my sperm. Man, I was off like a rocket. I signed up for… I did it twelve times. That’s how I got the money to finish up on time.
“In the beginning, it didn’t seem important. I’d go, do it, leave, and get on with my day. Then it started bothering me. Then it started bothering me even more. I hated it, yet I had to finish what I started—I needed the goddamn money.
“You know my story, Harvey. I made a promise to myself that when I made my first million, I was going to relocate my parents to Hawaii. Of course, that went up in smoke because they refused to go. I told you that a few times already. What I never told you was there was a second part to the promise. I promised myself I was going to go back to California and buy the damn sperm bank, then burn it down. They weren’t just words. I meant it. I never did it. I need to find out why I didn’t do it. I could have, Harvey. I could have paid whatever the owner wanted. I didn’t even try. I should have tried, Harvey. It haunts me.”
“Why?” Harvey asked.
“Haven’t you been listening to me, Harvey? That’s why I’m here. I want you to tell me why I didn’t do it. I think there was something fishy going on there. It’s easy to say now, but it wasn’t so easy to say back then. Then there’s the girl who was donating her eggs at the same place. We bumped into each other on the last day. She looked so damn sad. We both had trouble looking at one another because we both knew why we were there, and it was embarrassing.”
“Go on, Pete.” The pen and pad were back in Harvey’s hands.
“She…her name was Lily…she said, maybe I said, damn, I don’t know, but one of us said there was something sinister about the place.”
“What made you think that?”
“Lily said it was because of the big, long building that ran across the back of the sperm bank and the egg donor clinic. She said it didn’t have windows or doors, yet it was attached to the egg donor clinic and the sperm bank. She also said she tried getting into it, but an Amazon of a woman stopped her. She damn well spooked me, Harvey, and I’ve been spooked ever since.”
“Is this why you can’t sleep?”
“Damn straight. Plus, every time I see a teenage kid, I think it’s one of mine. Am I losing it, Harvey?” Pete asked in a tormented voice. “For all I know I could have twelve kids out there walking around. Before you can ask, yes, they tried to get me to go to counseling sessions, but I blew them off. Look, I was young and stupid. Back then the only thing I was thinking about was how I was going to make it through the last year so I could make my first million by the time I turned forty. Did I know I was going to be a billionaire at forty instead of a millionaire? It just snowballed and happened. It’s not like I was counting the dollars on a daily basis. Lily whatever-her-name-was didn’t go to the counseling sessions either. The way she put it was, ‘It’s no big deal.’ I think back then it was a big deal for her, more so than me, but that’s how I’m seeing it now.”
“I see.”
Pete bristled. “What the hell do you see, Harvey? That I was a jerk? I know that. Just tell me what the hell to do to get this monkey off my back.”
“It doesn’t work that way. What do you want to do? Everything in life starts at the beginning.”
“So what you’re telling me is I should go back to California and do whatever I have to do. I did try to locate Lily. For some reason, I couldn’t find her in the yearbook.”
“Why didn’t you hire a private detective to find her? It would appear you didn’t want to find her badly enough. It’s not like you can’t afford the best of the best, Pete.”
“I guess I’m afraid.” Pete sat back down on the recliner. “You need a bigger place, Harvey. This is too cozy, too comfortable. You need more light in here, too.”
“I’ll take it under consideration. Why didn’t you follow through on the promise you made to yourself? Did you think it was too far over the top—one of those things you say because the moment seems right at the time—or did you really believe there was something sinister about the facility?”
“Probably a little bit of both. I have to go back to the beginning, don’t I?”
“It’s a good place to start, Pete. You do realize you cannot invade people’s lives, don’t you?”
“Hell, yes. That’s one of the things that’s killing me. God, I was so stupid. Why the hell didn’t I just take a semester’s leave, work my ass off, then finish up? Why?”
“Is it because you are so goal-oriented? So on target, so anal, you can’t get sidetracked in any way? There are people like that, you know,” Harvey said quietly.
“You mean that in my haste to become a millionaire at the age of forty, I didn’t give two shits about anything except myself?”
“Something like that. Do you want some advice?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do, Harvey.”
“Then find the elusive Miss Lily and take it from there. It’s not that misery loves company, but more like you two have so much in common, maybe you can help each other. I’m just a phone call away, Pete.”
“I can’t unring the bell. This is never going to go away, right? I have to come to terms with what I did and didn’t do. I guess I’ve known that all along, just didn’t want to face it.”
“No one is perfect; nor is it a perfect world we live in. We all make mistakes, and we have to live with them. Sometimes you get up to bat again, and sometimes you don’t. You have to make the best of it.”
“And that about ends our session,” Pete said, getting up off the chair.
Harvey clapped Pete on the shoulder. “It’s not the end of the world, Pete. It might seem like that right now, but eventually there will be light at the end of the tunnel.”
“I’ll call you.”
“From California?” Harvey asked.
“Yeah, from California.”
Chapter 2
Lily Madison stared off into space. She was jolted out of her thoughts when the office manager of Sandcastle Ltd. entered her workroom to drop her personal mail on the desk. Penny Lyons knew better than to intrude when her boss was designing. Lily looked down at her sketch pad. Lines. Nothing else. It wasn’t happening that day. The truth was, it hadn’t been happening for some time. All of her creativity seemed to have vanished into thin air. She wondered, and not for the first time, why she’d left her teaching job years ago to go into designing children’s clothing. Because, she answered herself, I didn’t want to deal with children. And, yet, here I am, designing
