Chapter 10

After I was taken by a different woman to get showered and dressed, it was time for me to give Robert the demo I had planned for tomorrow. For someone deemed too old to run the family business, he was very up on technology. A few minutes to familiarize himself with the interface was all it took for him to be doing things I had never seen done with our application. Already suffering a huge hit to my ego, he further shattered my little world by pointing out dozens of bugs, so obvious our QA team should never had missed them. That led us into a very long discussion about improvements desperately needed to make the product become a huge bright spot on all of the major software company's radars. They would not take any time to actually implement, test, and document either. I found myself really respecting this man more than any past or present business owner I had ever met.

"If you do not mind, I have a few more thoughts I would like to explore using your software if you would not object," he told me without really asking for permission. "I know my family's business, that of my suppliers and even that of all of my competitors."

He asked me to unlock everything, even the beta and alpha code, before asking if I would sit with him a minute.

"Joe," he stated sadly. "I spent my entire youth proving to my father that I had the drive required to run the family business. I worked long hours and focused on nothing but showing him continually how I was up to the task as each of my siblings failed doing miserably in their attempts at the reins. I did with my children as my father had done and his father before him. I never understood the letter he gave me just before he died and I took over the company. A man of many words, it was a surprise to have a single handwritten line saying 'Son, you lack heart.' Not until yesterday did I understand those words from so many decades ago."

A woman came in to ask him to speak with her in the hall for a moment.

When he returned he told me, "Something has come to light regarding a grievous error in judgment made a decade and a half in the past. An overreaction that I never knew had been weighing on my heart until last night. It is impossible for me to properly vocalize, the wound so freshly reopened. Your guests have arrived and soon I hope all will be clear."

Be clear all will become. Yes. Since of dream you now make. I heard Yoda saying in my head. What will it be now? A travelling train of junior high nymphomaniac virgins cheerleaders desperate for my dick? Well, maybe that would not be so bad.

I wondered why June's sister, the one working here as a servant, had looked to have been crying as she led me toward what I guessed was a front sitting room. She told me that my guests were waiting and then quickly disappeared around a corner.

What the heck, things have been so good here. I might as well face the horrible beast waiting to balance out the universe.

Opening the doors I saw a woman and a girl with their backs to me looking at photo albums as they talked quietly. When they sensed my presence, both turned around.

Shit, shit, shit! What was Jill doing here? Who was this woman? Ok, where are the cops, angry mob with pitch forks?

The woman asked Jill if I was the man she told her about. When Jill nodded, she was nudged toward me by the woman. She ran to me, jumped into my arms, and wrapped herself around me in a tight hug. This was not the same hugs she gave me any time before. It was something much deeper with more feeling than a friend or even a first lover. Whatever it was, I returned her hug with the same feeling even if I don't know why.

Without even any introductions, like she knew me as well as anybody, the woman said "She is lucky her body waited a year before it decided it was time for her to grow up. Otherwise things would be really interesting in about nine months Joe. Genetically speaking, there is still enough variation in our DNA that any child you would have fathered inside our daughter would be perfectly normal. Still I don't want to have to find out, you know? I already told her that she needed to be thinking about those things now before it was too late. She should still be safe for at least another six months, though. Maybe by then she will be better able to control her cravings, but I doubt it. I never could."

Blah, blah, daughter?!

"I still can't believe what caused such trouble for my mother is now being used to do the same to my asshole uncle. Seems karmic to me Joe, as it was his meddling that caused so much hurt to everyone, especially someone as special and dear to me as you," she told me as she came over to pull Jill off me, or at least try to.

Daughter? How the hell could I have a kid somewhere around fourteen? The only times I did not use rubbers were with geek chicks that were very picky about having me be checked and were on that implanted birth control. I did not bill this hot of an ass in any reality.

"You still think too much Joe," the woman said as she took me over to where they had been looking in photo albums.

She put her arm around me as she pointed to picture on one of the pages. It was an 8x10 color picture of the girl down street just after she got home from the hospital. I remembered it because she had me take it and the three others on the same page. The next page were the ones I had taken after her casts came off. She was hairy and pale everywhere there had been a cast. The next pages had just a few more random pictures of her that I had taken. The last page had a crumpled up photo. Someone had smoothed it out as best as possible. It was of the two of us sitting on their couch smiling at the camera. She got me to set the timer to get one of us together that day.

She pulled a tablet from her purse and told me to take a seat next to her. There she had all of the pictures I had taken of her and those few we managed to get the timer working right so we were in them together. It included a perfect one matching the crumpled up on in the album. I went to hand the tablet back, but she told me there were a lot more pictures left I had not seen yet. As I started flipping through, they were first mostly of her or her with one of her parents. Then there were only those of her or a rare one of her mom.

"Dad left us soon after we moved away hurriedly," she said as I continued flipping through the photos.

As I continued, I noticed she at first started to look a bit fat and then there was one of her with her pants down a bit and shirt pulled up. She was pregnant and showing a good bit. A few pictures later were ultrasounds showing the baby, the last one saying "girl" next to an arrow pointed between her legs. Pictures showed her pregnancy as her belly grew and then time lapsed ones looking right between her legs as Jill worked her way into this world. She stopped me when I got up to Jill's second birthday party pictures. She had to have sensed I needed a break. "Joe I was so clueless back then to all of the drama of mom's family at that time. I did not even have any idea of what happened back then, only that we had to move, and I was never told why. Well that was until last night. Since the day Jill was born she has never been away from me for long. She always calls when she is away overnight. I panicked when I could not get in touch with her, so I called my mom to see if there was any way she could reach out to her old friends or family up here. I knew grandfather was a really important man to her and the family had lots of contacts. Mom just told me we needed to do something important, to pack a bag, and call work to tell them I had a family emergency. From the time we got into the air until just before I left to come here, my mother filled me in on what happened almost fifteen years ago," Ariel told me. "I have never lied to you. I really had no idea I was pregnant with Jill until I was already in my second trimester. We created our child without me even having a first period. You remember how weak and chubby I was from the casts that there was no way for either of us to know what we had done."

A butler came in to bring us some drinks and then April's older sister, the one working as a maid here, got Jill to run off somewhere with her.

Ariel continued telling me, "My mom met by dad when she started her first position working as a manager at one of the company's offices near our old school. She told me that he was very good at fooling everyone into believing he was an excellent husband and father, but being a workaholic, no one really noticed if he was or not. Mom had it figured out by the time I was two, but kept it to herself for my sake and to meet family expectations of her. At the time of my accident, she had been moved up to running that entire division. Her older brother, my asshole uncle, was still just a director at one of the smallest offices. It pissed him off so badly that she got such a big promotion. Grandfather was still in charge then and did not feel that my uncle was ready yet for more responsibility. When I was hurt he watched me closely, yet from afar, as the pictures in the album show. You remember those pictures well; you took all of them and many more."

Her grandfather stepped in, apologized for the interruption, and then requested a few minutes to speak with me. I expected him to drop the axe for screwing his great-granddaughter, not doing the right thing by Ariel with regard to Jill, or any manner of other horrendous ways of ruining my life completely. Instead he had a technical question on a new alpha section of the software that he somehow managed to find. It was not yet ready to be demonstrated or marketed yet, but he was very interested in some of the features. I had a good idea of the basics on them, clarified some still unclear menu buttons, terms and jargon. He was already deep into it when I went back to Ariel.

"I see a lot of mom in Karen, June and Blossom's older sister," Ariel started out saying as I sat back down to face her. "Mom explained it all, as she should have done when I was there crying over losing the one friend I had in the whole world. After mom's promotion my uncle was already pissed off majorly. I think if that was all, he would have gotten over it. Mom is sure that it was all of the interest my grandfather put in me as I worked to recover from the accident that made him do what he did to mom and me. When talking about me, grandfather is quoted saying many times how I was strong like my mother. Evidently he never said that about any of my Uncle's girls or sons. My uncle used every resource he could come up with to find a way to tarnish my mother in the eyes of my grandfather. Just by chance he came across some residents at the hospital more interested in paying off their student loans than customer privacy or ethics. For a couple grand a week they gave him copies of all my test results from when I came to the hospital all the way until he found his silver bullet. First he had the tests faked to make it look like I was a drug addict and that was why I was injured. Mom called him insane right in front of my grandfather as she showed him my grades and SAT scores. It was impossible to achieve that at my age if I was using any drugs."

She had to excuse herself for a minute and then returned with some papers.

"If the dates on the labs and the results are correct, that time you went off unexpected when rubbing up against me in the shower was more than enough to do the trick. When I had my checkup two weeks later, the blood tests showed I was pregnant. My uncle paid off the techs to alter all of my lab results. Continuing on his mission, he scheduled me an ultrasound with one of his bribed doctors for two weeks after my last appointment. After all of the ultrasounds while I was in the casts, mom nor I thought anything about it. All during that time he had been slowly putting little bits of doubt into my grandfather's head. Many were just small things like asking why mom had not been at home when I got hurt, what took so long for her to get to the hospital, had she hired a nurse to care for me at home and why was I going to school before my casts were ready to come off. Taking my real records, the two pregnancy test and the ultrasound, he dumped it all on my grandfather. Mom has since learned that my uncle made sure to give him the picture, which grandfather crumpled in anger, as he dropped the bomb about how cute we looked together. Baiting grandfather even more, he said it would look great in the trade papers about why women should not be put in charge of companies. My lab results showed I was fertile and yet my mom allowed us to continue to sleep together and now I was pregnant. His forked tongue poisoned my grandfather's mind towards me and my mother. Mom was given no reason why she was called into the company's lawyer's office and told she was no longer an employee of the family business. She had to clean out her office immediately and vacate the company provided house. All calls to try to find out what the hell was going on were met with her being told to stop calling or they would have her arrested. She told my Dad what happened that night and while mom was clearing her office out, he was making his own escape plans. We never heard another thing from him until mom got an already executed divorce decree. Still having no idea why she was now excommunicated from the family, mom did what she does best, she landed on her feet. By the time we made it to Kansas with our few possessions and rented a small sparsely furnished house, I was registered as a junior in a progressive school district. Joe we started over from just what mom had kept hidden away from dad over the years. Both of us were exhausted for weeks as we got settled. When I started to show a bit and it was obviously not fat, mom had me taken to the doctor. I was already thirteen weeks along. Mom told me that was when everything clicked for her, but she never told me a thing. She told me she never wanted to burden you with what you and I had done out of love."

Jill came back in to ask if she could go swimming for a bit. Ariel asked about a suit and Jill just said that it was ok to skinny dip, according to Karen. They discussed it a bit and the Jill was off to swim.

I was grinning as Ariel continued, "So mom knew we really loved each other and we decided together that I was going to have Jill. No one in my school seemed to notice I was getting large or said a thing when I missed two weeks of school after I delivered. There was a daycare program at school, so I was able to have Jill there and go breastfeed when she was hungry. I was not even going to let her come on this trip, but then things worked out so that I could work to quench the fire we started inside me so long ago. What mom told me was eye opening and really cleared up a lot. My asshole uncle had used my pregnancy to show and make my grandfather believe it was his mistake to let mom work in the company instead of being in the home. If she had been at home she would not allowed a boy to sleep naked in my bed with me and fail to make sure I was protected. He went so far as to imply that you were actually responsible for my fall as a ruse to get into my panties. Mom said my uncle even handed him all of the reports from the paramedics about how they found us and you being arrested for being just about to rape me. It would disgrace the family name if it ever got out and the family needed to distance themselves from my mom forever. Grandmother told my mom that she had done her best to try to save the photo. She wanted to be able to see the boy who gave her a grandchild."