One Night Stand novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Opening
Callie sees Mateo on TV, Otto raises the same eyebrow, and on the steps of the Kincaid Tower Mateo denies her on camera; in the loading bay he calls it a shakedown and she demands a DNA test. The news has already run the clip.
The mayor cut the ribbon on the Kincaid Tower at ten that Tuesday morning, and my landlady turned the kitchen television up until the spoons rattled.
I was cutting my son's toast into strips and not watching.
"Callie," she said. "Callie, put the knife down."
I looked up.
The camera had moved off the mayor and onto the man beside her.
Dark suit. Dark hair. A jaw I had once traced with my thumb in the back of a club.
"Mateo Kincaid, thirty-three, the youngest chief executive in the history of Kincaid Hotels," the reporter said.
Four years ago he had told me his name was Matt.
He had told me he worked in hotels.
I had thought he meant the front desk.
On the screen he turned to answer a question, and his left eyebrow went up, only the left, and stayed there.
My son, Otto, pointed at the television with a toast strip.
"Mama, that man has my eyebrow."
He was right.
Otto raised his own, left side only, to show me.
Dottie Lyman sat down very slowly in the chair beside him.
"Honey," she said. "You have a christening at two."
"I know."
"Shoot it first. Then we think."
I texted the christening family that I would be late.
I kissed Otto on the top of his head and took my camera bag off the hook.
Inside the lid pocket, zipped shut, was a memory card in a paper sleeve with a date on it from four years ago.
I had never put it in a reader.
I zipped the pocket again and walked out.
So I took the bus downtown.
The tower filled a whole block of Market Street. A rope line held back the crowd, and a second rope held back everyone without a lanyard.
I stood at the second rope with my camera bag and my coat and no lanyard.
"Not on a list?"
The man who said it was tall and fair, with a friendly face and a gray overcoat that had cost more than my rent.
"I'm a photographer," I said. "I need to speak to Mr. Kincaid."
"Everyone does." He smiled. "Preston Kincaid. I'm his cousin, and I'm the one who gets blamed when the right people can't get in."
He reached into his inside pocket and took out a press badge on a green lanyard.
It already said PHOTO.
"Put this on. Stand by the steps, and I'll tell the guards you're mine."
"Why would you do that?"
"Because he's been working fourteen hours a day for three years and nobody ever gets to him." He shrugged. "Go on."
I put the badge on and walked through.
The cameras were lined up along the steps in three rows.
Mateo came out of the glass doors with the mayor on one side and a woman with a clipboard on the other.
He stopped on the third step to shake a hand.
I walked into the gap between two camera crews.
"Matt," I said.
He looked down.
I watched him find me.
His face went completely blank.
"I need to talk to you," I said. "It's about my son."
A flash went off, then another.
"I'm sorry," Mateo said, loudly, to the whole row of lenses. "I don't know this woman."
"Lantern Room," I said. "Four years ago in February. You took my camera strap off my shoulder and said you wanted to see what I saw."
"Security."
"You know exactly who I am."
Two men in black jackets had me by the elbows before I finished.
My bag swung against my hip. A cameraman filmed my face from three feet away and did not lower his lens.
They walked me down the side of the building, past a loading bay, and let go of me beside a stack of flattened boxes.
I was shaking.
I turned around, and Mateo was standing there, alone, with his jacket open and his hands in his pockets.
He had followed.
"Four years," he said quietly. "I waited four years for the photographs to come out."
"I never sold a photograph."
"Don't." His jaw moved. "Name a figure. Say it here, where nobody's filming, and never say his name on a staircase again."
I understood then what he thought I was.
So I told him what I wanted.
"I don't want your money," I said. "I want a DNA test, and I want you to look at him."
Mateo stared at me.
"Boy or girl?"
"Boy. Otto. He's three."
He took a card from his wallet, turned it over and wrote an address on the back.
The pen skipped twice.
"Nine tomorrow. My lawyer's office."
He pressed the card into my palm, and his fingers were not steady.
"If he's mine," he said, "you will wish you'd taken the money."
He walked back around the corner.
I stood by the boxes until my hands stopped.
On the bus home my phone buzzed.
It was Dottie.
"Honey, don't look at anything," she wrote. "They put it on the news."
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