“No,” said my mother, speaking in the careful way she always used with him. “I am not going to do that.” They were on the balcony. She was trying to sketch, and he was leaning against the railing with his shadow falling everywhere, blocking the mid-morning light. It was January and chilly enough to bite. My mother and I were staying at our townhouse. It was in a beach resort, but we mostly stayed there in the off-season, as we needed the summer income from renters. I always liked it better in the off months anyway. The loneliness pleased me, as did the unvaried palette. White buildings, gray sidewalks, white clouds, gray sand. Only the hard blue of the winter sea provided any contrast.

I sat off to the side, wondering why her ex-husband had made an appearance and when he might leave. I wanted to wander the empty streets, like always. I wanted to sit on the cold, unpopulated beach. But here he was, being civil.

“We can use my people, if you like. They have some experience with the more complex aspects of family law.” It was as if my mother hadn’t spoken, as if her “no” had never been uttered.

The silence on the balcony should have been peaceful. There was no breeze, no glaring sun. The off season was at the height of its peculiar beauty, after the holidays and before the tourists returned, so there was no familial ruckus— no screeching of children. It should have been peaceful.

 Mother continued to sketch. She first tried to draw the scene without him in it, but it was no good. Soon his form appeared on the page, initially very light and rough, then darkening into a resemblance as she worked.

He looked as if he might be enjoying himself, but it was hard to say. He was certainly posing, manicured hands steepled, head slightly cocked. I took the opportunity to examine him. Although not exactly handsome, he was handsomely exact. (Or, anyway, that’s how Mother usually described him.) His white-blonde hair was razored into distinct layers, and his pale face was surely shaved close enough to take off the top level of skin. The tailoring of his suit was severe and priestly, had nothing to do with fashion.  He wore no jewelry, except for a plain platinum wedding band. 

There was something in the way he waited. Something wound up and watchful. His eyes, of no particular color, were intent. It took two or three minutes, but Mother put down her sanguine pencil and took a theatrical sip from her coffee mug. She checked the time on her phone to underline the hint. It did no good. He shook his head, unmoved.

I should never have taken that stupid DNA test.

Putting reluctance into his tone, he spoke. “Alternatively, we could revisit our custody arrangement in a more formal setting.” And there it was, the first shot fired. My mother’s face took on that look of vast patience most often seen when her younger boyfriends announced they were in love. 

“Too late,” she said, throwing an approving glance my way. I felt like one of her better landscapes, just waiting for a signature and the right buyer.

Surprise came and went on his features. He leaned a trifle closer. “Are you sure?” he asked, genuinely curious. In the next moment, his no-color eyes moved over me, like someone reading an equation to make sure it was right. My usual invisibility gone, I kept my face blank.

My mother’s ex turned back to her with a smile, his curving mouth much like mine. There should have been no question about this being a war of sorts, but I could only see her smiling triumphantly back.

On the balcony, a loud heartbeat began and became insistent. It was an actual recorded heartbeat, not some musical facsimile. His ringtone. It was his ringtone. My mother’s ex-husband pulled out his phone and held up a godlike finger, as if to command more of the silence he’d already been getting. My mother raised an ironic eyebrow, and for a second or two, it looked like he might laugh. Instead, he smiled again. This time, it was flirty and could almost have been real.

He spun away to go pace in our living room, and my mother pretended not to watch.

She’d told me that when they were married, he would sometimes sit in front of a trio of mirrors, his face moving as if someone was pushing buttons and pulling levers. Most notably, there’d been his “so glad to see you” face and his “you’ve disappointed me, but I forgive you” face. Those were spot on. While others were not as convincing, he’d improved with practice.

“You never know what he’s really feeling,” she often said.

But the thing was, I knew. He mostly ignored me, but I had always paid the closest attention to him. At rest—however, rare that rest was—his face showed something midway between the desire to consume and the fear of being consumed. This was his truest self. I was sure of it.

But he was not at rest. Not today. There was more going on. I thought about his recent plane crash and the boy from the second marriage who’d died. Bad things happen to everybody, and they’d finally started happening to him. 

He was ridiculously rich and being famous was a kind of hobby for him. Reporters for various outlets treated his opinions as newsworthy, and I’d see his face on my news feed next to headlines about bank crises or the evils of plastic bottles. His current passion was family cohesion. This was an odd fixation for a man who’d recently divorced his third wife, but he had no love of consistency for its own sake.

It had nothing to do with me. Or it wouldn’t have happened before that stupid test.

I’d researched my mother’s once wildly famous marriage, reading old articles with quotes and revelations from unnamed “close associates.” Mom was 19, and he was 29; they’d gotten married in a rented castle. I was born a year later. During the whole marriage, he’d had affairs, and she’d had affairs. But he was the one who wanted to fight about it. After two years, Mother divorced him.  She claimed it wasn’t over the absence of love or him seducing the nannies.

“It was all those parties, all that traveling. It took time away from my painting, and he was insistent,” said Mother. Her tone was matter-of-fact and almost convincing. 

The divorce was, briefly, a big deal in the media. In the press, he swore to leave her with nothing. Mother never once spoke directly for publication, but she’d ended up with a lump sum— one that “could in no way be described as child support.” Or so said the settlement. If he was trying to punish her, he must not have understood. Back then,  it was enough for my mother that I was her child.

Since the divorce, Mother and I had lived in peace, commuting between the city and the townhouse. She was old news, and I never had been news. I was just the almost-teenage, almost-daughter of a celebrity entrepreneur. Nobody bothered us. Mostly, it was me going to school and Mother painting, while she rumbled through a few of her own romances. Her one and only ex-husband did show up now and then for the usual “alone time,” but it was no bother for me because he never tried to make friends.

All that was before I spit in a tube out of rank curiosity, my mother in wine and laughing as she did it, too. We speculated about how Neanderthal we were and whether our more recent ancestors were French or Irish. But once our results came back, he found out almost immediately. The fact that I turned out to be related to his terrifying old rag of a mother must have given it away. Why he didn’t insist on his own test way back when, I don’t know. Mother looked everywhere but at me when I asked about it. It is possible she lied to him.

So, here we were, all by the seaside.

His phone conversation ended with him saying the same thing in two or three languages. “No later than Tuesday” was what I think it was. Hanging up, he returned to the balcony and sat at the table with the air of someone waiting for coffee, or perhaps a presentation on the next quarter’s earnings.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Mother asked. She looked at him with raised eyebrows, using her best customer service voice.

Somewhat startling to both of us, he rose from his seat and left without another word. It was much more dramatic than anything else he could have chosen to do. His heels clicked over the marble as he left, and my mother started tapping her sanguine pencil in time with his steps, looking sulky. She took note of my fascination.

“He’s charming, isn’t he? Riveting. But hear that? With every step, we recede further from his mind.” My mother shook her head, her expression rueful. She had been through this before; I realized. “By the time he gets to the car, he’ll have forgotten us entirely. By the time we hear his limo pull away, his whole focus will be stock fluctuations or his next wife.” She shrugged. “In ten minutes, we won’t exist for him. We are nothing but a passing impulse.”

We both heard it when his footsteps slowed and then stopped on the marble staircase. He spoke, his voice carrying clear as a bell through the silent marble rooms.

“Passing? Oh, not that. Never that.” There was a teasing quality to his words. He went on to speak to my mother in Italian, calling her “Constanza,” her true and un-Americanized name.

He came back up the stairs, still speaking in Italian, the scent of his hideously expensive cologne growing stronger. I suddenly imagined the townhouse collapsing into a pile of blocks, entombing Mother and me, the odor of that cologne hanging over the rubble. Then he was back on the balcony with a bouquet of orchids, eyes on hers, smiling again. He’d had the bouquet from the get-go. Must have. It had probably been sitting around the curve of the stairs, on the landing.

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” murmured my mother. Delight was there, right there in the curve of her lips. Delight at the flowers and at the sight of him standing there holding them. She wasn’t thinking about how he’d planned everything. For a second, I wanted to push him off the balcony and into the street.

He stayed for the rest of the off- season, taking over our spare room. A parade of people in suits began to come and go from the townhouse. To get away, I spent hours each day at the beach, painting water colors as drafts for my later acrylics. Soon, I noticed more people in suits, haunting the boardwalk, and could feel their attention on me. It put cracks in my solitude. Mother was painting, too—painting like crazy, in fact. But the quiet was gone, and her colors were a full summer riot.

As the days went on,  I gave up trying to stay out of their way. I noticed that he sometimes stared at me directly, but we didn’t talk. Since I had been studying my mother’s ex for ages, it seemed unreasonable to object. We began to play nearly mute games of chess. Early on, he made a move so bad it guaranteed my eventual victory. It was deliberate, so I stood up and walked away. After that, he won almost every game. But not all. Either I actually won a few or he was orchestrating his losses more carefully.

Weeks passed, and Spring approached. This meant, usually meant, my mother and I would gather up our things and journey home. I was relieved at the thought. Our apartment, my school. We could go back to normal, even if it was a version of normal where he visited more often. But we stayed past time, and soon, the beach was crowded with tourists grimly set on having fun.

Today, I was next to an earnest nanny of 20 or so, with one of those immensely busy babies. The nanny would build houses of sand, and the baby would knock them down. Over and over, she made castles,  huts, and townhouses.  The baby would first examine them, frowning, then sweep them away like a tiny God practicing for Armageddon. After five or six such acts of destruction, I saw my mother rapidly advancing across the sand with her not-so ex strolling closely behind. So sharply angled was he— so finely cut was his hair and clothing— that he made me think of anime. When he got close enough, I could see his proprietary hand on my mother’s elbow.

“We aren’t going home.” I said it softly. But the nanny heard, and the pity on her face made me want to weep.

My mother got to me, beautiful and a touch wild-eyed. She put a foot into the current sacrificial castle, quickly apologizing. The nanny apologized, too, apparently just for existing, while the baby squawked in outrage. My mother’s eyes slid away, and her words tumbled out.

“I should have warned you,” I thought.

“There’s something you should know,” she began. But I already knew.

The baby on the beach, consoled, finished sweeping away what was left of the castle. The nanny tactfully gathered him up and packed the stroller, trying to pretend away her own presence. My mother talked hurriedly. I sat in the sand nodding, as polite as a prisoner on the scaffold. Meanwhile, my mother’s once and future husband listened to every word, murmuring in her ear from time to time, prompting her.

The next day trucks came and moved us an hour or two away. It was an enormous house with enormous bedrooms and had been built for the mistress of a robber baron. It sat in the midst of several manicured acres, surrounded by a tall security fence. I saw six or eight photographers taking pictures in front of the front gate.

“You’ll get used to it,” said the woman who seemed to be looking after me. She wore an expensive suit and quite possibly carried a gun.

My room, in a wing by itself, was furnished with Art Deco furniture, including a vanity. The vanity was enchanting, but seemed useless until I noticed its three fine mirrors. One was faced forward, and the other two were angled to allow the sitter a full view.

I sat in front of the mirrors, trying to be objective about my looks. Gray eyes, marginally further apart than the norm. Black lashes. Blonde hair. Good skin. A clearly defined chin, a bit sharp. I was quite sufficiently pretty. I began to practice expressions, starting with “You’ve disappointed me, but I forgive you.”

From the doorway where he was lounging, I heard an amused-sounding voice.

“Very good,” said my father.

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