“Talk or so help me I’ll throw you out into the street,” Neil threatened eventually in a low, lethal tone that clearly shook Terry as not even the vandalism upstairs had.
Jason realized then that his suspicions about the relationship between the two of them were accurate. The prospect of a publicity nightmare flashed through his mind, then vanished. Whatever was happening right here and now was far more pressing than any damage Terry’s sexual preference might have on Within Our Reach. He spent a fortune on the best spin doctors in the business. Maybe they could finally earn their keep with a challenge of this magnitude.
Terry shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away from them. It was several minutes before he finally spoke, describing a series of notes tucked in with his fan mail. The mild threats had been enough to shake him but not enough to scare him into going to the police. He’d gone to Callie instead.
“Dear God,” Jason muttered, his fists clenching. “You deliberately dragged her into this?”
“You hired her. I just took advantage of the fact that she’s playing a cop,” Terry retorted.
“No wonder you were so eager for her to take the job,” Neil said. “You wanted her to save your ass.”
“Yours, too,” Terry shot back. “You don’t want the truth about our relationship spread all over the tabloids any more than I do.”
At that, both Callie and Jason looked at her mother, clearly wondering what Regina’s reaction was going to be.
“Why is everyone staring at me?” she demanded. “I’m not blind. I’ve known all about Terry and Neil from the first day I met them. It’s none of my business how they live their lives, as long as they’re happy.”
Neil leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Thank you.”
Regina patted his hand. “There’s nothing to thank me for.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” Neil said. “There are a whole lot of people who wouldn’t be so understanding.”
“Well, we know of one, for sure,” Jason said direly. “Let’s concentrate on figuring out who that might be.”
“I’ve racked my brain,” Terry said.
“And I’ve asked questions,” Callie offered. “Everyone connected to the show seems to adore Terry. I’ve dropped hints about his sexual preference, but no one has so much as blinked. If someone knows about him and Neil, I sure can’t figure out who it could be or why they would want him to go public.”
Jason considered what they’d all said. “You seem certain this has something to do with Terry and Neil. Why? Were the notes more specific than you mentioned?”
Terry stared at him. “No, but that has to be what they’re talking about when they insist I tell all.”
“Is this the only secret you have?”
“It’s the only one that matters,” Terry insisted.
“Maybe to you, but what about to someone else?” Jason persisted. “Is there anything in your life, anything at all, that somebody in the cast might think you’d want kept quiet?”
Callie shook her head. “Jason, I think you’re way off base here. It’s obvious that somebody wants Terry to come out of the closet and admit he’s gay. You know perfectly well that there are whole groups dedicated to making sure that public figures who are gay are exposed.”
Jason kept his gaze pinned on Terry. Although Callie was expressing what Terry himself had said only moments before, he didn’t look quite as certain as he had when the conversation had begun.
But it was Neil who finally spoke out. “Tell them, Terry. Tell them about your child.”
20
“Damn,” Terry muttered over and over, his face buried in his hands. He cast a betrayed look toward Neil. “How could you?”
Neil clasped his shoulder. “To save your neck,” he said simply. “And Callie’s.”
Callie stared at her friend, openmouthed with astonishment. “Terry, is that true? Do you have a child?”
He nodded without meeting her gaze. When he finally lifted his head and faced them all, his expression was bleaker than she’d ever seen it. All traces of his usual exuberance and optimism were absent.
“It was a long time ago,” he began, his gaze fixed on Neil as if for moral support from the one person in the room who obviously already knew the whole story and hadn’t judged him.
“I was married my sophomore year of college,” he explained, his tone flat. “I was just nineteen and trying to prove I was straight, I guess. It lasted all of six weeks before I realized the relationship was all wrong. I was cheating both of us, not just because of the sex stuff but because we were both ruining our chances of pursuing the careers we wanted.
“Hannah...” He paused and drew in a deep breath. “Hannah was upset, as I’m sure you can imagine. She ended up leaving Northwestern. I never saw her again. But not quite a year later I got a note telling me I was a father, nothing else. No request for child support. Nothing. I have no idea where they are. I don’t even know if the baby was a boy or a girl. I suppose she thought it would be the ultimate revenge, telling me I had a baby but nothing more.”
“How old would the child be now?” Jason asked.
Terry considered the question before answering. “Thirteen, I guess. Maybe fourteen. I don’t even know the exact birth date, but it would be right around now.”
“Old enough to be asking a lot of questions about his or her father,” Callie’s mother said, tsk-tsking in sympathy. “Poor child.”
Callie was astounded at how well her mother was taking all of this. For someone who’d always seemed so rigid and unyielding in her beliefs, she was coping with everything with amazing open-mindedness. For the first time she wondered just how much of her mother’s seemingly judgmental attitude could be attributed directly to her father’s influence. Freed from that pressure, her innate compassion seemed to be flourishing.
“Is there any way someone connected to the show
