John Pollard wished he'd never met Katherine West.
It wasn't her fault. She was a nice enough woman, well-dressed, good job, and a face that was pleasant, if not pretty, when she was a 25 year-old whom he had caught eyes with at a bar.
John, 27, and still yet to spot a single grey hair, was working for Carlton & Cutler Law, and making a good deal of money in the process. He went to the gym several times a week, ventured out for the occasional run, and ate more than his five-a-day of produce.
It was the usual story. A drink sent her way led to a conversation, her friends giggling and leaving her to it, compelling her not to do anything they wouldn't. A little too much vodka and a tangle of limbs later, he was satisfied, if not a little inconvenienced that he would have to wait for the woman to leave in the morning before he was returned to his sanctuary of solace.
He hadn't even thought about the condom until she'd called him.
Call him an imbecile but he barely even knew that condoms expired. Sure, he'd taken health class, but real students knew that that was just a filler; he saved the neurotic concentration for classes that actually mattered, like math and chemistry.
Also, he had used a condom. No one could argue that he hadn't been safe and sensible. The fact that it had expired five years prior was negligible; how was he to know that it was the one he'd slipped into his wallet as a brooding eighteen-year-old, and not one of the many more recent additions?
Either way, unfortunately, the result was the same: Katherine was pregnant.
John had almost dropped the phone in shock. He hadn't been expecting Katherine to call, not least because he hadn't given her his number. When she'd explained who she was, he'd rolled his eyes; this wouldn't be the first time he'd have to turn down a woman who had presumably gone to great lengths to find him.
Before he could launch into his rejection spiel, however, Katherine uttered those two words which would irrevocably change his life.
Of course, he wanted her to terminate. Begged her, in fact. They weren't a couple, he didn't want to be a father. He offered her a great deal of money to go through with the abortion, but she insisted that she could not do that. Later, when he discovered that she was in the middle of a divorce and had two children, he decided that women were, ultimately, brainless, and could not be trusted to make sensible choices.
With Katherine standing firm behind her decision, John was left with a conundrum. Being a father was the last thing he wanted, he was more than certain of that fact. There was a way to avoid fatherhood, of course, but it was the thought of his admirable father that made him uncertain about escape. John Pollard Senior had been a resolute father figure, an absolutely unmoving presence in John's childhood.
It was only thinking about his father, and whether he would be more ashamed to find out that his son had fathered a child out of wedlock, or that he had hidden his abandonment of a child born out of wedlock, that caused John to remain put.
Katherine was six months pregnant when John finally broke the news to John Senior. The man was expectedly disappointed, but had expressed how proud he was of John for deciding to stick around, and that he would much rather he know his grandchild, than simply know he had one.
Within seven years of Jade's birth, John was sure that his father regretted this statement, to the extent that he decided that keeling over from a heart attack was more preferable to being in her presence.
John had left Jade at the back of the church for the funeral, unable to disregard the anger at the idea of her being in the front pew for a ceremony for someone as honourable as his father had been.
The truth was that no one liked Jade. This wasn't harsh - it was simply a fact.
As each day of his life passed, both his regret at ever having slept with Katherine, and his relief at having refused to give Jade his surname, grew. Katherine had begged him to make Jade a Pollard, suggesting that people would talk if he didn't. John didn't know why she thought a simple name would save her - either way, she would have three kids with two different surnames, and everyone knew that Jade would be born in the middle of Katherine's divorce, and not by the man she was divorcing. In John's opinion, Katherine's situation was already far past saving, and he saw no reason to place a stain on his own fine family lineage for her sake.
So, Jade became a West.
And as if sealing her fate, the moment the ink dried on her birth certificate, she became insufferable.
From a young age, Jade was difficult, to say the least. She refused to wear what her parents wanted, or go where they took her, screaming outside the church every Sunday when John had tried to take her. She did not find favour in his family members, and struggled to make friends at school. On the rare occasion that Katherine accosted him and forced him to pick her up, she would explain that her days had been spent alone, vastly in her own head. John concluded that his daughter was a dud. Evidently, she had not inherited his studiousness, or natural intelligence, and she certainly hadn't gained any kind of social skills, from either parent. It seemed as though Jade would grow only further into an irritable, moody and isolated person, and John barely felt guilty at the thought that this was not exactly undeserved.
The unavoidable truth was that Jade was simply not someone who anyone of sound mind wanted to associate with. No one liked her.
Well, apart from that boy she'd let sleep with her.
And now he was a 45-year-old grandfather that had never even wanted to be a father. Although, he would argue with himself that that title required significant involvement, and he had never even met the child, thank god. He didn't want to think of what kind of horiffic Jade reincarnation it might be.
Whilst he'd always known that, no matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to rid himself of the black mark on his life that was Jade, he had hoped that she wouldn't further his pain by falling into a cliché like teen pregnancy. As though just to taunt him, she hadn't even waited until a marginally more, though still horiffically shameful, form of this; she could've got pregnant at nineteen, but instead she chose fifteen.
Fifteen.
The thought of it disgusted him. At fifteen, he had been wholly focused on his studies, which is why he now possessed such a respectable and prosperous professional life.
Jade, obviously, would never understand the values of such discipline, and therefore would never, under any circumstances, succeed in the way he had.
He was now a successful and rich married man. He didn't need the stresses that Jade brought him. The day that Katherine had asked him to cancel all his meetings and put his life on hold to meet with her and Jade due to 'an emergency' still lay fresh in his mind. Jade had been sat on the couch, and did not look up once as Katherine explained how she was four months pregnant and that she was keeping the baby. John simply shook his head and departed straight back to his next meeting.
He had made it clear to Katherine that, just as he had had no interest in being a father, he was not at all inclined to take on the grandfather role. He and his wife Michelle, the leggy 32-year-old heiress of the Kleinman Corporation, a local yet profitable business, had recently taken to spending their weekends at the country club. John adored golf and rubbing shoulders with fellow success stories, whilst Michelle thoroughly enjoyed discussing the lives of women she loathed with women with whom she had a markedly fake relationship. But enough flutes of champagne meant that the group always had fun, no matter how much they all secretly disliked one another.
The last thing he needed was such a pleasant life to be interrupted by the consequences of Jade's roguery.
This was the first time he would see her in nine months. On that May day, he had looked at her, her belly swelling over her toes, and could barely believe that he had produced such a shameful offspring. He had hoped that that would've been the last time he'd laid eyes on her, holding no regret at their last ever exchange involving him telling her he wished she had never been born. Why on earth would he regret honesty?
However, she had, for some unknown reason, attempted to regain contact, inviting him to a play that he would've dreaded attending even had he not known its director. The only reason he had actually arrived at the theatre us because his secretary, the brainless woman, had received Jade's invitation and blindly assumed that he would be going. It was in his diary and commented on by colleagues before he could reject the invite. Knowing that it was not a lie he would look well being caught out in, he had reluctantly settled on attending, with the reminder to have a less-than-gentle word with his secretary when he got the chance.
So now here he was, sitting in an uncomfortable, fold-down seat, preparing to watch some presumably god-awful artsy crap. He didn't like plays, with their creative pretentiousness. The only thing he ever watched was documentaries. Who needed fiction when real life exists?
John took a look around him. The play was fairly well-attended, something which surprised him, given how few friends Jade had always seemed to have. He considered for a moment whether people had been paid to attend, and noted that he would have to look into how his child support was being spent if he was shown any indication that this was the case. He saw no familiar faces in the crowd, though this did not surprise him. The only friends of Jade that he might, in good lighting, have recognised were the self-obsessed boyfriend, and moronic redhead.
He and Jade had had no contact since he, or rather his secretary, had confirmed that he would be attending, so he had no idea if her friend or her boyfriend would even be there, that is whether she was even still in a relationship. He also had no clue whether she'd have the baby in tow, but he religiously hoped not. It was bad enough knowing that the child existed, but the thought of having to see it was quite simply loathsome.
His face curled into a grimace and he shuddered back into his seat, the small girl beside him giving him a look of great concern.
She would do well to mind her own business, he thought, but the lights then dimmed and she would have been unable to stare at him again successfully even if she'd wanted to.
It seemed that the play was beginning. John looked down at his watch. 7:30. Considering Hollywood traffic, he'd be lucky if he got home by ten.
The curtains opened, revealing the ditsy redhead John knew was a friend of Jade's. Her name was something short and stupid, but he couldn't quite recall it. No bother - he had no interest in retaining details about Jade's life.
As the play progressed, John found himself getting more and more agitated and uncomfortable. The subject matter was grotesque, and he worried that the child next to him would grow up to be just as psychologically flawed as Jade if thid was the material she was being exposed to at such a young age.
It followed a young girl, who was essentially ignored by all her peers and family. Quite rightly so, in John's opinion; the girl was unignorably irksome. This was why he didn't watch plays - even fictional characters could not escape his ire.
The girl, feeling sorry for herself, then tripped and tumbled into a well, finding herself miraculously unharmed. John's snorted, earning looks from the family beside him, but he knew better. His knowledge of human anatomy was far greater than theirs, he was sure; it was highly improbable for a girl to survive, let alone be uninjured as a result of, such a fall.
It was getting increasingly tiresome to avoid such blatant potholes, and John found himself checking his watch so often that sometimes the time had not even changed.
He was unnerved by what such a piece said about Jade. He had known that she was not wholly sound, but he hadn't quite realised just how messed up she seemed to be. Even if he ignored the mistakes which exposed her poor education, he could not pretend that he wasn't seeing what was clearly a manifestation of the girl's psychosis. He wondered for a moment whether anyone else in the audience could sense this, and felt, as he often had, relieved that he and Jade did not share the same name or features.
He wasn't sure what had gone so badly wrong in Jade's life for her to turn out as she had, but he found himself greatly frustrated that he had put so much money into such an embarrassing result. Katherine had always been a poor decision-maker; every one she'd ever made regarding Jade had been wrong.
At that moment, a character entered the stage, rippling the curtain as he moved past it. It only took a fraction of a second, but John saw a flicker of Jade, waiting in the wings with a clipboard clutched to her chest. Her face was stony.
It was at that moment, after such a long time of trying, and suffering, as her father, that John decided that he truly did not want to be part of Jade's life.
Even if his father had been part of his own, he was not Jade. He had been a model child, the light of his father's eye. It was unreasonable to expect him to treat the insolent Jade as his own equal.
Ignoring the glares he received from those in the seats around him, John stood up from his chair and straightened his suit jacket, making for the exit without so much as a second glance at the stage.
Whatever the repercussions would be for exiting Jade's life, he would deal with them. But there was surely no possibility that they could be as bad as the idea of being around her any longer.
John marched through the corridors of the theatre, intentionally avoiding eye contact with ushers and employees who probably thought it was a cardinal sin to leave a play, even one as abysmal as Jade's, early.
Blind to a glare from the receptionist, to whom he had been unnecessarily curt earlier in the evening, he pushed open the theatre doors and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Outside, with the street noise in front of him, and the actors' lines behind him, John Pollard breathed in the city air and felt peace for the first time in seventeen-and-a-half years.