Published 2011
Ed King is an orphan. He didn’t find this out until his younger brother Simon was diagnosed with prostate cancer and Ed gets genome tested. Although he is an orphan, Ed has developed the premier search engine on the planet. He has a personal assistant (virtual) named Cybil whom he relies on for hashing through information. Cybil is the one who tells him, after her analysis, that he and Simon are not biologically related.
The book starts out with Ed’s parents, a married man whose wife has been hospitalized and the au pair who comes to take charge of the house and two children during her absence. Diane is just a teenager, an exchange student from Britain whose mum was a prostitute and whose dad she never knew. The married man, Walter Cousins, has a good job and knows better but succumbs to the enticement of a young girl in his house day after day. After a few months the wife comes home and Diane is no longer needed. But by this time she is pregnant with Walter’s child. He makes arrangements for her to deliver the baby and give it up for adoption. She has a couple of days to make her final decision, and during this time she leaves the hospital and then abandons the child on someone’s doorstep in an upscale neighborhood. She writes Walter demanding that he provide for his child by sending her two hundred and fifty dollars every month to a post office box. She then finds a cheap place to live and watches for her next opportunity.
Ed, meanwhile, is adopted by loving parents and has a good life until, during his wild teenage years he runs a car off the road in the middle of now where and the man in it is killed. It happens to be Walter Cousins, his father, although he has no idea of the relationship. This brings Ed’s wild days to a screeching stop and he begins college in earnest. No one knows about how the accident happened and Ed carries this with him eventually relying on prescription drugs to bring him out of his fog.
Time marches on and Diane goes from high class prostitute to the wife of a wealthy man. All she has to do is keep herself looking good and she does this with so much gusto that she eventually goes to the hospital for plastic surgery. For nine years she has been married and has told her husband that she is not able to have children. While she is in the hospital he sees that she is on the pill, and has been lying to him all along. So ends her lush life, with a small settlement and the money she’s saved from Walter’s extortion she sets up again and starts dealing cocaine, never taking it herself but supplying to a higher end clientelle.
As unlikely as it seems, Diane eventually meets up with Ed King and they fall in love. I’m going to leave the story there because the ending is worth reading through for. I am not sure I can quite believe it, but it’s interesting and possibly plausible.