Prologue

I didn’t find out the truth about my birth until I was ten years old. For ten years I had fantasized about it. I truly believed that my parents could not be my parents; I was really the long lost daughter of the President, the secret lovechild of a Duke and his mistress. I believed that my birth was extraordinary and I was destined for even more extraordinary things. After receiving a zero on a fourth grade paper about our pasts because my writing was ‘too fantastical to be taken seriously’, my mom decided it was about time I knew the truth. I was born at four oh four in the morning on May 2nd, 1991 in Lennox Hill Hospital in New York City. My mother, Laura Johnston, is a publicist and my father, Victor Lombetti, is a state Senator. I was born without any complications, no panic, no surprises. Except one. My mom and dad never married. Both were fresh out of college when they met. She was temping at some agency in Greenwich and he was interning at an old law firm in Lower Manhattan. They were together for over two years before Laura got pregnant and, even though there was pressure from their friends and both their families, the two remained unmarried. The idea of raising a child between the two of them, together but unmarried, didn’t fazed either one until the day I was born. In the hospital, the nurse took me away and filled out the paperwork to keep track of me, naming me ‘Baby Girl Johnston’ until my parents decided on a name. When the nurse brought me in and my mother saw her name on my basinet, she said ‘Oh no. It should be Baby Girl Lombetti,’. My dad completely freaked out, wrote my mom a check worth his entire savings account from the last two years’ salary and skipped out. I didn’t meet him until my second birthday, when he moved back into town. Eventually, I gave up on believing in the possibilities of my birth and instead settled on being plain old Regan Marie Johnston, nothing special about me.

After my wonderings about my birth faded into memories, I needed something to fill up all my spare time. I had notebooks full of possible scenarios of my birth and even more with why I had been stuck with two, dull, normal parents. My fourth grade teacher, Ms. Chazan, suggested that a good outlet for all my creativity was writing but I had no knack for grammar and spelling and at the end of the day, my creativity stemmed from thoughts about my birth and trying to tap into that to write just kept leading me down a dangerous, dangerous path. Instead, I turned to acting. Every time I set foot on a stage, I got this huge adrenaline rush of pure, unaltered excitement; the exact feeling I got whenever I opened a book to learn about a new country, a new rich, childless family that could possibly have been mine, or each time I woke up in the middle of the night with sweat streaking my body and the satisfactory feeling that there was yet another way to spice up my life.

When I turned thirteen, a little too much spice was added. My father ran for Senate. My dad was then voted into the Senate. From the moment he entered the campaign, I had a bodyguard on my tail all day, everyday. Tracey Goldschmidt’s Bat Mitzvah? Bodyguard. Being asked out by Marc Barretto? Bodyguard. First time I got my period? Bodyguard, outside the bathroom door. Nico Marcus was unrelenting in his vigil. He was loyal to my father, that much was for sure. Loyal to me? Who knows; he sure as hell is loyal to making my life hell.

It wasn’t, however, until I was seventeen that I really swerved off the beaten path of sanity. I went right back to fantasizing about my birth. The only exception: that time, I wasn’t that far off.