When He Found Me (Road to Refuge Book 1)

by Victoria Bylin

  His earnest tone broke into her thoughts. “Can I ask God to make Shane my dad?”

  As much as she wanted to protect him from hurt feelings, she couldn’t discourage his childlike faith. “You can ask God for anything, but he decides how to answer.”

  Folding his hands on his chest, he seemed to consider her answer. “That’s what I thought.”

  MJ covered his hands with one of hers, and Cody prayed.

  “Dear God, I want a dad, and I want him to be Shane. I want a brother, too. Amen.”

  “Amen,” she whispered.

  Swallowing a lump, she grazed his warm forehead with a kiss. Cody grabbed her shoulders and hugged her. She held him tight until he let go, then she turned out the light. “Sweet dreams, kiddo.”

  He whispered back, “I love you, Mommy.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Tears puddled in her eyes. She didn’t want Cody to see them, so she hurried downstairs. By the time she reached the kitchen, her cheeks were damp and she couldn’t swallow until the lump in her throat shook loose in a sob. She barely heard the tap on the back door. Only when the knocking became insistent did she raise her head. Shane stood at the door, peering through the lace curtain, worry etched on his brow. She didn’t want to talk to him now, not with Cody’s prayer ringing in her ears. But the door opened anyway.

  He strode across the kitchen, drew her into his arms, and tucked her head in the crook of his neck. She smelled his warm skin, his soap, the traces of rain in his hair. She didn’t dare mold her body to his, but neither could she pull away.

  Her will battled with her heart until she couldn’t stop herself—didn’t want to stop herself—from swaying fully into his arms. She leaned into him, borrowing his strength just for this moment. Their breath synchronized into the backbeat of a song, a bass line that was more felt than heard. His arms tightened around her body. She clutched at his back. More than anything, she wanted to pray with Cody that Shane would be his dad.

  Finally his lips brushed the shell of her ear. “Cody asked the question, didn’t he?”

  Chapter 16

  “Yes,” MJ murmured. “He asked.”

  Shane rubbed her back with a firm touch. The warmth of her skin soaked through her blouse and into his fingertips. Whatever monsters lurked in the dark, he wanted to slay them for her. She had to face them for Cody’s sake, but she didn’t have to face them alone.

  When her sobs faded to ragged breaths, he handed her a tissue from a box on the table.

  Stepping back, she quietly blew her nose. “You tried to warn me. I wish . . .” Shoulders sagging, she dropped down on a chair, her gaze on her bare feet. “I wish a lot of things.”

  He pulled a chair around for himself, sat across from her, and hunched forward, his hands loose between his knees. “Cody asked me about his father when we drove by the church. I told him to ask you.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “He deserves the truth, MJ. Whatever it is.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  The refrigerator hummed. The icemaker rattled out a few cubes and halted. When MJ still didn’t speak, he nudged her foot with his. “I’m not following you.”

  “I just don’t know.” She twisted the tissue, turning the cotton until it hardened into a twig.

  What didn’t she know? How to tell Cody? The how wasn’t nearly as important as the who. “You can’t avoid it. Cody needs the truth.”

  “Yes, but—” She stared into his eyes with the bleakness of an overcast sky. “Like I said, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Not what . . . who.” The word echoed like the hoot of an owl perched alone in a distant tree. Who . . . Who . . . Who . . .

  Sitting a little straighter, he studied her face—the wrinkle of her brow, the dull pewter of her eyes, the nervous twisting of the tissue. Suddenly he understood why MJ couldn’t answer Cody’s question. She knew the circumstances of his conception, of course. But she didn’t know the man’s name.

  Ugly possibilities flashed through his mind, but one leaped out above the rest, leaving him sick to his stomach and afraid for her. “Were you raped?”

  “No.” She raised her eyelids, met his gaze, and squared her sagging shoulders. “I was willing. Drunk, but willing. It happened at a party in my freshman year. Just one time. How do I explain that to a six-year-old?”

  No way would Shane judge her the way he had judged Daisy. “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I.” Her fingers slid out of his grasp, leaving a warm but empty trail behind them. “I was so eager to grow up—and to fit in. Nicole had all the answers.”

  “Who’s Nicole?”

  “She lived next door to me in Sproul Hall.”

  “The dorm?”

  “Yes. It’s big and social. Coming from out of state, I chose it because I thought it would be easy to make friends, and it was. But it was overwhelming, too.”

  “Kind of like going from Double AA to the Major League.”

  “Or from Earth to another planet.” MJ sighed. “Nicole was a freshman but a few years older. We talked a lot. You could say she influenced me, but my decisions were my own—especially the one that led to Cody. I wasn’t exactly naïve back then. Just . . . curious, I guess. At the time, losing my virginity seemed like a natural thing to do.”

  MJ stared blindly past him to the back door. “It happened at a party off campus. His name was Brady or Brandon, something that started with a B. That’s all I remember. I never saw him again.”

  Maybe the guy had been drunk like MJ—a naïve kid who made a mistake. Or maybe he was a user like Eric Markham, someone who treated women like the napkin MJ used to wipe the snot from Cody’s nose. Either way, Shane wanted to slam his fist into the guy’s jaw. “Brady-Brandon dropped the ball here.”

  MJ implored him with her eyes. “He doesn’t even know about Cody. Should I have tried harder to find him? For Cody’s sake?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “I think about it a lot, but that night I knew what I was doing. The guy had a condom. Maybe he used it. Maybe he didn’t. I don’t remember. There was no obligation on his part, no commitment at all—”

  “Wrong.” Shane refused to let the guy off the hook. “There’s a big obligation on his part. The biggest obligation a man can have.”

  “But—”

  “If a guy has sex with a woman, he should have the decency to know her name and to check to make sure she’s not pregnant.”

  She gave him a rueful smile. “According to the women I knew at SassyGirl, that’s old-fashioned. Online dating apps changed everything.”

  Thanks to locker room talk, Shane was no stranger to the hook-up culture. He could only shake his head. “Biology is still biology.”

  “In more ways than one,” MJ admitted wearily. “Cody has his father’s blood type, B-positive, which is fairly rare. Mine’s A-positive and not a match. What if he needs a transfusion? Or a kidney? What if—”

  “MJ, stop.”

  “I can’t.” She tossed the twisted tissue in the trash. “I worry all the time.”

  “You can’t change the facts.”

  “I know, but Cody’s going to have questions. Even worse, people will ask him questions. I know because they ask me questions all the time. It’s natural. But someday he’ll be a teenager. I’m terrified he’ll be embarrassed or ashamed, or just mad. And bitter. That would be the worst.”

  Shane said nothing, because her fears were real and likely to come true. After his mother’s death, he had searched every inch of the van for a letter, a note, anything with information about his father, in part with the vain hope the man would want him. Grief-stricken and in shock, he had plummeted into a silent rage that sometimes still plagued him. How could his mother have taken such vital information to the grave?

  He reached for MJ’s hand again. Her fingers were still cold, but she had stopped shaking. “Most secrets do more harm than good. If you tell Cody what h
appened, he’ll be able to cope with it. Anything’s better than not knowing.”

  “You sound certain.”

  “I am. My birth certificate says ‘Father Unknown.’”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “You don’t know who your father is?”

  “I don’t even know about him.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing.” The word glided off his tongue with surprising ease. The detachment came with practice. “No name. No pictures. Only the fact I was born in Phoenix.”

  MJ took a slow, deep breath and blew it out. “You do know how Cody feels. May I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I know you missed having a father, but was it enough to have just your mom?”

  “My mom was amazing. And yes, she was enough.” More than enough, she’d been everything to Shane and Daisy. “She liked baseball, so we listened to games on the radio while she drove. No matter where we were, she made sure Daisy and I had special birthdays. She loved us and we knew it.”

  Awash in memories, he told MJ about his unusual childhood. His mother, Jennifer Riley, had left home at the age of nineteen to study art in Paris. When her parents died a few years later, she returned to the United States, bought a van, and sold her work at artisan fairs all over the country. Somewhere in her travels, Shane had been conceived. Later she married a man named Jon Walker and gave birth to Daisy. When the marriage ended, she took her children and went back to the craft fair circuit, where she sold sundials made from scrap metal.

  Shane thought of the hours in the van, the boredom of rural highways. He still wondered about his father, but he also remembered laughter and his mother’s spirit of adventure. “There were good times and bad ones, but Daisy and I did all right.”

  “What about school?”

  “We spent most of our winters in Arizona. My mom had friends there. It worked until she died so unexpectedly.”

  MJ’s pretty eyes misted. “I’m so sorry. Did you ever ask her about your father?”

  “Once. I was thirteen when she accidentally left my birth certificate in plain view. Until then, I thought Daisy and I were full siblings, that my father was Jon Walker.”

  “But your last name’s Riley.”

  “We all went by Walker until he left us. After that, we went back to Riley, even Daisy, but she now uses Walker.”

  “It’s confusing.”

  “That’s what happens when kids don’t know who they are.” Shane recalled the times he’d changed his name and held in a sigh. “When I saw the birth certificate, I asked my mother for the truth. I could see her thinking about it, deciding, but in the end she said I was too young to understand.”

  MJ nodded solemnly. “I can see why. Thirteen’s a sensitive age.”

  “Yes, but she shouldn’t have dodged the question. Don’t do that to Cody.”

  “I won’t.” She laced her fingers in her lap. “Thank you for listening . . . for everything. You’ve been wonderful to us both.”

  MJ’s praise warmed him from the inside out. He could be proud of what he’d done tonight, what he’d said to her, and how he had handled Cody’s questions. His good deeds were adding up like coins in a bottle, each one shiny, valuable, and a payment toward redemption.

  “Cody’s a great kid,” he said, sharing MJ’s pride. “How’s his nose?”

  “Sore, but he’s fine.”

  They chatted about the slide and the crash, Cody’s spelling test, Shane’s students, and the possibility of MJ moving in with her mother. She still didn’t know what to do, and Shane offered no advice. Working for Olivia Townsend was a challenge. He couldn’t imagine living with her.

  It was ten o’clock and a school night, so he pushed back in the chair and stood. “I better go.”

  MJ popped to her feet. “I baked cookies this morning for church on Sunday. How about taking some with you now?”

  “No, thanks.” Cookies reminded him of his failure with Daisy.

  A frown must have rippled across his face, because MJ tipped her head. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re upset.”

  Yeah, I am. “It’s nothing.”

  A lie, and she knew it. “Is it Cody? I know he’s attached to you, and he has . . . ideas. If there’s a problem—”

  “It’s not Cody.” In his mind Shane saw Daisy dressed in a black leather mini-skirt and strutting on four-inch heels, her lips coated in garish lipstick and her eyes rimmed with heavy makeup. He relived trapping her in the storeroom, berating her in that high-and-mighty tone he now despised.

  As if she were a ghost, Daisy spoke to him. MJ tells you her darkest secret, and you sit there and pretend to be perfect? Well, you’re not. You cursed at me when I was hurting. You practically spat on me in that storeroom.

  He owed MJ an equal confession, and he owed Daisy. His conscience squirmed, wormlike and ugly, until he opened his mouth. “Cookies remind me of my sister. I haven’t told you much about her.”

  MJ tipped her head. “Almost nothing.”

  “She’s in trouble, and it’s my fault.”

  In his mind the kitchen morphed into the Harpers’ living room. He saw the social worker speaking to Daisy in a hushed tone, then taking her away while Shane eavesdropped from the hall, grateful he didn’t have to go with her. He’d been a Christian then, yet he had willfully ignored the promise he made when their mother died. I’ll watch out for you, Daisy. I won’t let them separate us.

  He had failed her. Miserably.

  MJ brought cookies and milk to the table and urged him to sit. Shane sank back down on the chair, sipped the milk, but couldn’t look at the cookies.

  She nudged the plate in his direction. “You were in foster care together, weren’t you?”

  “For a while.” He told MJ about living with the Harpers, how his dreams came true while Daisy made one mistake after another. “I tried to stop her from drinking and staying out, but I did everything wrong. I’d been a Christian for a few months, and I had all the answers. Looking back, I bullied her.”

  MJ winced on Daisy’s behalf. “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “And scared like Daisy.” She nudged the cookies closer to him. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You were grieving your mother and getting used to a new life.”

  “Yes, but I was older, and Daisy needed me. If I’d asked to leave with her, we might have been placed together in a new home. But I didn’t want to leave the Harpers.” His eyes dropped down to the sugar cookies loaded with M&Ms. “If I’d left with her, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen apart.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “True, but I know what did happen.” He told MJ about Daisy’s promiscuity and drinking. Lastly he described half dragging her into the dark, cluttered storeroom at his college graduation. He couldn’t bear to look at MJ, who would either condemn or excuse him. Either reaction would sicken him, but especially an excuse.

  He forced himself to look her in the eye. “She wanted to leave, but I blocked the door. I shouted at her about the drinking, the guys. I told her she was ruining her life, and I couldn’t stand by and just watch. That’s when she told me to go to hell. I lost it and yelled back. She got hysterical, and I still didn’t open the door.”

  MJ gave him a stern look. “You blew it.”

  “Yes. Big-time.” Guilty as charged. But his confession brought no relief—not even a whisper of absolution. “She needed me to look out for her, and what did I do? I told her she needed Jesus, and I wouldn’t open the door until she came to her senses. When I finally gave up, she left with a guy who later bragged about hooking up with Preacher Boy’s little sister.”

  Even in the dark, Shane saw MJ go pale. “That’s awful. But I don’t understand. Who was Preacher Boy?”

  He hammered his thumb into his chest. “Me. It’s an old nickname. I hate it.”

  MJ laid her hand on his forearm, but he felt dirty and pulled away.


  She allowed him to escape her touch, but not her words. “What you did was awful, but you’re sorry.” She eyed the little flip-calendar on the kitchen table, Christian-themed, with pretty pictures and a daily Scripture. Until now Shane had steadfastly ignored it.

  MJ’s eyes lit up. “I like today’s verse. It says love covers a multitude of sins.”

  “Don’t go there.”

  “Go where?”

  “To God forgiving my sins. To Jesus dying on a cross and paying the price. To goodness and mercy following me all the days of my life, because that didn’t happen.” Sarcasm dripped fire into his belly. He had no desire to torpedo MJ’s faith, or to mock it, but neither could he stand a naïve lecture on God’s ways.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I was a Christian for eight years. I respect your faith, but I don’t share it. Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “A lot of reasons. Let’s drop it.”

  She hesitated. “I won’t pry, but I’m wondering about Daisy. What have you done to find her?”

  “I’ve called her a hundred times, but she doesn’t answer. Before I left L.A., I hired a private detective.” It hurt to think about Daisy’s present circumstances, but he needed to be completely honest with MJ. “Last I heard, she showed up at my old apartment with a black eye. My roommate answered the door and she ran. She could be on drugs, homeless, doing anything to survive.”

  MJ’s eyes lit up. “You lived in Marina del Rey, right?”

  “In Palm Terrace on Washington Boulevard.”

  “I have a friend who works with Maggie’s House. It’s a place for women escaping domestic violence. The organization runs a thrift shop about a mile away in Venice Beach. It’s a long shot, but I’ll talk to her. At the very least, she can keep an eye out in case Daisy shows up.”

  “Thanks. The odds are about a million-to-one, but it’s worth a try.” An old verse echoed in his mind. With God, all things are possible. He no longer believed in miracles, but his soul clung desperately to a fraying strand of hope.

  MJ carried the plate of cookies to the counter. He picked up the half-empty milk glasses and followed, watching as her hair swished against her slender shoulders.