A Missing Heart

by Shari J. Ryan

  Almost the moment the cold air hits my face, the tension in my shoulders, chest, and head lessens. I can breathe a little easier and a twinge of happiness finds me. I often remind myself of Hunter and the way he was during the years after Ellie died. With the general mood in the house, it feels like someone did die.

  The job site is a little farther into town than our normal locations, but it’s a three-thousand-square-foot house needing hardwoods in every room. Since it’s just Hunt and I, we’ve been at it all week. Normally, Hunter is at the jobs before I am since he has to get the girls to the bus stop at a sickeningly early hour in the day but this morning, his truck isn’t in the driveway when I pull in. He must be running late today. Weird.

  I hop out of the truck and bring my tools in to set up, and as always, Mom is calling me. She waits until I leave the house most mornings and takes the time to check in and see how I’m coping. Coping. That’s what she refers to my living situation as now. I’m just coping with the aftermath of a mental disaster.

  “Hey, Mom, I’m just walking inside of this gigantic cluster—”

  “AJ,” she says abruptly.

  “I didn’t say it, Ma,” I laugh. She loathes my cussing. I have to let it all out when Gavin isn’t in earshot, but she still can’t deal with it. I explained it’s just a form of release but it still doesn’t fly.

  “It’s not that,” she says. Listening to her speak, I realize something is going on.

  “Is everyone and everything okay?”

  “Yes, everyone is…well, maybe you should be the judge of that,” she continues.

  “What are you talking about?” I drop my toolbox down by the front door as I dig around for the spare key I have in my pocket. “What’s going on, Mom?” She tends to be a little over dramatic, and I’ve become accustomed to her long, drawn out explanations for Hunter’s daughter having a sore throat or Dad’s back going out. She always makes it sound like someone is on their deathbed, but there’s a different inflection in her voice this time, and I can’t put my finger on what it could possibly be.

  “We had a visitor this morning,” she begins, talking softly into the phone. I look down at my watch, verifying that it’s only nine. What visitor would be stopping by before nine?

  “A visitor? Like a delivery guy?” I laugh. “Mom, what’s going on? Spit it out.”

  “Hunter’s here now. Maybe…can you put that job on hold for a few hours?”

  “What? Why is Hunter there?” What the hell is going on?

  “I called him,” she says.

  “Mom, you’re starting to worry me. Can you give me something to go on here, please?”

  I hear the receiver of the phone rustle against something, and I’m quick to realize it’s the phone being passed over to someone. “AJ,” Hunter says. “Get on over here for a bit. We’re ahead of the schedule with that house anyway, so we have some time to spare.”

  “What is going on, man?” I demand with anger. “What’s with the guessing games?”

  “We’re not going to get into this over the phone.” I hang up on Hunter, because now I’m getting pissed. I pick my toolbox back up, carry it over, chuck it into the bed of my truck and hit the road, going way faster than I should. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what would be so important that I need to leave the job, or for the fact that they won’t tell me what’s going on over the phone.

  It’s a good twenty minutes before I make it to Mom and Dad’s, and I find a white BMW X6 in the driveway, situated in front of Hunter’s truck. We don’t know anyone with a vehicle that expensive. It must be a salesman or something; although, I’m not sure what would be so important about that.

  I get out of the truck, letting the door slam behind me as I make my way up to the front door. Letting myself in, I walk through the foyer and into the family room where I hear—happy voices.

  When I round the corner, it takes less than a minute to piece everything together—who I’m looking at.

  Everyone is staring at me, and I’m confused, but at the same time, I’m not confused. “Wha— Uh, oh, oh my God. Holy—wow…Cammy?” The name feels unfamiliar leaving the tip of my tongue. I have tried my hardest to forget about her. I have tried my hardest not to mention her name or wonder what she’s doing, who she’s with, if she is happy, and if she thinks about me as much as I think about her. Damn, she’s fucking gorgeous. She was beautiful and hot, every dude’s living dream, when we were in high school, but now she’s like some elite goddess. Maybe that’s not the right phrase, but I don’t know if I have the words in my vocabulary to describe what she looks like. The golden brown waves she once had now have streaks of burgundy tones. Her lips are covered in red, her lashes are darker than black, which match her dress pants that contrast with the stark white shirt she’s wearing. Heels. Cammy never wore heels. But the ones she has on now must be at least four inches high.

  She stands up, showcasing her perfectly toned and slim body, then offers a hesitant grin. “AJ,” she says softly.

  “Wow.” Wow, as in, you look like a million bucks and I have torn jeans, a white shirt that I might have shrunk in the wash last week, and a hairstyle that needed a haircut three weeks ago. “Yeah, I look like ass,” I laugh.

  She shakes her head, and her smile grows wider. “That’s not what I was going to say,” she replies, through a gentle laugh.

  “And we’re going to give you two some time to catch up,” Hunter says, pulling Mom off the couch. He needs to be pulling Dad up too, because he’s sitting there, happier than a pig in mud, with his arms crossed over his chest and his left leg draped over his right. Dad lives for this shit. I don’t know why he doesn’t plant his butt down in front of the TV and watch soaps with Mom all day. At least that way, he’d get his fill of drama.

  It takes a minute for the three of them to clear out of the room, leaving Cammy and I standing toe to toe.

  “It’s been a long time,” I tell her.

  “You look, geez, you filled out,” she says through nervous laughter.

  “Yeah, I work out,” I joke, curling my bicep. I’m fooling around, but she’s biting down on her bottom lip. Okay, she shouldn’t do that. Please, stop doing that. How has it been so long, and at the same time it feels like no time has passed.

  “I’m sorry I cut things off cold turkey,” she says, referring to our conversation before I left for Cancun. When I returned, I knew I had made a huge mistake and realized I wasn’t ready to give up the fight. She was, though. Cammy never answered another one of my calls again. “I had to, or it would have made things really hard.”

  “Things were really hard,” I tell her.

  She looks down at my hand and lifts it up in front of my face as she presses a finger into my wedding band. I’m trying to ignore the warmth of her fingers clamped around my hand, but it’s like a song that reminds you of a moment in time. Her touch brings it all back for me. “Clearly you’re doing okay now,” she says as a smile touches her lips.

  What I want to tell her is, she has no idea how not okay I am, but it’s not the time to air out all of my dirty laundry.

  With the focus on my marriage, the thought of what her life has become enters my mind. Selfishly scared to see something similar on her finger, I force myself to look down and take her hand, immediately intimidated by what must be a four carat diamond ring. “And you, not too shabby, Cam.”

  “It’s…Cameron, now,” she says, breaking her gaze from mine.

  “Cameron,” I repeat—not as a question but as a statement. I need to hear the way her name sounds on my tongue after never calling this person I thought I knew so well by the very name she was born with. “Suits you.”

  She wraps a strand of her flawlessly curled hair behind her ear. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So, what brings you all the way back to this quaint little New England town? Surely, it can’t be me.” I laugh, because if it were me, why wait almost thirteen years?

  Cammy�
��Cameron, looks down to her feet as I question her visit. “I am here because of you,” she says. As if six words couldn’t turn my life completely upside down, I create the space I think I need and take a seat on the couch behind us. “Are you okay?”

  “Twelve—thirteen years, Cam. Do you know how many of those days you have crossed my mind?” She’s engaged or married…something, and I’m married with a son. This isn’t okay. But it’s Cammy. My Cammy. But, not my Cameron. Someone else’s Cameron.

  She walks over to where I’m sitting and takes a seat beside me. “I’m here because I have something to tell you, something we need to talk about.” The lightness in her voice thickens and an anxious inflection coats the last of her words.

  “Are your parents okay?” My mind races right to the thought that something might have happened to one of them, but even if that happened, why would she need to talk to me?

  “Of course, they’re both fine. Still the same people, always in my business, always keeping tabs on me. You know them,” she laughs. Yeah, while I should know them—the grandparents of our estranged daughter—I only know of them. She places her hands over her lap and knits each of her fingers tightly together. Her pale skin brightens into a light pink, closely matching her polished nails, and I’m becoming anxious and impatient for her next words.

  “I give up, then, what is it?”

  Cammy takes in a sharp breath and closes her eyes. “Ever, she’s…she came to find me.”

  “Ever?” I feel every muscle on my face tighten, questioning each word that spills out of her mouth. “Ever? You mean our Everything?”

  She inhales, placing a long pause between my question and her answer. “It’s really her name, AJ. After you left the hospital room, when I made you leave, the adopting parents insisted that I give our daughter a name. “I could only hear your words playing through my head at that moment: ‘She’s my everything.’ Because of that, I named her, Everything. The adopting parents were a bit put off by my decision, but rather than argue, the woman asked if they could call her Ever for short. It sounded like the most beautiful name.” I want to tear through the house like a tornado with anger and resentment, after all of these years I’m only now finding out that Cammy knew our daughter’s name. But, I’m not moving, and I’m not unleashing because she named her a perfect name. Her name is short for everything, and I’m just short of Everything. “I didn’t tell you because you were already going through so much turmoil, and to be honest, I was seventeen, AJ. I wasn’t making the brightest decisions. I can apologize for the hormonal seventeen-year-old I was, but it won’t change anything now.”

  “Wait a second,” I say, stopping all of my thoughts because my world just imploded. It’s spinning around me, and I’m in the center watching my life spiral out of control. “Did you say…our daughter came to find you?”

  Cammy lifts her face and I see that her eyes are filled with tears. Her bottom lip juts out slightly, and it’s quivering like the rest of her body is. In an instant, all I see is an upset seventeen-year-old girl. A sound like someone just tied a knot around her throat escapes as she begins to cry, and it breaks everything inside of me. Whenever Cammy cried, I felt like crying too. I couldn’t stand it when the girl I loved was in pain, and I couldn’t do anything to fix it. Her tears still seem to have a similar effect on me. “She came to find me—us.”

  I close my eyes, feeling them fill up with tears that I will not be able to control, not if my life were to depend on it. “Did the adoptive parents find you or something? The adoption was closed, and I thought that was the end.”

  “No,” Cammy says softly. “It was just Ever.”

  “But…only—she’s only—today’s her birthday. She’s only thirteen, and…D.C., she wasn’t living in D.C., right?” I ask, having a hard time putting words together. Everything feels hazy, like I’ve been whacked over the head with something heavy.

  “She came to find me on her own. I don’t know how she found me, AJ, but she found me.”

  “Where is she now? What does she look like? Is she okay? Is she—” I’m frantic, panicking, completely discombobulated.

  Cameron holds her hands up, gesturing for me to relax. “Okay, okay. I know this is a lot. I almost passed out when she came to my front door. It was the strangest thing, AJ. She was standing there, and I could have—should have—assumed she was a random kid, selling Girl Scout cookies or something, but the moment I saw those eyes—your eyes, those crazy Caribbean blue eyes of yours, I knew it was our daughter. I didn’t even confirm it…I just threw my arms around her and didn’t let go for a long time. She let me hold her, AJ. She didn’t make me let go,” she croaks through harder cries.

  I don’t know what else to do other than wrap my arms around her and hold her as tightly as I’ve wanted to hold on to her for so long. “Can I meet her? Where is she right now?”

  “With Casper,” she sniffles. “At the hotel down the street.”

  “Casper?” I question, sucking in a breath. “Casper?”

  “My fiancé,” she says.

  “Casper?” I ask again. “Like, the ghost?”

  She laughs through her tears. “He’s never heard that one before,” she jokes, waving a finger at me.

  “You’re engaged to a Casper?”

  “Yes,” she snaps with a small smile. “I am.”

  The smile has fallen from my face, though. “Is he good to you? He could be named Dog Shit for all I care, as long as he’s good to you.”

  She presses her lips together, and the smile lines tracing her mouth deepen. “When I see him, he’s great. Works a lot, travels even more. You know how it can be. He’s an attorney.”

  “Your dad’s dream, huh?” I add in. I never knew much about her parents, but I know nothing was ever good enough for their Cammy.

  “Yeah, Mom and Dad love him,” she shrugs.

  “Do you?” Too far, AJ. Too far. First time speaking to this girl in over a dozen years. This is none of my business.

  “Of course,” she says. The conversation comes to an awkward pause, and I take the hint about dropping the relationship questions as she puts her hands over her eyes. “Anyway, how about you? You have a wife. Any kids?”

  “Yeah, I have a wife, Tori, and we have a one-year-old little boy, Gavin.”

  Cammy gives me a genuine smile and places her hand on my knee. “It makes me so happy to hear that you got over your promise of never having another child. I always thought you would make a great father.”

  “Wasn’t planned, but everything does have a reason for happening. That’s for damn sure.”

  “And I’m going to take a guess that you’re working for your dad now?” Her fingers pinch at the shred from the knee-hole of my jeans.

  “Hunter and I are running the show, but yeah.”

  “Your life looks pretty perfect to me, AJ.”

  “Looks aren’t everything,” I tell her. Her eyes sag a bit with despair, maybe recognizing the truth in my words, maybe feeling sorry for my words, maybe feeling them for herself.

  “So, Ever, did she run away?” The questions pop into my head, one by one. It isn’t okay that our thirteen-year-old daughter showed up at Cammy’s house on her own and out of the blue. Something must have caused that to happen.

  “Yes, she ran away from a foster home,” she says.

  I stand up from the couch before my mind has a moment to tell me to breathe and stay seated. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “She had only been there for two weeks.”

  “Why, Cam—Cameron? Tell me why she was in foster care for even thirty seconds?” I’m pacing the living room, feeling ready to run out the front doors and find those fucking assholes who took our daughter and promised to care for her.

  “They died. They were in a private jet affiliated with the man’s company, and it crashed. Eight of the ten people aboard died on impact. I’m sure you heard about it on the news a couple of weeks ago. I
n any case, those are all the details I was able to get out of Ever.”

  I did see it on the news. Watching the updates made me feel sick for the families involved. Oh shit… “Was she in—” I stop pacing to ask this question.

  “No, she was with her nanny.”

  “I need to see her, now. I need to see her. Okay?” My chest is rising and falling at a rapid rate, and I feel like everything within me is erupting with a fuel of anger, resentment, excitement, and utter happiness. I’m out of control, and I’m afraid of waking up from this dream—the only dream I’ve fucking had since that little girl was brought into my life.

  “Okay, I’ll take you to her.”

  I fall to my knees because they’ve given out, and I wrap my arms around Cammy’s calves, thanking her over and over again. “Thank you. Thank you,” I breathe out.

  The only wish I have for my daughter on her thirteenth birthday is to sit down at a table and share a cupcake with me—and for her to blow out her own candle. This year, my wish is coming true.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I’M SITTING IN Cammy’s BMW, staring out the window, retracing my steps from the moment I woke up this morning. I had no clue my day would end up like this. “So,” I say, looking over at Cammy in her dark Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. “What did you decide to do with your life?” Other than become stinkin’ rich and more beautiful.

  “I’m an attorney,” she says, grinning with pride.

  “Oh yeah? You any good?”

  “Depends,” she says, her smirk growing a little wider.

  “On what?” I laugh.

  “If you’re the good guy or the bad guy.”

  This reunion feels like nothing between us has changed, like no time has passed at all. I feel like myself, and I feel so proud of her.

  We pull into the parking lot of the only four-star hotel in the area. “Casper is cool with meeting me and stuff?” I ask. The last thing I want is to cause any issues between her and this ghost but I’m seeing my daughter whether he’s cool with it or not.