Sawyer.
I was screaming the name in my head, but I didn’t scream it out loud because the man who now faced me looked at me without a hint of recognition or acknowledgment. Startled, yes, but who wouldn’t be if confronted by a frenzied woman with a death grip on your arm. Startled, but with no fear, no oh-my-god-I’ve-been-discovered anguish, just a mildly curious puzzlement.
It threw me for a moment. Made me doubt what I’d seen on the water.
It was easy to see why Dave had thought this man might be Sawyer’s brother, because he was both Sawyer and not-Sawyer. Older, of course. He had long hair, swept back into a dripping ponytail instead of cropped in a short professional cut. That change made more of a difference than I would have expected. This man had the same facial build, same etched cheekbones, same dimple as Sawyer, but even so, his face wasn’t quite right. This face was heavily lined and subtly softened. Sad, that was it. A face of failure and regret, not the confident take-on-the-world face I’d known and loved.
If this was Sawyer, he was a different man than the one I remembered.
Or perhaps I was wrong, and this wasn’t Sawyer at all.
He gave a pointed glance at his arm, as if I needed to be reminded I was hanging on for dear life. “Can I help you?”
Four words.
Four words, spoken in the flat tone of complete indifference, but those four words dispelled any doubt. This was Sawyer’s voice. The voice of countless lazy mornings in bed, the voice of whispered love, the voice of a future I’d been promised and then denied.
“Sawyer.” Not a scream, a statement. I choked out the word, the air devoid of oxygen. My head spun, and the festival around me grew fuzzy, the noise fading. Sawyer, alive and standing in front of me, was my only anchor point.
“I’m sorry.” His expression still betrayed no trace of recognition. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. My name is James, not Sawyer.” He grasped my wrist and pulled gently but steadily until my fingers loosened their clawed hold. “Excuse me. I need to get ready for my second run.”
I stood and stared. I wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t be wrong. I’d been confident Del was chasing a mirage, convinced Sawyer was dead and gone. I’d been wrong to doubt her then. I was right now. Sawyer Whitman, the man I loved, the man I hated, was standing there in front of me.
“Why? Why would you do this? Abandon your family? Leave it all behind?”
He ignored my questions, his face sympathetic but his attitude dismissive, the way I’d ignore the pleas of a panhandler who wasn’t quite grounded in reality.
The performance was so perfect, I started doubting what I knew. Could this actually be a stranger?
He gave a last little nod of farewell and turned as if to reach for his kayak.
His eyes slid off my face. He looked slightly behind me and froze. His eyes widened, shocked and terrified, the reaction I’d expected but hadn’t seen when I confronted him. Every last bit of blood drained from his face, and he sucked in a single sharp breath.
I turned to see what had prompted such an extreme reaction.
Josh stood a few feet behind me, tense, unmoving, and just as pale as his father. I looked from one face to the other, mirror images of stunned disbelief.
Sawyer gave a choking gasp, a startled half sob that ripped into my chest and seized my heart. All pretense had disappeared. His face was distorted, the face of a man fighting to cling to fragile shreds of composure. “Josh.”
The single strangled word acknowledged I was right in recognizing him, and it sucked all the air out of my lungs.
He ran a trembling hand over his forehead and turned back to face me as if he couldn’t bear to look at his son. “You. I was ready for you. I thought I could convince you. But Josh …” His voice broke. “I never expected …” His voice faded.
“Sawyer. Please. Tell me why you’ve done all this.”
A flicker of profound sadness passed over his face. “I left to protect Josh. And to protect you. I never intended to hurt you the way I did.”
The words scrabbled to find a foothold in my stunned brain, and I stood there, frozen, trying to understand.
In a single swift motion, Sawyer grabbed his kayak, whipped it onto his shoulder and disappeared upstream into the crowd.
Before I could take a step to follow, Josh raced past me, trying to catch up with his father, but the surging crowd blocked him. In only seconds, Sawyer disappeared. Josh turned back and stumbled into my arms. He clutched me with the fierceness of a drowning victim, sobbing uncontrollably—his entire world destroyed. I hung on to him with equal strength, too staggered and too dismayed to stand unsupported.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Josh
I’d wondered about my father my whole life, this man who lived in a handful of photographs but nowhere in my memories. A name on my birth certificate, a name rarely spoken, a name with no connection to anything solid.
And then there he was in front of me, in a waterpark in Colorado, alive for two short minutes, facing off with Bryn.
I just stood there, staring like an idiot and unable to move, my heart beating so hard it bounced off my ribs and made my chest hurt. There were so many things I wanted to do and say, but they cancelled each other out and I did nothing.
An actual dad. Someone I’d just watched do flips and turns in a kayak in front of all these cheering people. I’d be able to point him out to my friends. See, that’s him. Not bad, huh? I wouldn’t have to pretend any longer that having no dad was no big deal.
And then he abandoned me. Again. He ran away. He saw me and recognized me and still ran away.
He disappeared into the crowd without saying hello or goodbye or anything at all. I lost sight of him almost at once, too many people in my way to even move. I turned and stumbled into Bryn without even realizing my legs were moving. Her arms wrapped tight around me, a rib-bruising Mom hug, and when she turned loose, she rubbed my back.
“It’s all right. We’ll figure things out.” Her voice was shaking so bad, it was hard to understand her.
And I knew for sure not to believe her. Nothing was all right. I’d forgotten the most important thing about dads. The thing I’d known my whole life. Dads leave.
I lifted my face off Bryn’s shoulder, the sun too bright, my cheeks too wet. People around us were laughing and cheering, and for a second I thought they were making fun of me, but it was only another kayaker doing tricks. Maybe nobody noticed the fact I’d fallen apart. I pulled up the edge of my T-shirt and wiped my face. Tellico was squished tight against my legs like he knew I needed hugs from everybody.
“That was him. Dad.” It felt unreal to say it.
“That was him.” Bryn’s face was tightened up and frozen hard, like she was trying not to cry or maybe trying not to scream. “I can’t believe it.”
I’d been right; we did need to look for Dad. I was going to say told you so, but I bent down and patted Tellico instead, my voice stuck deep inside. We had needed to look for him—but this wasn’t at all what I’d expected once we’d found him.
Bryn gave a gulping sort of swallow. “We’ll never find him in this mass of people if he doesn’t want to be found. Let’s see if we can figure out who he’s pretending to be.”
I nodded, on autopilot. Dad dead. Dad alive. Dad gone. It was a chant in my head. I breathed in the smell of too many people too close together, and the hot dogs in my stomach lurched like they wanted out. I had to swallow hard and fast to keep them down.
Bryn was already moving, shouldering her way upstream, mumbling some serious profanity when people got in her way. Tellico and I hurried to keep up. She reached the roped-off area where the four judges sat, positioned close to the standing wave for the best view. They were talking to each other, pens and pencils down, waiting for the next round to start again. She ducked under the rope and stormed up to their table.
“Hey! You can’t be in here.” A young guy, all blond hair and muscles, tried to grab her arm. Bryn bru
shed him off.
“The fifth kayaker in that first set. Where’d he go? Who was he?”
Three of the judges turned their faces away to ignore her, but one guy with a beard, sitting closest to Bryn, looked up at her. “He didn’t show up for his second run. No notice. Maybe he got sick or something.”
Bryn took a breath so deep it shook her whole body, and her jaw got tight like she was trying not to yell. “What’s his name? James, but James what?” Her voice had a frantic edge, and I worried she was starting to lose it. I didn’t feel very pulled together myself. My insides launched into another flip.
The guy shook his head. “We don’t get names, just entry numbers.”
Bryn’s shoulders slumped. The muscle guy waved her away, and she came back to the rope and ducked to my side. One of the other judges chuckled. “Sort of old for a groupie.”
Bryn’s neck turned pink, and her face got blotchy. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” She led the way to the grandstand exit, the crowd shouting and cheering as the next group of paddlers started their runs. I hustled, trying not to lose her.
We stopped when we got to some open space, and she pulled up the Games map on her phone. “There must be a registration place somewhere. Names. Addresses. E-mails.” She scrolled through, her teeth biting down on her bottom lip so hard I thought she’d tear all the way through.
I tried to sort things out while she looked. We weren’t searching for Mom right now; we were searching for Dad, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. If he didn’t care about me, care about us, he should just stay lost. No dad was better than a rotten dad. Fuck him if all he wanted to do was run away.
Then again, we had found him, so maybe Mom had too. Maybe he knew where she was. I kept quiet and waited. I’d let Bryn decide.
After a long few minutes, she nodded. “Here’s a central office. Lost children, security, first aid. Maybe they have access to the names of competitors. It’s over this way.”
Once again, she led, and I followed. Tellico ignored the other dogs we passed, his eyes glued to Bryn as if he knew how upset she was. I kept looking around, thinking maybe I’d see Dad again or maybe Mom, but no.
We hurried past the area with the food trucks and past the LL Bean tent and past the climbing wall. It was too crowded, too loud, and too pointless. I found my dad and then I lost him. The sentence looped through my head like it was stuck.
We came at last to a small building with all sorts of tables out front. A Red Cross tent on one side. A pickup table for registration packets on the other. Stacks of brochures advertised next year’s Games. Bryn talked to a woman, who pointed toward the door of the building. Bryn led Tellico to a quiet spot and told him to stay. I thought I’d hang with him and catch my breath, but Bryn waved at me to come in with her, so I went.
Inside, lots of desks, lots of noise, and lots of people running around. Bryn stepped up to a desk on the left where a woman with a butterfly tattoo on her neck was typing fast at a computer. She had a name tag that said “Cheryl,” and she was looking back and forth between a stack of handwritten forms and her computer screen without slowing her typing at all.
“Excuse me.” Bryn sounded ultra-polite. “I need to find out some information about one of the competitors in the kayak freestyle competition.”
The woman barely gave her a glance. She flipped to the next form and kept going. “Confidential. Sorry.”
Bryn leaned forward, as if trying to slow the woman down by casting a shadow over her work. “It’s important. And it will only take a minute.”
This time, the woman didn’t even look up. “Send an e-mail to the director. Go away.” She flipped to another form and continued her quick typing. We were out of luck.
Bryn and I stepped to one side. “Maybe it’s worth checking with someone else.” But she didn’t sound too sure.
“Hey, Cheryl, can you detangle this for me?” It was a man at a computer at the far side of the room calling. “I’ve gotten stuck in a loop with this pivot table.”
“Coming.” Cheryl punched a final flurry on her keyboard and then hustled out of her chair. She didn’t even look our way. Maybe she’d already forgotten we were standing there.
Bryn glanced around at the chaos surrounding us—people zipping in and out, talking on cell phones, nobody paying attention to anyone else. “Josh.” It was an urgent whisper. “She didn’t lock her screen. Can you look?”
I didn’t want to—what if I got caught?—but maybe it was our only chance. I went around Cheryl’s desk and sat in her chair. A half-eaten slice of pizza was in her trash can, and the smell didn’t help my stomach any. Bryn picked up a flyer from the desk and stood where she blocked the view of most of the people in the room. She pretended to read it like she was waiting for someone.
An Excel spreadsheet titled “Competitors” was open on the screen where Cheryl had been entering data. She’d been working on line 1300, which was way too many entries for me to remember. The columns in front of me were names and contact information, and it looked like the spreadsheet went on and on to the right, off-screen, maybe with event information or other stuff.
My mouth was so dry I couldn’t work up enough spit to swallow, and when I glanced at Bryn, she looked nervous too. If I had the time, I could probably figure out how to filter down to kayakers or even freestyle kayakers, but I didn’t think I could risk it. Keep it simple. I did an alphabetical sort on first names and scrolled to the J’s. “There’s eight Jameses.”
“Can you remember them all?” No whisper this time, just an ordinary voice. “If we get caught, I’d rather not have pictures on the phone.”
Eight was easy. I nodded, scrolled so I could see addresses and telephone numbers lined up and took a snapshot in my head. Then I did it again to make sure I had it. I turned and looked across the room at Cheryl. She was starting toward us, talking to someone beside her, and my hands got so sweaty my fingers slipped on the keys.
“Check under Jim too.”
Shit. I wanted to leave, but I scrolled down. “Three more.” I memorized them as well, then I hit “Undo” a few times until the screen looked the way Cheryl had left it. I scooted out of her chair, Bryn set down the flyer, and Cheryl closed in, but not in any hurry, checking her cell phone now and smiling at whatever she saw. We kept our heads down and walked out the door with one of the other busy people.
Bryn collected Tellico and walked toward the truck, moving super-fast like she wanted to escape. I practically had to run to keep up. We passed a side street that had a grocery store, and she stopped at the corner and waited for me.
“We’re staying in Colorado. We’re tracking him down.” Her voice was an icicle, cold and sharp. “Let’s pick up the groceries we need for the next few days. If we don’t find him, I’ll hire a detective. Whatever it takes.”
This was good. I wanted to talk to him. It was bad. He didn’t want to talk to me. More importantly, Bryn was missing the main point. I hadn’t come all this way for a father who didn’t give a shit. “We still have to find Mom.”
“Yeah. We do. And we have to get Carl off our backs.” She stared down the street with one of those looks where you don’t really see anything. “Your father. I can’t believe it. Why did he do it? Leave? Hide? Run after he saw you?”
All I could do was shrug and stare at the sidewalk. They were the same things I’d been wondering, the things that were eating away at my insides with needle-sharp teeth.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Bryn
Sawyer was alive. The truth of it burned its way into my brain with such intensity I could smell smoke.
I told myself it shouldn’t matter. Alive. Dead. Whatever. He had been out of my life for years. What difference should it make to me now?
Well, it did make a difference. Anger, that old familiar friend, surged through my body like a toxin and radiated from my skin to taint the air around me. Sawyer had cheated on me. He had abandoned Josh with no explanation. He deserved my fury.
>
But if I looked deep enough, I was also angry at myself. Here was even more proof that my judgment sucked. The man I had loved and planned to marry had faked his death, and that probably meant he had robbed that safe deposit box as well.
If he had done all this, what else was he capable of? Del had been right in coming to Colorado to search. If she’d found him, what had he done to her? I’d spent the last week believing Del’s disappearance was all her own fault, but what if it wasn’t? What if Sawyer held the key?
Maybe I was just trying to justify my reasons for finding Sawyer. For setting out on yet another ridiculous search. It was stupid. It was pointless. But I didn’t care. I wanted to face him down and find out what the hell was going on, whether that led me to Del or not.
Josh and I got back to the tent. Time for dinner, and most evenings that meant a quiet bustle around us, with people cooking, talking, tending to fires. This night, everyone was still in town at the Games, and we had the campground to ourselves. I was relieved. At least no one from Carl’s group was waiting for us this time. I couldn’t face them. Not now.
We’d reached the end of Carl’s seven-day countdown, and I needed to call him, try each of the numbers I’d blocked until I reached him in Memphis. I needed to negotiate more time, but first, I had to get my thoughts straight and figure out the next steps in finding Sawyer.
I rummaged through my stuff, pulled out a pad of paper and a pen, handed them to Josh. “Do you think you can write down the information on the people you saw?”
“Sure. But I don’t need to write it down. I’ll remember.”
“It will help me to look at it. We need to decide how to tackle this. How to find him.” How to find your father. I’d been so immersed in my own reaction to our discovery I hadn’t given much thought to Josh. After his initial breakdown at the Games, he’d been all business, but inside, he must be reeling. The magnitude of Sawyer’s deception was too much for anyone to deal with. I wanted to help him but didn’t know how.
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