by Christa Wick
With each word read, his muscles pulled tighter and tighter. He could feel his mouth all but disappear. All the tension burned along the surface of his skin.
He wanted to demand an explanation from the woman sitting across from him, but she had turned to stone. And he knew Sage would explain nothing, offer no excuse. He would have to talk to Jake, not her, and shake the truth out of the man at long last.
“Addy!”
He jerked at Leah’s joyful welcome. She didn’t seem to notice, but then she saw the notebook in his hand and her little face collapsed on itself.
“I broke it.” She walked over to Sage, a study in heartfelt apology, and tugged at the dazed woman’s sleeve. “Sorry…I sorry.”
Sage woke from her stupor to put her arms around Leah’s shoulders.
Adler carefully removed the pages in which Sage Ballard had brainstormed walking out of his family’s life forever. Next, he removed what was left of the perforated sheet Leah had tried to pull out plus two more sheets.
“It’s not broken, baby girl,” he said, offering the notebook and two clean sheets to her. “It just looked that way.”
She hurried over, squealed her delight and rushed back to Sage, offering her the notebook.
“Not broken!”
Sage nodded. Adler could see she was doing her best not to cry. Leah patted her cheek, repeating the news more softly.
“Not broken, Sage.”
“I know, Honey Bee.”
His mother came rushing up the hall, out of breath by the time she reached the office’s threshold.
“I turned my back for just a second…did Leah hear…”
She trailed off, her gaze traveling over the woman and child before turning to Adler for explanation.
“I was just showing Leah how the pad isn’t broken.”
Getting up from the sofa, he folded the incriminating pages and stuffed them in his back pocket, Sage watching him the entire time, still looking like her world had just blown up.
Probably because it had.
“I’m heading off to Chandler’s,” he said, naming Jake’s boss. “Leah stays here until Jake comes to collect her.”
He rolled his lips at his harsh tone, but there was no way he was going to take back what he had just said. The notes Sage had written down were completely irrational. Who the heck plotted something like that, stacking more lies on top of the ones already told, dragging their reputation through the mud until it was in complete tatters?
He shook his head, nailed his mother with a stern gaze. “I mean it. She goes home with Jake or she stays here.”
Lindy nodded, her mouth pulled into a tight frown. Approaching Leah, she got down on one knee.
“Love, Aunt Sage is tired from going to all the water stations. Why don’t we watch a movie while she rests.”
Leah looked to Sage. Still holding back tears, she stroked the child’s cheek.
“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” Sage lied. “I won’t be so tired when your movie is done.”
“Not mad?” Leah whispered.
Leaning forward, the first tear falling and disappearing in the strands of Leah’s hair, Sage kissed the child on the forehead then nudged her toward Lindy.
Adler watched his niece and mother go down the hall, Leah taking a hesitant look behind her before turning the corner out of sight. When he looked back at Sage, she had pulled the key ring to the car from her bag and placed it on the desk.
“Keep it,” he growled. “You’re brother and I are going to have a talk, one that’s long overdue. Then I’ll decide what I’m going to do about you.”
Turning her over his knee sounded about right. But he had no idea how many swats it would take to land some sense inside the woman’s head. Sense and a little self-preservation.
Of course, he was only assuming she had been set on climbing up on the cross and martyring herself for Jake. Maybe losing Leah and leaving Willow Gap meant nothing to Sage after all.
Before the question had a chance to come rushing past his lips, he made a sharp turn out of the room and headed for Frank Chandler’s ranch, reaching it in record time.
11
Jake met Adler at the front gate of Chandler’s ranch, no doubt tipped off by Sage that Adler was on his way.
Adler pulled to a sudden stop, the truck kicking up dust on the unpaved road. He killed the engine then just sat for a few seconds as Jake watched him with a wary gaze.
Getting slowly out of the truck, he took the sheets of paper from Sage’s notebook, slammed them down on the hood of his vehicle then walked around to the tailgate. He wasn’t sure Jake deserved the chance to read them in a semi-private setting, but Adler didn’t trust his own temper to watch the man’s face while Jake took in the enormity of what Sage had considered doing.
He let the tailgate down and took a seat, his hands balled into fists pressed hard against his thighs. He had given her no time to explain, so his mind still reeled from how she had been so calm most of the time at the water stations. Just thinking about what she planned had his mind and body spinning in circles.
Relaxing his hands long enough to unball his fists and curl his fingers around the edge of the tailgate, Adler looked over his shoulder in search of Jake. The man was still standing in front of the truck. What looked like fresh grief contorted his strong features, the expression just a little less devastated than the one he had worn at Dawn’s funeral.
“You gonna drag your tail over here?” Adler growled. He was in no mood to give his brother-in-law any quarter. He was certain Sage would have answered all his questions but for her loyalty to Jake.
Adler admired loyalty, especially to family. He regretted the hard words he’d spoken, especially those carrying the implication that he didn’t trust her to leave with Leah. The love she already felt for the child lit her gaze each time they were together.
But those pale purple sheets filled with her elegant, self-destroying script had shaken him to his core. Did she really care for his niece as much as he thought if she could leave like that, cutting the little girl out of her life in an instant? And she certainly couldn’t feel anything for Adler.
He’d been a fool for a pretty face to think she had.
Looking over his shoulder again, he slammed his hand down on the tailgate, the metal ringing with the force of his blow.
“Get over here, kid.”
Jake was only five years his junior, but men don’t lie. Scared kids were a different story.
Moving in slow motion, Jake came around to the back of the truck, stopping far enough away that he was outside the reach of Adler’s arms and fists.
“I’m not gonna punch you, kid.”
Jake just stared at him.
Fine. Adler stared back with a tight grin.
“You proud of what she wrote? That what you want, your sister to walk out of your life, out of Leah’s? Does she have any family to go back to or were you telling the truth about your mother and father being dead all those years?”
Jake eased a hand into his back pocket, pulled out his phone and activated the device. He swiped through to an app, typed a few words then made another selection before handing the phone over to Adler.
A picture of a man in his sixties stared out from the screen. The face, small in the format rendered, was slightly familiar, but he couldn’t attach a name to it. He scrolled down to the article that accompanied the photo.
The man glowering through the screen was Congressman Steve Templeton. Before that, he had been Senator Templeton, his seat lost when the first of his affairs had been exposed. From there, he had moved on to an undefended seat in the House.
“That’s from when he was running for election in the House. I doubt anyone would remember when the news broke about his affair with my mom. Heck, I was barely sixteen. He got voted out of the Senate. Can’t run on a family values platform when you don’t have any.”
At a loss for words, Adler handed the phone back in silence. Did Jake really think
Dawn or the rest of the family would have rejected him because his father was a walking, talking piece of excrement?
“Of course, it all got dredged up again when he decided to run for the House,” Jake monotoned. “Opposition researchers and tabloids started stalking me and Sage. That’s when I left the East Coast, finding work where I could just hire on with nothing but a first name. Picked lettuce for a season in California, started drifting north.”
Back teeth locked together to keep from interrupting, Adler sat there and listened to Jake pour everything out. He figured after almost four years of concealing the truth, there was a lot to unload.
Silently cursing himself, he put Jake’s age in perspective. He had been twenty-four when he started courting Dawn. Adler could barely remember what he had been like that young. Folks had said he was a fine young man back then—but their words didn’t make him a man, just one in training. How differently would he have behaved if it was his father plastered all over the tabloids?
“I thought…” Jake continued with a misery-laden laugh. “I thought it was all winding down, but then he went and got some other woman pregnant. Maybe you remember that one?”
Adler thought back. If Jake figured there was a reason for Adler to remember the event, then there probably was. He sifted through memories until he hit upon the afternoon leading into a Sunday dinner. Jake was there, the television on, news playing in a lull between football games.
Always hungry for ratings and the next foul-tasting bit of gossip, the television channel had done a breaking report about the newest scandal in Congress. Not only had Steve Templeton fathered another child, he had allegedly diverted campaign funds to the infant’s mother. Of course, that last bit was never proven and the man still held his seat. The media had been so focused on the new, far younger mistress and the potential violation of election laws that they had only mentioned in passing that there were other children from another mistress. They hadn’t named them in that broadcast or any other broadcast Adler could remember.
But Jake, already reclusive, had been stiff as a board the rest of that Sunday. And while Dawn had dropped hints to her oldest brother for a full week that she expected Jake to ask Brody for her hand in marriage that Sunday, Jake was quiet until two Sundays later—after the news channels and tabloids had moved on to something else.
“Yeah,” Adler answered. “I remember it being on television when you were there.”
“Do you remember what was said?” Jake asked.
Adler hung his head. What was said never would have passed his mother or father’s lips if they had known even the outline of Jake’s past as a boy with a blank spot on his birth certificate where his father’s name should have been printed.
“I remember,” Adler confessed again. “Daddy said he wouldn’t want to be the wife or children of that man. And Mama…she said she felt bad for the wife and all of the kids but didn’t have an ounce of pity for…”
“My mother,” Jake finished. “And my half-brother’s mother.”
“Yeah,” Adler rasped. He chewed over everything he had just learned about the man standing in front of him.
Sliding off the tailgate, he thrust his hand forward then waited for Jake to step closer and clasp it.
“I’m sorry for my part in everything,” Adler said. “You were always a good husband and father. I want you to know I never faulted you for that.”
Saying nothing, Jake swallowed roughly as he withdrew his hand from Adler’s.
“Far as I’m concerned, the only person you might have done wrong by is Sage. But I’ve only known her a little while. Maybe you were right to cut her out.”
Adler couldn’t keep his gaze from drifting to the front pocket of Jake’s jeans where an edge of the colored paper with Sage’s writing on it poked out. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to cut her out of their lives, but maybe he was a fool who could only see the good in her.
“You’re right,” Jake admitted. He rubbed at his arm like fire ants crawled over the skin. “I did wrong by Sage. And Dawn, if she was still with us. They would have been great friends.”
Adler nodded, his gaze locked on the ground as he struggled against the swell of fresh grief. When he finally looked up, he saw the same emotions mirrored on Jake’s face. Without a thought for what he was doing, Adler stepped closer and wrapped his arms around his brother-in-law’s shoulders, hugging him as he would his parents or his siblings.
Hugging him like he was, at long last, family.
12
The first twenty minutes or so after Adler left the office, Sage didn’t move from the seat. She didn’t slump. She barely blinked. Her hands remained fastened around the armrests, her feet stayed locked side-by-side.
The trance was broken when her gaze focused on the monitor, noted the time and she realized that Adler would soon reach the ranch where Jake worked. Mechanically, emotions as numb as when she had cared for her mother during the woman’s final days, Sage pulled out her phone and tapped a quick warning to her brother.
I screwed up. Adler doesn’t know about SS, but he is headed your way for answers.
At eight, she had tagged her father as Simply Steve without knowing he was her father. He never revealed his last name on his rare visits, neither did her mother.
She had been twelve and a half when she discovered his identity and that he was married. Her seventh-grade teacher had the class watch a Senate session on television and there he was, the man who was her mother’s drug. It took another year to work up the nerve to ask if the senator was her father and Jake’s.
Six more years would pass before she told her brother everything she knew. Shortly afterward, newspapers across the country plastered the sordid details across the front page for a few days. Reporters stalked Sage on campus and waited outside Jake’s high school.
Sage had told Adler that Jake ruined everything, but it wasn’t what she meant. She knew she had ruined it by telling Jake. It had been easier for her to slide through school fatherless. She focused on academics. The kids in chess club didn’t care if “unknown” filled any blanks on her birth certificate. In turn, she avoided things like cheer squad.
Jake had joined the football team, his natural talent a threat to the varsity quarterback. Rumors were spread, things often got physical and, after being called a bastard a hundred plus times on the field, in practice and in the locker room, Jake had hit back with his fist—and the truth.
Thrown off the team, he barely made it the rest of the way through high school. He didn’t care to go to community college after the tentative football scholarship offers from several universities were withdrawn.
He began to drift and then he dropped off the grid altogether.
Would it happen again, her words once more the catalyst?
With no reply from the text, Sage opened up the computer’s word processor and typed a simple letter of resignation. Next, she wrote out a check returning the five thousand dollars that had already cleared her account.
Easy come, easy go. Between her bank balance and her credit cards, she had enough to get back to Baltimore and survive a couple of months while she resumed the hunt for her next client or agency job. She hadn’t yet given her landlord notice on the studio apartment.
Stuffing everything in an envelope, she went next door to Adler’s office and placed the envelope and car keys in the center of his desk.
It was only after she returned to her office and sat on the love seat that she wondered how she would get back to town and where she could stay for the night. Then there was getting to Billings for the flight home.
Home—the word sank its sharp hooks into her chest. For the longest time, Baltimore had been nothing more than a place. Dangerous and dirty, no family, only loose acquaintances beyond one stalwart neighbor.
In the span of two weeks, Willow Gap had grown in her mind as someplace she could stay forever and be happy.
Resting her head against the wall, she closed her eyes but didn’t sleep.
Ears attuned to the slightest sound, she heard two pairs of boots traveling down the hall, their steps increasing in volume.
She opened her eyes and Jake stepped into the office. The other pair of boots continued down the hall and into the next room.
Their movements as coordinated as synchronized swimmers, Jake shut the door as Adler shut his.
“Leah said you were tired.”
They both knew that was a lie. Sage shrugged.
“Did you get my text?” she asked.
“Yeah, gave me enough time to tell the boss I had to clock out and meet Adler at the gate.”
Sage looked Jake over. Despite the fair colored skin they both had, he had a deep tan that kept her from gauging whether his face was flush with emotion. The only real hint of his feelings was the subdued voice and the set of his shoulders. After so many years apart and the fact he was only entering manhood when he left Sage before, she didn’t know how to read Jake any better than she could read Adler.
So far, she only knew he’d seen the list of ideas because part of the paper poked from his pocket.
Cheeks flushing, she looked away, her voice no more than a whisper.
“Are things okay with Dawn’s family?”
Slowly, he took a seat next to her.
“I think so. Adler figures the only person I’ve wronged is you, sis.” He reached out his hand and covered hers. “And he’s right. I never should have broken away, never should have shut you out. You should have been at the wedding, Leah being born…the funeral.”
His voice cracked open. Sage turned to him, one arm wrapping around his chest, the other curling around his head to pull him to her as she had when he was little.
She didn’t hear him sob, but she felt a trace of moisture on her neck.
“It’ll be better going forward,” he whispered.
There was no uncertainty in his tone or words, but Sage felt the question inside her. Maybe his decision to cut her out had been the right one.