“She left because of Albert,” I started to talk, not knowing why. I should just keep my mouth quiet.
“Albert was just as selfish and just as fucking spoiled as she was. They were both despicable people and because of them, Alice suffered. Grace and Alice were not your fault.” Hearing her name made my heart hurt more than anything, and I plopped onto my chair.
“You don’t know shit, Mike,” I tried to growl out, but it only sounded as defeated as I felt.
“I know everything,” he told me, and I couldn’t seem to look away, though I had no idea why he was swaying so damn much. “Albert came to see you. I never told you, because the son of a bitch was nothing but a complete useless asshole and a fucking dick. You were finally getting out of that drunken haze you had lived in for over a year after Grace killed herself. Grace let you believe Alice was yours, she wasn’t. She took her away when Albert, Alice’s real sperm donor, needed an heir.”
Hearing her name again, I could see her little face, her blond, silk, straight hair standing every which way so clearly. I wanted to reach out and touch the image, and my stomach turned.
Alice. My beautiful Alice.
“I watched her come into this world,” the words slipped out of my mouth as Mike’s facial expression sobered.
“I know.”
“I knew,” I told him, “I knew she wasn’t mine, but I didn’t care. From day fucking one I knew. Grace was unstable and she was so tiny, she needed me, Mike.” My heart was heavy, so fucking heavy.
“I know.” His hand was on my shoulder, and my head drunkenly slumped forward.
“She should be in Vegas celebrating her twenty-first birthday today instead of…”
“Say it, man. You need to say it. I can’t even imagine how you feel. If something were to happen to Mark, Penny, Chris or Nikki….” A dam broke inside of me at that moment, wetness running down my face, Mike’s hand on my shoulder as a support.
In my drunken stupor, I sobbed in a way that I had never done in front of anyone.
“She’s buried six feet under, Mike. My little girl…”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Anne
I should have left, but I didn’t.
Zoey was asleep in the playpen, and I was snooping. Tears raced down my face as I heard the raw emotion and pain in his voice as he talked to Mike. I stayed behind, worried that Mike and John would fight. Silently, I heard his jagged cries until I could no longer stand it.
Hearing the pain in his voice and feeling his sobs as my own, I couldn’t help it.
I walked back into the study and took in the sight, wiping tears off my face.
Mike was standing behind a crying John, but not even Mike’s imposing size could stop me or scare me away in that second. I rushed to John, and without a second thought, I sat on his lap, my arms going around him, pulling his head onto my shoulder. Without hesitation, he sought and took the comfort I was offering.
It might have only been two weeks without being in his arms like this, but being like this with him, I could breathe again. Really breathe.
His arms tightened around my waist, his face tucked into the crook of my neck. I felt a light squeeze at my hand and looked at Mike. His ice-blue eyes red, he nodded at me and walked out the study, closing the door gently behind him.
My heart literally ached for everything John had been through, for what he had lost. Slowly, he started to calm down, my fingers stroking the back of his head. His hair was thick and soft in my fingers.
“I’m sorry I was an asshole.” His rich voice was gruff, and my chest warmed up. How could he believe he wasn’t a good man? Here he was, dealing with so much and he was apologizing.
“It’s okay,” I whispered as he took a deep breath that stuttered with emotion.
“I’m sorry about—” I placed my fingers over his lips and he quieted down.
“I get it. It’s okay.” He had his own demons and monsters he was fighting. I could only imagine how much of the past Zoey and I had dredged up by being here with him.
The moment I took my fingers away from his lips he spoke again, “I thought you left.”
“I was worried.”
“You snooped?” He sniffed and looked up at me. Our gazes locked with one another.
“Yeah, I snooped,” I admitted, my cheeks warming with slight embarrassment, and waited for regret to hit, but sitting on John’s lap, his arms around me, his dark eyes looking at me the way they were, I couldn’t regret anything. I didn’t think anything could be regrettable in this position with this man.
A hand went up to my face, the pad of his thumb tracing the obvious blush on my cheeks.
“Everyone falls,” I told him, repeating the words he’d said to me when I’d first come here, and he closed his eyes and nodded.
I leaned closer to him, hoping that somehow this helped comfort him. He moved slightly, his face mere inches away, and what he did next more than surprised me, it threw me for a loop: he shared.
“I’d known Grace since high school. I grew up on the East Coast. She was the daughter of my parent’s best friends. She was always energetic, but not in a healthy way. She was also beautiful. Tall, lithe like a ballerina, blond, and eyes that…” He looked away, and I was about to tell him he didn’t have to do this. I, more than anyone, could relate to how much the past could hurt, but he kept talking, and I couldn’t find it in me to stop him.
“Her eyes were moss green. Alice had her eyes. We dated casually. When I left for college, she’d come visit me for a weekend whenever she needed to get away from home. Usually, it was just for her to get laid. I was nineteen, and shit if I cared if she used me for sex. As long as I got off, too, I didn’t give a shit,” he stared into space as if somehow seeing the past there.
“After a visit, she called me, said she was pregnant and it was mine. I told her to come live with me. My grandmother had just passed away, and I had an inheritance. I wasn't able to touch my trust fund yet. She came out, we bought a small house close to school, this shitty two-bedroom bungalow that had this roof that leaked and ugly yellow bathroom tile, but it had this huge backyard with a giant tree. We were okay. Alice was born, and I took a year off to be home."
“Grace though… Grace was always antsy after Alice was born. It was like she was afraid of something or frightened. Alice had blond, wispy hair and moss-green eyes and my older brother’s very distinctive birthmark on his leg. That first year, she kept going back east to visit her mother, or at least that’s what she would tell me. As long as it helped calm her, I didn’t care. We weren’t in love, we weren’t getting married. Shit, we hadn’t even slept together since she’d told me she was pregnant.”
John
I opened my eyes, and Anne’s warm stare gave me a strength I didn’t know was humanly possible to just hand over to another being.
Yet that was what her gaze did for me.
“Alice turned one, and I was about to go back to school when Grace came back from her last trip to visit her parents. This time, she was wearing a rock of an engagement ring and had my older brother, Albert, on her arm. She told me what I had suspected from the moment she told me she was pregnant, and took Alice back East. Alice was Albert’s kid.” The room stopped spinning for a moment as I remembered those first days after Grace had left with Alice. The silence. The deafening silence.
“When they left, I felt lost, but I knew they were okay. Then they moved to Florida, Albert got transferred there for work. I’d get calls at home from Grace, sounding off. Drunk as a skunk all while Alice was screaming in the background, crying. I went out there and told Albert, warned him that something wasn’t right with Grace. He shrugged it off, saying I was fucking jealous and pissed I wasn’t Alice’s real dad.” That conversation was still ringing in my head, as if it had just happened yesterday.
“I told him I was the one on the birth certificate, and if Grace didn’t clean up her act, I was going to file for sole custody and that I would win.”
“What happened?” Anne asked, her hand on my face, and I leaned into her touch.
“Grace got pregnant again, and for the next year, everything seemed okay. I went to visit Alice for birthday parties, holidays. I was always there. She was like this burst of energy.” I smiled, feeling my nose tickle with unshed tears at the thought of my girl.
“They moved out here when she turned three, and Grace fell into the women-who-lunched group. Alice and her brother had a nanny, who took them everywhere, but that one day…” my voice cracked. “It was raining hard. Grace had gone to have a lunch of cocaine and martinis and went to pick up Alice from her ballet lesson.”
“Oh God,” Anne gasped, and her huge eyes stared at me.
“She didn’t make Alice get in her car seat. When the cops showed up, they didn’t even know there had been a child in the car until an hour later when Grace came to.” The familiar anger was seeping through me. “She was so drunk and high, she fell asleep at the wheel and hit a car head-on. Alice’s body was found a short distance away from where the car ended up, all while Grace didn’t have one fucking scratch on her.”
“John,” Anne whispered, wrapping her arms around my neck and holding me close to her while I let her. She felt so damn good. Like home! “I’m so sorry, John,” she whispered, snapping me out of my thoughts, and I held her close and finished the story.
“A month later to the date, I got a call from Grace. She was again high as a fucking kite, telling me it had been my fault. If I had married her, Alice would still be alive,” the shrill tone of Grace’s voice still rung in my ears. “I hung up on her and called Albert. I told him she was high. I told him he needed to keep an eye on her. He didn’t listen. His fucking pride. She drank three bottles of pills and did a couple lines of coke, then slit her wrists.” I heard Anne’s intake of air and kept talking, I didn’t know why, I just did.
“She was dead by the time I showed up. Albert told me to mind my own business. That she wasn’t mine to worry about, and he was right. But something about the way she had talked made me go over to their place.” I shook my head, remembering how Albert had showed up twenty minutes later. “If I had—"
“It’s not your fault. None of that was your fault. You did more than you needed to.”
“She was in love with me,” I admitted out loud, and the heaviness of that guilt sat at the pit of my soul. “She thought if she got knocked up, I’d marry her, but instead, somehow my brother, who had been in love with her, talked her into marrying him. She thought I would marry her when she came back with Albert in tow. She didn’t think I knew the truth. I was so oblivious to how she felt.”
“Did you love her?” Anne asked and I shook my head.
“I cared about her. I loved her because she was the mother of my child, because even though I knew she wasn’t biologically mine, in my eyes and in my heart, Alice was mine.”
“Mike’s right, you know?” Her voice was confident and I looked at her. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She looked so damn good cuddled into me. Her hand was stroking my chest in random circles, making my eyelids too fucking heavy. I felt her body move slightly. A soft giggle followed, and I wondered if I had said that out loud. I felt her soft body laugh again, her hands playing with my hair. Unable to resist, I nuzzled my head into her chest, my mind still swimming in bourbon, cognac, and the past.
“It’s okay, John, sleep. I got you.” I closed my eyes and prayed that I remembered this in the morning while I prayed at the same time that I didn’t.
Anne
I stroked his dark hair until his breathing slowed and his body relaxed completely under mine. I stood, carefully wiping the tears from my face I’d shed while John had explained his past. Walking out of the study to the linen closet, I grabbed a blanket and went back to carefully cover him with it. I walked downstairs to Zoey, who was still asleep in the living room. Fixing her blanket gently, I leaned in and kissed her forehead. The huge house felt slightly creepy in the drowning silence as I walked to the kitchen.
Entering my favorite part of the old house, I walked in the darkness towards the light switch, my hand on the switch.
“How is he?” A deep voice asked. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Turning quickly, just as the light flickered on, I pressed my back to the wall, my heart racing in my ears.
“Shit,” I squeaked as I stared at an obviously embarrassed Mike. “Asleep,” I answered, regretting the bitchy tone that came out in.
“I didn't mean to…” He tried to explain, but my nerves were so frayed I couldn’t seem to shut up.
“You do that a lot,” I blurted, instantly regretting it.
“I'm sorry. I don't mean to.” Mike’s face was pink, and I took a deep breath.
“It's not your fault.” And it wasn’t. It was my own ghosts that made me jumpy. “Would you like coffee?”
“No, I'm okay.” I nodded as I walked to serve myself a mug and he followed me. Everything John had shared continued processing in my mind.
One ankle crossed over the other, he leaned against the quartz countertop, his arms crossed over his chest.
“He told you?”
“Yes,” I answered him and he nodded. His icy, blue eyes should have been frightening, but somehow they weren’t.
“I wasn't sure what to think of you that night he found you.” Mike’s deep voice almost echoed in the silent kitchen, and I looked at him, surprised and caught off-guard, not sure where he was going with this.
“Oh?”
“I was worried about him. The way Zoey was around him even just a few hours after meeting him. You're a good woman, Anne. You're a good mom. Thank you for what you did up there.”
“I was snooping,” I admitted, standing straight and not breaking eye contact with him.
“You were making sure two grown men didn't kill one another. You wanted to make sure I didn't bully John when he was obviously upset. You were being protective.” Had I been?
“I was stupid.”
“What?” His handsome face scowled and I sighed.
“You two are huge. If you fought, what the heck would I have been able to do?”
“You were protecting John.” He tilted his head and put his hand out towards the table. "Do you mind sitting with me?"
I nodded and walked with my mug of coffee to the table.
“Secrets are never good,” Mike said out of nowhere and I looked at him. “I'm glad you know his.” His eyes were piercing me, holding me in place. Now it was Mike who was being protective of John.
“He knows some of mine.”
“But not everything?” He asked and I shook my head. With a sad smile, he continued, “I was nothing but secrets and lies when I met Sabrina. To this day, I have no idea why the hell she forgave me.”
He surprised me once again, sharing personal things, and I had no words to give him. I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me.
“Forgiveness is such a difficult thing, to give and to receive. Forgiving ourselves for whatever we think we did wrong in the past is close to impossible.” My back straightened and a knot formed in the middle of my throat thinking about how true his words were, how close to home they hit. As if sensing it, he kept talking.
“I have a feeling that in a way, even as different as our circumstances might have been, you and I actually have that in common.” His words made me bite my lower lip, trying to ignore my stinging nose, and I broke his stare and looked down at the mug in front of me.
“I don’t think I could have ever really forgiven myself for …” he stopped talking and looked away, not to anything in particular, and something urged me to ask something that was probably highly inappropriate.
“Did you? Forgive yourself?” I blurted out. His icy gaze met mine, warming instantly as a smile that made him seem younger spread over his face.
“Eventually. I’m naturally stubborn, and it took realizing how close I really was to losing everything for me to get my head out of my ass, excuse my language.” He shr
ugged and I smiled.
“I’ve heard worse.” He nodded.
“I knew the three of them. We were nothing more than overgrown kids pretending to be adults. Alice though, she had this light about her. I think when it came to her, John just wanted to give her something he didn’t have. Sure, he came from a family with more money than God, but he didn’t have a great childhood. He wanted to give that to Alice.” I nodded, understanding what he was saying.
“I should get going, are you going to be okay with him like this? I could stay…”
“I think we should be okay. Zoey’s in her playpen and I’ll sleep on the couch,” I told him, and he looked at me for a long time. The silence in the house was eerie as something worked in his mind until he nodded and stood up.
“Okay then. Thank you for staying with him.”
“No problem”, I smiled and for some weird reason added, “It’s my job.”
I wasn’t sure why I said that, but he stood still, tilted his head, something working in his eyes again, and then smiled at me as he nodded.
“Good night, Anne. I’ll lock up before I go.” He patted my shoulder as he passed me, and I took my coffee mug to the sink, automatically washing it and setting it to dry.
My mind raced in a million different directions, all of which were connected to John. Grabbing some Tylenol and a bottle of water, I quietly went back upstairs. Entering his room, I left the pills and water on his nightstand and walked to the study.
He was still drunkenly slumped over. I walked towards him, and he scared me when he lifted his head, his dark eyes slightly open, his gaze confused.
“Kitten?”
“Yeah.”
“The room is spinning.”
“Cognac and bourbon will do that on their own, I can imagine together, they would make your head swim.” He smiled freely, and my heart flip flopped at how handsome he looked. I loved it when he smiled like that.
Davenport Harbor (Six Degrees Book 3) Page 21