by T. Torrest
Not like Mia. Mia was cool and fun and real. Even more, I was real with her. I’d never been more myself than when the two of us were together. There was no ego, no act.
Just me.
Just us.
Holy fuck I’m an idiot.
I’d been unknowingly breaking Rule Number One for weeks. I’d been dishonest. Lying to myself as well as my clients. Chasing after Ainsley when I should have been falling in love with Mia instead.
And I had.
I knew that now.
It took me until right this very minute to see the truth.
I’d wasted all that time falling in love with the wrong girl.
I liked to think of myself as a con man, if only as a play on words. I taught confidence, get it? But the title fit me better than I ever realized. I was a fucking fraud of the highest order. I was a fake and a phony and an empty shell of a man.
Mia knew it.
And she wasn’t afraid to call me out for it.
And she mores me anyway.
My brain was racing as I tried to figure out my next move. An apology was in order, that was for damn sure. Fact was, I was planning to go straight to Mia’s apartment first thing in the morning to let her know I was wrong.
I could have called, but the selfish truth is, I was too afraid of the conversation going badly. What if Mia had already given up on me? What if I was too late? So, instead, I wimped out, lay back down, and used my relaxation exercises to help me settle my mind and go to sleep.
I wanted one last night to pretend that she still loved me before she told me to go fuck myself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I ’m in the backseat.
It’s nighttime. It’s raining.
Mom.
Dad.
Me.
Singing along to “Fly Away.”
Rain slamming against the roof of our car. Loud.
Staring out the front windshield. Hard to see. But I know we’re on the road that winds around the lake. The lake where Dad took me fishing last summer.
It’s late. It’s dark. No one’s fishing today.
No one’s driving today. Except us.
And I guess that one other car. We’re the only ones on the road.
“That truck’s driving a little too fast for this weather.”
Headlights coming closer... filling the car with light... too bright...
I woke up gasping, feeling like my heart was going to explode out of my chest.
I knew what scene was coming next and I was thankful that my body woke me up before the vignette could play out. I knew every second by heart anyway. Me, lying on that road, bloody and bruised and not knowing who the hell I was.
This latest nightmare was the first time I’d ever remembered anything before that moment, however.
And I knew it wasn’t just a dream. I knew the vision was real.
But I couldn’t figure out why Katherine would be in the car. She left a month before the accident ever happened, didn’t she? Besides, the woman in the passenger seat had dark hair. Not blonde.
The logical side of my brain was battling with the truth, the truth I was trying to deny. The stomach-churning reality was that I knew that was my mom and dad in my dream.
Thing was, the woman in that car wasn’t Katherine… and the man wasn’t Frederick.
I whipped off my covers and barreled down the hall wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pants and blind fury. I slammed my fist against my father’s door—two sharp booms that echoed throughout the hallway—before tearing into the room.
My father was already on his feet, standing in the middle of his dark bedroom, looking half-asleep and completely baffled. “Luke? What are you doing? It’s one o’—”
“Who are you?”
“What? Are you sleep wal—”
“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?”
His brows tightened in bewilderment. “I’m your father. I’m—”
“My father had gray hair.”
The air left the room as his eyes went wide, staring at me in shock, incomprehension, and something else I couldn’t quite identify. It wasn’t until he sank down onto the couch at the foot of his bed that I was able to put my finger on it:
Guilt.
His eyes met mine in disbelief. “How do you know that?”
He didn’t try to deny it. I had to give him that much. “I had my dream again.” He nodded his head in understanding. He knew which dream I was talking about. “But it started before the accident this time.”
He shook his head at his feet, a beaten man. “Okay. You’re looking for the truth. You’re entitled to it.” He ran a hand over his face and met my eyes before taking a deep breath, coming clean. “I adopted you, Luke. Sixteen years ago.”
“You what?”
“I filed the papers a year after the accident, although I wanted to do it much sooner.”
“But...” I couldn’t verbalize all the questions running through my mind. He wasn’t my real father? How did he know me? Why did he adopt me? What happened to my parents?
“I was driving home from a meeting out in New Jersey. It was raining, just pouring buckets. It was hard to see, and I was on a dark, empty road. And then... lights. Still, unmoving lights. An accident. It must have just happened; there was no one else there. Just a truck turned on its side and a smashed-in car. I pulled over and called nine-one-one from my car phone, then got out to check the damage. The truck driver wasn’t badly hurt, but from the looks of the car, I didn’t think I’d find anyone alive. I wouldn’t know how to help them if I did. I told the truck driver to stay still and couldn’t do anything but wait for the ambulance to get there. And then I saw you.”
That was the part of his story I knew all too well. “Lying in the road.”
“Yes.”
“And you came over to me.”
“Yes.”
“And you called me ‘son.’”
He shook his head at his feet. “I did.”
“So, then what? I blacked out before the ambulance got there.”
“So then the police came and confirmed that your parents...” were dead, he left unsaid. “The ambulance loaded you up, and I went with you to the hospital. I don’t know why. I just saw you there, banged up and bloodied... no family... and I just couldn’t let you go through what was to come on your own. Fifty-eight hours and two surgeries later, you were alive, but just barely. You woke up... and you just... looked at me. I’ll never forget that moment, Luke. You looked at me with fear, but also... recognition. And the first word you said after all those days asleep... You woke up and you looked at me and you asked, ‘Dad?’... and I just melted.”
I had no recollection of the memory, but apparently, it was a big moment for him. “But you weren’t my dad. You didn’t think to correct me?”
“The doctors didn’t think your memory loss was going to be permanent. They told me to just let you think whatever you needed to think for the few days until you could remember on your own.”
“But I never did.”
“No.” He brought his fingers to his head, massaging his temples.
“And all that time in the hospital, you never thought to tell me I wasn’t really yours?”
He dropped his hands and looked at me with a mixture of remorse and awe. “Oh, but you were, Luke. I knew as soon as I saw your face that you were my son. I fought it, though.”
“You fought it?” I had no idea what the hell he was trying to say.
“Why do you think I sent you away to that boarding school? Yes, you needed to catch up with your studies and Wentworth Academy was the best school around. But the real reason was because I needed to separate myself from you. I didn’t want to love you. You weren’t mine to love. As more time went by, I realized... I realized maybe you could be.”
“But why did you keep the truth from me?”
His tone changed from placating to defensive as he lurched to his feet. “You were recuperating! The doctors didn’t want to shoc
k you while you were healing. You assumed I was your father and I let you believe it, thinking you’d remember the truth in a few days’ time. I always planned to tell you the whole story once you started getting your memory back. But you never did! Days turned into weeks. Then months. Then years. After all that time passed, it just seemed pointless to bring it up. By then, you were my son.”
I dropped to the easy chair, too overcome by all the new revelations to stay on my feet as my head dropped into my hands. “Oh God. My parents died!” It was both heart-wrenching and frustrating to mourn the loss of two people I couldn’t even remember.
“Yes. I’m sorry, Luke. I’ve always wanted to be able to tell you how sorry I was that they were gone.”
I’m an orphan. A twenty-eight-year-old orphan. I was able to acknowledge that much, but I was still having some trouble putting the puzzle pieces together. “So all that stuff about my mother—Katherine Warren—you just made up a human for this story?” I’d spent years staring at her picture, wondering why she left, if she’d ever come back to us.
“No. Kate was—Kate was very real. She used to call me Rick,” he said on a sad chuckle. “And as far as I know, she’s very much alive.”
Not that it mattered. The woman I’d believed to be my mother all these years was just some random person from his past. Well, maybe not that random. “You were in love with her.”
“Yes. She was the love of my life. I fell for her almost immediately, but she was married.”
“Wait. She was married?”
“You can’t choose who you love, Luke. We couldn’t fight what we had. Besides, Ken and she were over long before we...” He trailed off before he could finish his thought. Thank God. I didn’t need to hear the details about their fucked-up life. I was still reeling from trying to figure out my own. “She eventually left her husband and two kids behind to be with me.”
I was in shock from the whole conversation, but that last bit put me over the edge. “She had kids?” I asked, stunned and disgusted.
“Yes.” He made his admission not with pride, exactly. More like determination. A willingness to own it. “I loved her. Lord knows I tried not to, but I did.”
If they were so goddamned crazy about each other, then where the hell did she go? “What happened to her?”
“I already told you the truth about that, even if I adjusted the dates. We spent almost four years together until she disappeared.” He looked up at me, his eyes pleading. “In nineteen eighty-eight.”
“Same year I was born.”
“Yes. Unrelated, of course, unless you count the fact that while I was at my most miserable, I had no way of knowing the joy that was awaiting me, that my son was being born. It just took a dozen more years before I could meet him.”
“But you said she left right before the accident.” Then again, I guess he’d said a lot of things that weren’t true.
“She may as well have. The twelve years between her leaving me and me finding you are all a daze. I threw myself into my work. I concentrated on building this house. Aside from that, I didn’t allow myself to think, refused to feel. It’s like I was dead all that time and only came back to life once I found you.”
“So that’s the real reason why you hardly talk about me as a little kid? Why there are hardly any baby pictures of me around the house? Because you didn’t even know me until I was twelve?”
“I’ve made up stories and shielded you from the truth, and for that, I’m so, so sorry. I wasn’t trying to deceive you. The longer it took for you to heal, the more elaborate the stories had to become. I’ve lived in fear of this moment for the past sixteen years.”
His explanation had me firing up all over again, trying to make sense of this whole thing. What the fuck kind of soap opera bullshit was I dealing with here? How was this my life? “So, let me get this straight. If I never had that dream tonight, you would’ve just let me continue living a lie for the rest of my life?”
He slapped a palm to his chest, his eyes beseeching, his voice raw as he bellowed, “I’m not the bad guy here! I’m not the villain! I tried every way I could think of to help you remember on your own. Why do you think I never stopped researching doctors, made you go to new ones all the time?”
As angry as I was, I couldn’t deny that fact. He’d never given up hope that I could get my memory back.
“But how were you able to keep it a secret?” I asked.
He looked at me as if the answer were obvious. “I moved you an entire state away. Who was going to tell you?”
“So you’re saying there wasn’t anyone who knew me anywhere? How is that even possible? Didn’t I have any family? Friends who looked for me?”
“Your parents didn’t have any siblings. You only had one grandmother still alive in a nursing home who didn’t even know who she was much less would she know who you were.”
“I didn’t have any friends?”
“I was told you were a shy kid. Your parents kept to themselves, too.”
My parents. I had a mother and a father who raised me for twelve years... and I didn’t know a single thing about them. “Tell me about them. Anything you know.”
He sank down onto the couch again and clasped his hands. “Your father was an insurance rep in the city. Your mother was a high school English teacher at a private school in Norman, New Jersey. It’s where you grew up.”
“What were their names?”
“Matthew and Janet.”
Matthew and Janet. Matthew, my father. Janet, my mother.
I had a sudden unquenchable thirst to find out every detail about their lives. “What else do you know about them?” I was hoping he would have an entire history to share with me, a culled trove of information to help me understand where I came from.
But instead, his shoulders slumped as he shook his head at his feet.
“You don’t know anything, do you,” I scathed. “You couldn’t even be bothered to find even one person who’d be able to give me their life story? Not one person?”
“I needed to pretend they never existed. It’s what I had to do in order for the two of us to move forward.”
I looked at him, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, I asked, “What was my name?”
He took a deep breath and finally met my eyes. “Lucas Atticus Mason.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
There was only one person in the world I needed right then. The only person who would care enough about me to help me get through this.
Who cared, anyway.
It was close to three in the morning by the time I pulled up in front of Mia’s apartment building. I went to her front door and buzzed, hoping against all hope that she’d answer. It took four tries, but finally, I heard the garbled scratch of her intercom as a sluggish voice asked, “Hello?”
“Mia.” I didn’t say anything more than that. I didn’t know what to say. “Please,” I begged as an afterthought, feeling like my knees were going to give out from under me.
She didn’t respond, and in the excruciating silence that followed, I leaned my forehead against the wall and placed a flat palm against the speaker.
Please.
Finally, without another word, the front door buzzed. I launched myself inside and headed straight for the elevator, cursing the slow trek up to the twentieth floor.
By the time I turned the corner to her apartment, she was standing in the open doorway, her arms crossed against her chest, a scowl on her face. “Luke, it’s the middle of the—”
Her words were cut off as I wrapped my arms around her waist and collapsed into her. I didn’t even realize I was shaking until I felt her hands resting against my shoulders.
The anger left her voice as she asked, “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Luke...” she said, warily. “You’re scaring me.”
I pulled back to look at her, to explain myself. I knew I looked like a beaten man. I didn’t care. “I’m so sorry about ton
ight at the restaurant, about everything before tonight, for not seeing it sooner. You’ve been right in front of me this entire time, and I didn’t...”
Mia’s face was a mask of concern. She seemed confused about my apology, but more focused on my red-rimmed eyes. “Luke...”
“I need you, Mia. And I just...” I knew I was coming off as selfish, but my head was too fucked up right at the moment to care. “I just need to be with someone who gives a shit about me right now, okay?”
Her expression softened as her eyes teared up. “Okay.”
At the sound of that one, capitulating word... I broke. I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in her neck, bawling like a kid who’d just wiped out on his bike. The pain was just as bad. No pride, no ego. Just Mia’s arms around me, smoothing down my back, her soft voice whispering in my ear, “It’s okay, Luke. It’s okay.”
She closed the door behind me, offering some soothing shushes against my hair until I took half a step back to pull myself together. Friend Mia was looking back at me, and I didn’t know if I had the right to ask her to be anything more.
I could barely see her through the blur of tears but maybe it was better that way. I didn’t want to wait for an invitation on her face that I knew wouldn’t be there. Before I could talk myself out of it, I lowered my lips to hers.
She didn’t stop me. She welcomed my invasion, kissing me back, slowly, gently, sweetly as her hands went to the back of my neck. Her lips were soft—softer than I anticipated—I don’t know why I was expecting anything different. I guess maybe because I hadn’t been expecting anything at all.
Her kiss was a cure, draining the questions from my brain and absorbing the pain from my heart. And I took and I took and I took until the ache disappeared from my chest, until the hurt dissolved into the ether.