Broken: The MISTAKEN Series Complete Second Season

by Peak, Renna

  I didn’t know where to begin with him. How to make the hot and cold stop from him for good. I just wasn’t sure if I could take the non-stop mood swings, but whatever this was that he had been hiding—it was big. Big enough that he thought it would ruin us, ruin our relationship. If it was bigger than what Daniel has done, I reasoned, it has to be huge. Why would sharing the fact that he had children be so horrible? Wouldn’t I be the horrible one if I didn’t support him? Didn’t encourage him to be the father he should be?

  I looked down into my coffee cup and tried not to let the sadness take over what had been an almost happy morning. I had been so close to it again—so close to feeling something almost normal. Whole. And then I had to go and remind him of why he had brought me here in the first place. To tell me about the secret he had been hiding for all this time.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  My gaze flicked up to meet his. What was I supposed to say? Maybe I am that shallow girl. Maybe I don’t want to be a step-mother yet. I didn’t even know what I thought about any of this yet, and he wanted to know what I was thinking about? I sucked in a breath and tried not to fall apart. “Do you need more aspirin?”

  He let out a chuckle, more from surprise, I think, than from anything I said being actually funny. “No. Do you?”

  I shrugged. “Probably.” I took a sip from my cup and turned my gaze away.

  He nodded and held his hands around his cup. “I didn’t sleep with those girls. The co-eds. I just wanted you to know that.”

  “Oh.” I turned to meet his gaze again. “I’m not sure I believe you, Brandon. And I don’t care … I mean, I care, but I don’t…” I shook my head. “Fuck it. I don’t know what I think.”

  He nodded again. “I didn’t sleep with them. You’ll have to trust me on that.”

  “Sure. Trust you. Because that seems like the smart thing to do…”

  “Jen, don’t. I’m telling you I didn’t. What do you want from me? A notarized statement?”

  “It would be a start.” I took another sip from my cup before finding the courage to look up into his eyes. “You were bathing them. What am I supposed to think?”

  He shook his head and took a small sip from the cup. He made a face and set the cup down. “I wasn’t bathing them, Jen. I was…” He stopped and looked down at the table.

  “You were what?” I tilted my head, waiting for his response.

  “You’ll think it’s stupid. And it is stupid, but I was drunk and I just wanted to see you yesterday. And then that guy…”

  “Yes, we’ve been over this. My psychiatrist. Ask your sister about it. She’s the one who found him—the shrink to the rich and famous. He makes house calls so we don’t have to worry about the paparazzi taking our photos outside of his office.” I took another sip of the bitter coffee, trying to calm the heartbeat I could hear beginning to pound in my ears. “Not that it matters to you. I mean, a guy. In my apartment. It has to mean I’m sleeping with him, right? Christ…” I shook my head.

  He set his jaw. “Jen, I’ve made it a point over the last few months—and let me be clear, here, I am not on your father’s payroll, so I’m under no obligation…”

  I narrowed my gaze, my body tensing. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  His own gaze narrowed to meet mine. “It means I don’t get paid to keep you safe. But I’m the one who knows where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing … it was the only reason I left you that day. The only reason. Cade should have known better.”

  “You are unbelievable, you know that?” I shook my head, heat rushing through my body. “I never asked you for anything. You don’t owe me anything, but I’m sure if you want to be hired on as a backup bodyguard…”

  “Your father would have no part of it.”

  “Of course, he wouldn’t. He’s at the top of your revenge list.” Every muscle in my body began to quiver with the rage I was feeling in my gut.

  “I don’t have a ‘revenge list,’ Jen. And if I did, his name wouldn’t be the one on top.”

  “Right, because you don’t blame him for your parents’…” I had to stop myself, remembering the woman in the bar. How was I supposed to know if what she said was true or not? For all I knew, that was just another secret he’d been hiding. “Your father’s death.”

  He pulled my hand into his and squeezed it. “My parents, Jen. Both of them. And I do blame him.” His eyes pierced into mine and he squeezed my hand again. “But I don’t blame you. Okay?”

  I was such a mix of emotions that I didn’t even know what I was feeling. The fact that a single touch from him still sent a jolt of electricity up my arm and through my entire body should have told me that it didn’t matter what any of the other emotions were.

  The only thing I knew for sure—with absolute certainty—was that I still loved him. That I loved him and always would. It didn’t matter how angry I was about the girls in his apartment, or the secrets he still kept from me. It only mattered that I loved him and that he made me whole. None of the rest of it mattered.

  6

  “Take a left here. Then take a right at the next street.”

  Brandon had been silent for most of the trip. He had deflected every question I had asked about these kids—he wouldn’t even tell me how old they were, their names. Nothing. He just answered every question with, “Just trust me,” or, “You’ll understand when we get there.” Unless these “kids” weren’t children at all, I wasn’t sure how I could trust him. Or even how he expected me to.

  We pulled up outside a small, white house in a middle class area of Sacramento. Not too fancy, but definitely not run-down, either.

  He scraped his hand through his hair and looked out the window, still not saying a word. I could see just from the constant bouncing of his knee that he was as nervous as I had ever seen him. I just wanted him to tell me what the hell was going on—let me in on whatever this was. What it was that was so important to him, he was willing to risk the two of us being together by showing it to me.

  I got out of the car first and waited for him to exit the passenger side. He sat there for a long moment, staring at the front door of the house. It almost looked like he was willing whomever lived there to never come out—to ignore the fact that he was there.

  He finally got out, grabbing the sacks of toys from the back seat.

  I followed him to the door, and before we even got to the steps, two small children tore out of the house, slamming the screen door behind them.

  “Brandon!” Two blonde children attacked him, one on each leg. They were young, probably no more than two or three.

  He grabbed both of them in an embrace, both still attached to each leg. “Hey, guys.” He looked up at me. “This is Jen.”

  The little boy looked up at me. “Hi, Jen.”

  I smiled. “Hi.” He looked nothing like Brandon. Nothing at all, with his blonde hair and dark brown eyes. A memory flashed through my mind, one from middle school biology. Something about recessive and dominant genes. I was sure that dark hair was dominant. Blue eyes were recessive—I definitely remembered that. It just seemed really unlikely that these were his children, considering they looked nothing like him at all. These kids couldn’t be blonde if they were his. Maybe.

  And they called him Brandon. Not Dad. That was weird.

  The little girl looked almost identical to the boy, and I knew they had to be twins. He had a son and a daughter, and both of them called him Brandon. Not Dad. It was hard to wrap my mind around.

  A woman came to stand in the doorway. She was thin—too thin, and almost skeleton-like. Barely a skeleton with some skin stretched over it. It looked like she may have been attractive at some point in her life, but now… not at all. She looked quite a bit older than me, and probably older than Brandon, too. I gazed at her and wondered if this was really a woman that Brandon found attractive. If he had fathered two children with her because he had found something about her appealing.

  “You r
eally need to stop bringing them so much stuff, Brandon.” Something about her voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place what it was. I saw her tilt her head and look in my direction for a long moment. “Jenna?”

  I looked up at her again. I didn’t recognize her and assumed she must recognize me from the magazines or from TV. It happened a lot these days, which I still didn’t love. I probably would never love it, but I was at least becoming a little used to it.

  I forced a smile, my prim, phony smile that I knew Brandon hated so much. “Hello. Nice to meet you.”

  “God, it’s been like, forever. I heard about the stuff with your dad. You should come in.”

  It’s been like, forever? There was definitely something familiar about her voice, but definitely not familiar about the way she looked.

  She smiled, and it looked like her skin might break off her face, it stretched so tightly across her bones. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  I looked at her again, tilting my head to get a better look. I didn’t recognize her—I went through the mental rolodex of people I knew in my head who were that age. Krystal was the only woman I could think of in that age range who would know me well enough to call me by my first name. There had to be a mistake. There was no way I knew this woman.

  I glanced over at Brandon, suddenly remembering why we were here in the first place. He was sitting on the grass with the kids, going through their bags with them, and showing them all their new toys. I could see how much he loved them, just seeing him sitting there playing with them. He might have been an absent father, but he seemed like he genuinely loved them.

  I looked back at the woman, who was still smiling, beckoning me to come inside.

  She shook her head. “Jenna, you seriously don’t remember me? It’s me, Polly.”

  I felt my heart race in my chest and I had to take a step back, my knees suddenly quivering. Polly Edwards. Pauline. The girl I went to high school with. She wasn’t years older than me—she was a year younger. What the hell had happened to her to have her age like this? I looked back over at Brandon, who was watching me with a look I had never seen before. His shoulders slumped and his eyes were… wet. Dull. This was sorrow. Whatever it was that had happened to Polly, he blamed himself. I could see it written all over him.

  * * *

  My dislike of children was world-renowned. I had never made a big deal about it, but me and kids? Not so much. These two, Hannah and George, though, they weren’t so bad. The fact that they were Polly’s made me indebted to them and I always tried to do what I could for them. She had only regained custody of them last year, and considering the reason she lost them in the first place could definitely be considered my fault … buying them toys was the least I could do. Buying them this house didn’t even come close to covering what I had done to her. I was glad I had the means to do it, though not that she had asked. I had insisted.

  I should have told Jen about her, about what I had done. How I had broken Polly so many years ago and caused her to become that woman—the hollow and broken shell of woman who could barely survive on her own. I had been the cause of her poor decisions. Hell, I had caused her father to commit suicide all those years ago, so anything that happened now was my responsibility.

  Jen talked about my “revenge list.” If she only knew. It wasn’t so much a list anymore, though. I had exacted my revenge against enough of the people I blamed for what had happened in my life—to my father—that I didn’t really need to hurt anyone else. There was her father, of course, but he wasn’t even at the top anymore. He wasn’t even second on the list. There were other people I needed to hurt before this was done, and while Senator Davis wasn’t going anywhere on my “list,” I knew there were other people who would be receiving my … attention before long. Before her father would, anyway.

  Daniel was near the top of my list now, not that she needed to know it. He had hurt her, and I would make sure he suffered for that. Death was too easy for a man like him—a man who would harm the woman I loved. I wanted his to be a slow and painful burn, one where he regretted being alive for the rest of his days. But I would take care of him later.

  There were others who were even more responsible, people Jen had no awareness of. People I never wanted her to know about. At least I didn’t want her to know to what extent they were involved in anything going on in her life. Or mine. I could fix this. I could fix all of it—that was what I did, for the love of God. I fixed things. And what had happened between us, all the misunderstandings, the overreactions… I could fix it all.

  I watched the two women walk into the house and I handed each of the kids another toy from the bag. I knew that when Jen came out, she would either forgive me and we could move on, or she wouldn’t be able to look at me. And I didn’t know what I was going to do if it was the latter.

  7

  I stood at the window, watching Brandon play with the children in the yard. My throat felt tight and the aching in my chest made it difficult to breathe. I’m not even sure what it was I was feeling when I saw the three of them together—some mix of hurt and jealousy, probably. He could have told me about them. I wouldn’t have run—I was sure of that.

  “Can I get you something? Tea? I don’t have coffee, sorry. Makes me too jittery.”

  I glanced over at the woman who had taken a seat on the sofa near the window. I felt a pang in my chest when I thought about what must have happened to her. How she had come to be this … skeleton, if that was even what she was. It had to be from drugs. I had seen the same this-is-what-happens-when-you-do-drugs movies as everyone else—and she could have been a star. Polly Edwards being a meth-head didn’t surprise me that much, given what I knew about her past.

  She motioned to the chair across from her with her hand, a tight smile on her face. “Sit down.”

  I flicked my gaze over her again before sitting down to face her. The pity on my face must have shown.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me, Jenna. It hasn’t been all bad. Those kids…” She motioned toward the window with her hand. “Those kids saved my life. I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t had them.”

  I nodded and looked out the window again. I watched for a moment as Brandon took out the bottle of bubbles and began blowing them into the wind. The little girl and boy were having the time of their lives chasing after them, and the look on his face … contentment. He loved them. I knew in my heart he should be with them.

  “I was sorry to hear about your fiancé. I can only imagine how difficult that must have been.”

  I turned my gaze to hers. She didn’t know about Daniel—no one did. For all the world knew, he was still dead and I was still a near-widow. “Thanks. I…”

  “You don’t have to apologize about what happened. You weren’t the only one who didn’t call after my father died.”

  I hadn’t been about to apologize, but I knew what she meant. After everything happened with her father—no one wanted anything to do with the Edwards family. The stigma they carried was so noxious, no one wanted anything to do with them. Nothing that her father had done was her fault—I knew that. I should have been the first person to realize that, if only because of all the things my own father had done.

  “He never forgave himself.” She nodded toward the window. “Brandon. No matter what happens to me, he needs to forgive himself.”

  I nodded, even though I had no idea what she was talking about. I remembered Krystal telling me that he’d had a hand in her father’s downfall, in exposing him for the things he had done. But I was honestly so oblivious to what had gone on back then, that I really had no idea what it was that he could blame himself for. Her father had taken bribes—lots of them. And not just small ones. He had taken huge bribes and almost flaunted the fact that he was able to get away with it. If Brandon hadn’t been the one to expose him, someone else would have.

  “Did he tell you about any of it? I mean, that’s why he brought you here, right?”

  My stomach churned. “I
think he just wanted me to know about the kids.”

  She smiled and I noticed her missing teeth. Her face was so weathered, as though she had spent years working outside in the sun and time had not been kind to her at all. But she was a year younger than me, twenty-three at most. “He told you that they were his?”

  I knew she didn’t want my pity, but it was hard not to feel it for her. My insides were quivering with this line of conversation, though. I didn’t need to hear about his past relationships. I knew he didn’t want to share that information with me and it was fine, because I didn’t want or need to hear it. “Aren’t they?”

  She chuckled and took a sip from the mug of tea she held in her hand. “No. They’re not his. He just takes care of them like they are.”

  It didn’t make sense to me. Why would he care for another man’s children? Why would he feel responsible for them? I knew I would never get those answers from him, even if I asked. That wasn’t the type of information he would share with me, not in a million years. “Why? I mean … why?”

  The smile fell from her face and she set the mug down on the small coffee table separating us. She looked out the window before she looked back at me. “Do you remember high school?”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

  She stared down at the floor. “It could have been you, you know. He could have targeted your father and not mine…”

  So that was what she wanted me to remember? That our fathers were close friends at one time? “Polly, I know what you went through was horrible, and I can’t even imagine…” I paused, trying to decide how to best put my thoughts into words without hurting her feelings or bringing up my own memories of the type of person she had been in high school. “But my father wasn’t…”

  “Your father was. It just wasn’t as obvious.” She looked up to meet my gaze. “Do you remember the trips we used to take? There was one to France, one to Bermuda…”