Red Card

by Liz Crowe

Trevor sat up straight, his large presence soothing and irritating her all at once. He raised an eyebrow, sipped his tea, and let the silence gather force between them.

  “No, Melanie. When your mother died, I gave you Alicia to raise because it was all I could do to get out of bed every morning, go to work, come home, eat, and go to bed without driving my car off the Ambassador Bridge.” He leaned in, pinning her with his gaze. “I’m not kidding you, Melanie. I lost it. I tried to never let you see me as anything but your father, the provider. But I was not your father, the caregiver, after that, for you or your sister, and for that I am very sorry.”

  “You ruined me for men, you know. What man loves his wife that much, I mean?” She shook her head, the file on the table in front of her laying there like an omen, or…a ticket to a new life.

  “Most of them do. You got hold of one of the shitty ones, and I wish I’d gone with my instincts and tried harder to keep you from him. But it’s one of the reasons I’m telling you now to lighten up on Metin. Whether it’s his culture or personality or both, he wears his heart on his sleeve, and now it’s shredded.”

  She pressed her lips together, not willing to give an inch, but not wanting to be disrespectful to her father. “Fine. Like I said, we’re done with him. I don’t care what happens to him as long as… as….”

  A bright image flashed in her brain, one of Metin, the moment he’d walked into the kitchen and heard the life-shattering news. His admittedly handsome face had held such indescribable horror, it was borderline obscene. She would never forget it. “He’ll be fine,” she said, her voice hoarse and her nose throbbing again. “Are you going…?”

  “Yes, I told his brother I’d meet them at the airport. They’re leaving tomorrow, after he gets processed out of jail. Poor kid. You probably did not need to call the cops, you know. We could have handled….”

  “Spare me. He was out of control. Shit, he nearly broke my nose, Dad, in case you forgot.” She frowned, wanting him firmly in her corner. “That kind of scene was so….”

  “Inevitable?” Her father glared at her. “You guys clashed from day one, and your coming at him that terrible day, yelling that he had to go if he was going to show up drunk, did not help.”

  “Unnecessary was the word I wanted to use.” She picked up the file, huffy, done talking about the funeral and its embarrassing aftermath.

  “You are as hard as nails sometimes,” he said, standing and slipping out of his suit coat.

  She smiled. She hardly remembered days when he did not seem to appear out of thin air, fully dressed and ready to work, tie knotted, watch on, expensive pen in his suit pocket, hair in place, shoes shined. It comforted her, more than she wanted to admit, the sameness of it—the reliability she craved out of everything she did but couldn’t manage to find. Maybe putting her in control of her destiny was the only way of helping her.

  “But I love you.” He kissed her hair then walked up the staircase, his gait slow, his shoulders slumped. “You sure you don’t want to come with me? Get some closure with him?” he called out.

  For a split second she considered it. It would be the adult thing to do, to see him off, put a lid on the whole messy jar that had been her connection with the man.

  “No, thanks,” she said, finally. “I probably won’t be of much help.”

  Chapter Two

  A near instant hit, Ayden’s Café moved past the honeymoon first year into a second with rave reviews among townies and college people alike. Mel ran her business with a firm hand, making her son Zach work, bussing tables every weekend he didn’t have soccer commitments and having Tanner spend afternoons after school, wrapping silverware in napkins and marrying condiment bottles.

  “This is our business, guys. You gotta learn it now so you can run it for me someday.”

  Tanner, her sweet little boy, now a rambunctious pre-teen, never complained and even asked for more tasks. Zach despised it, making no secret of the fact that his soccer-playing career and his social life had been eviscerated by his mother’s “new project” that uprooted them to the college town west of Detroit. They had not spoken much beyond the basics for nearly the entire time they’d lived there. He still kept some of his clothes in boxes in his room and spent the entire first summer there furiously filling out college applications to places as far from Michigan as he could get.

  “How will I pay for this?” she demanded, watching as he hit send for schools in Florida, Colorado, and California.

  “Scholarships, Mom. You’ve talked to the coaches already, or are you too busy serving eggs to everyone in town but us to remember? I sent them all schedules for this last season coming up, and DVDs of my old team. Don’t worry. I handled it. You don’t have to do anything.”

  Lately, she’d been too exhausted to even take his bait. They fought a lot less than they used to, but mainly because she didn’t have any response to him anymore. Another photo caught her eye, one of him in his soccer uniform, leg drawn back ready to score a goal. His dark blond hair and blue eyes his father’s, but the attitude and stubbornness all hers.

  Tanner worshipped his older brother and always had. And Zach put up with it, but was even withdrawing from him now. She tried not to have a favorite. But god help her, Zachary was impossible and had been since, well, almost his whole life. Tanner was so much less intense, so calm, accommodating, and never unwilling to give her a hug. She had not felt her older son’s arms around her since he was ten years old.

  She sat in the small office, a cluttered space in a single room over the café, and ran her finger down the photo of her and her sister. Alicia had been girl-next-door pretty. Blonde, athletic, funny, easygoing, so comfortable in her own skin, which drove Mel mad with jealousy for years even while doing all the caretaker stuff for her—breakfasts, lunches, dinners, driving her to soccer practices until she thought her car could drive the route on its own.

  Mel had never felt pretty although she was told it enough. She simply considered herself Alicia’s eternal caretaker. So when she’d looked up from her part-time job at the bank all those years ago, to find Scott Miller, manager of private banking, staring at her as if she were a mirage, something had clicked inside her head. Something stupid, she now realized, and something she’d never heed again. It wasn’t love; it was need. Her need to be loved. Her desire to be something other than “Alicia’s sister.”

  When that playboy asshole had swooped into their lives, messing up Alicia’s priorities and whisking her far away, Mel had been not only jealous all over again, but pissed. She’d truly missed her sister the years she spent gallivanting around the world, getting her picture taken as the pretty new wife of Metin Sevim, mother of his adorable little boy. A sob broke from her at the thought of Ayden—he had been amazing, perfect. And he was gone, along with her sister, because they had to go out and get a stupid coffee drink that morning for the soccer star.

  Face flushed, she fixated on her laptop screen. The bustle of energy all around her faded. The world reduced to a pinprick of light centered on the silly device that seemed almost superfluous there, amongst the coffee and toast-scented new reality of her life. The email she’d been reading over and over for the last few hours now seared into her retinas.

  “Hey, Mel!” One of the servers snapped fingers in front of her eyes. “You’ve got a visitor.”

  “Oh, um, thanks.” She shut the computer, heart pounding so hard it hurt. She’d gotten the message loud and clear. Someone was trying to find Metin, and for reasons that totally escaped her, had asked for her assistance. But she refused to respond. As far as she was concerned, that man had moved out of her life forever and thank god for that. Just seeing his name in an email made her eyes burn with anger and loss.

  Noting out of the corner of her eye tables three and seven had empty coffee cups and reminding herself to stop hiring college kids as servers, she smiled at some regulars, waved to another and made her way to the front of the café. Her back ached and her feet were sore. Her mind spun
with budgets, staffing, and food-ordering dramas. But she had never been happier. Until that morning, of course, when a total stranger sent her an email and ripped off the never-quite-healed scab over the memory of her sister and nephew.

  One of the bartenders shouted her name. She stopped to solve his problem, then turned and came face to face with the tall, be-suited form of a very handsome man. At his side stood another good-looking guy, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a poker chip and two playing cards, the letters BJG embroidered above it. She sucked in a breath. Ignoring the email this man had sent her the night before was apparently no longer possible.

  The suit stuck out a hand. “Hi, Melanie Matthews, right? I’m Jack, Jack Gordon. I sent you an email yesterday.”

  She froze. Her brain fogged over with anger that he dared to come into her café and confront her this way, she made a show of not taking his outstretched palm. Lifting her chin and crossing her arms, Mel studied his face, silently demanding an explanation. Jack kept his gaze neutral.

  “Melanie, I’m Rafael Inez. I played with your brother-in-law once. And I followed his career. So please let me say how sorry….”

  She held up a hand. “Spare me. What do you want?” She hated the sound of her voice, but these guys were dragging the whole nightmare of her loss out into the light of day, and forcing her to take a long, deep sniff of its stink. She had no time or desire to do that, much less discuss the man she blamed for it all.

  “Can we sit, talk?” Rafe asked.

  She glared at his too-hot-for-his-own-good face.

  “No. Sorry.” Wincing at her bitchiness, she said, “I’m busy. Tell me what you need.”

  “We need to get in touch with him, with Metin. His agent dropped him, as you probably know, and his parents won’t respond to our requests. I just thought….” Rafael shrugged.

  “I don’t know where he is. You can go now.” She took another step away from them.

  “Listen, I realize this must be hard for you, but we only want to talk to him about a job.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me what you want him for. I don’t know where he is, nor do I care.”

  Rafe gestured toward the picture she had on the wall above the front window, of her sister with Ayden. The photo had been taken—by Metin, no doubt—as they sat on his parents’ veranda. The European side of Istanbul spread out in panorama behind them. The boy’s eyes were alight as he stared up at his mother. And Alicia was radiant, as always. They were forever frozen for Mel that way, and she sent up a small prayer of forgiveness to them both every day. Letting that visual cancel the two that remained lodged in her brain, how they’d looked the last time she’d seen them both.

  “Listen, Melanie, you really are our last hope for this. You honor your sister’s memory every day, and her son’s every time you open your doors here. I’m not asking you to do anything more than that. Alicia would not want his talent wasted, like he’s done for the last two years, and you know it. We want him to come help us run the Detroit soccer team, to offer him a shot at something new. That’s all.”

  She wrestled with familiar demons, keeping her face calm the entire time. On the one hand, her sister would hate her for being so aloof, for refusing to speak to Metin, or his parents, whom Mel really liked, for so long. She knew damn good and well that withdrawing from him completely, taking her sons and father with her, had sent the man even deeper into despair. But she was only protecting herself.

  “Last I heard, he was in his condo in Madrid,” she ground out, hating that she even cared enough to lie. “Hiding and drinking and whoring and whatever else.”

  “He isn’t there. We were sort of hoping….” Rafe ran a hand through his hair.

  Fury replaced the tiny bit of remorse she’d allowed herself in a split second. “You honestly think I am going to reach out to the man? After all this time and what he did… to my… I mean….” She averted her eyes, tears threatening. This was her life, her business, and she had no intention of doing anything to upset it by yanking that man back into it.

  “Melanie.” Jack’s deep voice startled her. She swiped her eyes, glaring at them both. “I know this sounds like all kinds of sneaky and unfair, but I think even you would admit that it’s time for him to move on, to have a life. You’ve got one, I see, and a really successful one at that.” He gestured at the busy café around them. “We want him to coach our new expansion team. We’re building a new stadium, have already recruited players and….”

  She laughed, an ugly sound. “You honestly think I give a shit about your soccer team, Jack?” She took a breath. “Okay, I think I still have his private cell number. I’ll call him and let him know you’re hunting for him.”

  “Um, actually….” Rafe smiled at her again.

  “Stop using the puppy dog eyes, Rafael. I’m immune. Spit it out.”

  “We were hoping you would go see him, in person.”

  She tried not to curse at them. “You are insane. No. No way. Now, can I get you guys some coffee, or breakfast? I need to get back to work.”

  Jack shot her a dazzling smile, blinding her for a split second with his perfection.

  She shook her head. “You must get into all kinds of trouble with the ladies.”

  “Nah, not anymore.” He matched her stance, crossing his arms and shifting his weight to one leg. “Gave it all up for someone special and three kids. Listen, I know this is hard, and I’m sorry we have to make you dredge all of it up, but….”

  “We will pay your way to Madrid, or Istanbul, wherever he’s holed up. Honestly, I think the only thing that would drag him back to the land of the living, and make him willing to consider our offer, is to hear from you,” Rafe interjected.

  “You don’t know us very well, do you?”

  “All I know is what I’ve heard other people say about him in the last eighteen months or so. People very close to him, including his ex-agent and one of his brothers, who did agree to talk with me once.”

  Mel raised an eyebrow, readying for the Melanie-is-a-raving-bitch stories.

  “So the rumors are that he misses the connection with Alicia’s family. He’s hurt that you won’t talk to him anymore. And, of course, his career went into the shitter thanks to….”

  “He’s a drunk, washed up, former playboy who stole my sister and then got her killed.” The sheer irrationality of what she said hardly registered. Her eyes blurred with tears. “Now get out, unless you’re gonna eat.”

  She spun away from them, pushing her way past a couple of servers. Running upstairs, she slammed the office door behind her before sliding to the floor and sobbing as if it had been only yesterday she’d seen her nephew’s ruined body and had to watch her sister die.

  Finally, the tears dried up, and she sat at her desk, staring at the photo of her and Alicia at her sister’s wedding. She had so many years of bizarre resentment and fierce, protective love built up in her. Alicia had been her father’s favorite from the moment she’d shown her tomboy tendencies and he’d slapped her into a pair of soccer cleats. Her mother had enabled Melanie’s girliness—the obnoxious pink bedroom, the closet full of clothes, the dance lessons—for as long as she could. But it did not take long for Cathy Matthews to go from completely organized and in-charge, to limp with pain, and finally comatose in order to avoid it.

  Mel put her head down, trying to drag a mental picture of her mother out from under all the years without her.

  She had stepped up and handled Alicia’s life, and she did know how hard her father worked not to show his desperate grief. Mel’s life as pseudo-mom to her sister had not felt like a burden, until she’d had her own life blown apart by stupid choices once Alicia had been old enough to be on her own.

  The visceral distaste she still had for Alicia’s husband could probably be chalked up to pure jealousy that her sister found someone so much like their father in his devotion to her. It was easier for her to blame Metin, to lash out when they were around. And she’d alienated them bo
th with her behavior.

  She put her head on the desk, willing to have it all back for another chance to talk to Alicia, to tell her she didn’t mean to be unsupportive of her choice to be a mom and wife, to give up one dream for another. Hell, she’d even tolerate that sappy Turk for the chance to see Alicia again, to hold her nephew on her lap once more.

  Tears burned her face as familiar anger rushed in behind sadness. She practically heard her sister now, her infernal, unreasonable devotion to the man who’d seduced her and knocked her up, as clear as if the woman were alive and standing beside her in the small office. Mel, you have to help him. He’s part of us now. And he needs us. Please….

  The last information she’d gotten from Metin’s mother, who kept in touch for reasons that were beyond her, but that Mel anticipated in some strange perversion of logic, rose to the front of her brain. Metin had disappeared into a bottle, but in Turkey, not Spain, and would not emerge. They were worried, terrified, resigned. So yeah, she knew exactly where he was, damn it.

  “Shit.” Wiping her eyes, she strode out to where the two men sat with platefuls of food and huge mugs of coffee in front of them. “I know he’s not in Madrid. He’s in some flat by himself in Istanbul, his mother told me last week. I’ll go talk to him. But if I help you get him back here,” she poked a finger into Rafe’s shoulder, “you have to help my son play soccer in college. It’s all he has ever wanted, for reasons that escape me. And he won’t talk to me about it anymore. That’s my deal.”

  Rafael stood, put out a hand for her to shake, pinning her with his dark eyes. “Thank you, Melanie. Give me your son’s phone number. I’ll call him today so we can formulate a plan.”

  Jack sat, smiling at her. She walked away from them without another word lest she give in to the urge to punch them both in the face for dragging Metin Sevim back into her life.

  Chapter Three

  The plane trip was long, boring, and awful. She’d left her boys behind, one tearful and begging to come with her, the other barely acknowledging her words other than to ask why their grandfather had to “babysit” them.