I’d never seen her around my aunt Jo obviously, but she knew her, her small fingers running over the photograph.
“That’s me,” I told her, watching her. “My aunt Jo and me when I was a kid.”
I couldn’t have been much older than her. In fact, I knew I couldn’t have been, only a few summers spent at this place.
Laura’s small fingers travelled down the photograph and when her hand stopped on my aunt, curling on the worn paper, I questioned whether or not I should continue to let her study the photo. Laura had a lot of pain, only a snapshot of which I’d gathered from her dad. He said she’d taken my aunt’s death very hard, closed off into herself worse than she’d been.
“Laura?”
She didn’t look up at me and the silence sent a tremor into my heart.
My hand smoothing down her shoulder, she leaned into me, her face buried into my side.
“Why did she leave?” came suddenly, her eyes closing and I cupped her cheek, a few tears falling down my fingertips. I didn’t know what to say to her, not good at these things.
I’d never been… good with children. I hadn’t been until her.
“She really didn’t,” I told her, hoping, praying for the right words. Her tear-stained eyes looked up at me and I smiled at her, that salty trail underneath the pad of my fingers.
“She’s with you, Laura. In your heart. She never left.”
She’d heard about the afterlife in church and I knew she was aware of the concepts, but still, she was so very young.
Her tiny throat jumped before her words.
“But I miss her,” she cried a little, blinking down tears. “I miss her so much.”
“And she misses you, but she sees you. I know she sees you every day.”
She hugged me after that. She hugged me so hard and I didn’t want to let go of her either. My aunt was with her.
She was with both of us.
I told her as such and she nodded, her tears eventually falling away. Her arms moving around my waist, she breathed into me, closing her eyes.
“She sent me you,” she said before she fell asleep, and this time, it was my turn to cry. I knew she meant what she said, and in my heart, I think I knew she was right.
I let her sleep as long as I felt she should before daring to move. I needed to call her dad. She’d been there too long with me.
Easing from underneath her, I replaced myself with a pillow, covering her with a blanket before heading into the kitchen. After getting my phone my first thought was to call Gray, but the amount of missed calls on my cell struck an alarm through me. They weren’t from Gray.
But from Bastian.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Alicia
“Alicia… This is very important. Is Grayden near you?”
He had no right to ask this question. He had no right to ask me anything for that matter, but this particular question was more than off-limits. I’d been very firm where we left things as far as our relationship was concerned. I’d told him the truth for the first time since we developed a relationship together surrounding what I wanted. I told him my wants and they didn’t include him.
Forcing myself to calm down, I gripped the phone. I only answered because he called me so many times.
“I think I need to hang up now,” I told him, the certainty of that decision more than clear. “You don’t get to ask about Grayden and me.”
“Alicia, this isn’t some—” His voice severed into whatever room he was in and he forced a breath into the receiver. “This isn’t some jealous phone call from your raging ex. I told you when I’d been there I was at peace with your decision.”
In fact he’d been chillingly “at peace,” which only confirmed I’d made the right one. He’d been ready to leave, move on if there’d been nothing for him with me. I guess I hadn’t been surprised after finding out he’d had affairs behind my back as well if you could even call them that. Two people had to be in an actual committed relationship to cheat on one other.
We were just two people going slow.
He didn’t wait for me to come back onto the line before he breathed into the phone again.
“Now, I’m going to repeat my question. Is Grayden with you? This isn’t some invasive question. I need to know because the information concerns your well-being.”
Whatever bullshit he was spinning I wasn’t buying, but the fact he’d called me so many times...
And now the seriousness in his voice.
My jaw moved a little, my legs crossing after I took a slow seat at the kitchen table. I could see Laura from here on the couch, still sleeping where I left her.
“What is this?” I asked, panning away and he asked me next if I had my laptop. I did, working on it just that morning before church.
I entertained at least that part of his call, but only for convenience. He didn’t ask about Grayden again, but I assumed he believed he wasn’t around because I made no maneuvers to silence my voice or shuffle from the room. Maybe in the end, he just didn’t care because of whatever urgent thing he needed to tell me.
“I need you to open your email,” he said, the tick in his voice gone and now replaced with a semblance of ease. “I’ve sent you something and I want you to look at it.”
I brought up my account, logging in as I let Laura play on my laptop sometimes. I didn’t mind her being on it but I often did have important correspondence there an eight-year-old could easily get into.
Pressing the phone to my ear, I crossed my legs.
“Okay, it’s open.”
“Good. Do you see my email? I sent you two links.”
I had already clicked on the message when he said the words, the two links he referred to there in a no-subject email.
“I’m going to start with I don’t feel like I owe you anything, Alicia. But we had a good run and… I couldn’t in good faith leave things and you in a situation in which I feel could be detrimental to you and your well-being. I don’t think you know Grayden like you feel you do. You couldn’t possibly.”
His accusations of whatever this was he felt he knew about Grayden and me had me pushing my hand off the keys again.
“You’re tiptoeing a line, Bastian.”
“Well, watch me leap over it,” he said, being real. “I need you to open the first link I just sent you. Don’t argue. Just do it.”
The fact he was commanding me didn’t sit well with me. He had a lot of power in our relationship, the majority of the time he took advantage of. Those days were no more, but this, him coming at me with all this noise was even odd for him. Bastian wasn’t the type of man to raise his voice or even hell to get people to do what he wanted. He simply would just be and people understood that and what it meant. I had been one of those people, but I couldn’t ignore all this noise he was in fact sending my way.
My finger smoothing over my trackpad, I pushed the cursor in the direction of the first link.
“I knew I saw his face before,” was all he said and I clicked the link, a New York Times online article coming up.
“Dalton © Founder Liquidates Assets.”
My gaze skimmed over the headline, Bastian speaking before I could travel further down.
“You’re seeing an article about the manufacturing company Dalton. Have you heard of it?”
I had, though I’d had no dealings with them. My firm often handled clients who constructed major properties, hotels being one of them. That’s how I met Bastian in a hotel construction and companies like Dalton supplied the raw materials for the construction. The company based in New York City, I had no direct dealings with them, as my firm was based in Chicago.
“Of course,” I told him. “Though, I’ve never worked with them.”
“Well, I have,” Bastian went on. “They provided supplies for a few of my hotels on the east coast, but after the scandal, we promptly pulled out and went with another vendor.”
“Scandal?”
He, “Mmhmm’ed” into the line. �
��The article I sent you talks about the CEO. He went MIA about three years ago. Liquidated his assets and everything. The fucker even sold off his shares, then went off the grid. Sent the stock market into a tailspin for months.”
“Okay, where did he go?”
His silence poked raised flesh along my skin and I moved forward, my gaze finding Laura. She still slept peacefully, undisturbed with the pillow under her head.
“The only evidence of him was what he did with his assets. The fucker sold everything off, little by little until there was nothing left. No one knew why until fraud turned up in his company, embezzlement behind his back, and I guess the man got out before things got hot. Smart, but still a surprise. He probably could have stuck around and worked it out with the support he had. Regardless, that’s what he ended up doing with the money, but Davenport himself, no one really knew what was going on with him for another year or so.”
He said a lot, made me absorb a lot, but one thing stood out in particular to what he said, one name.
“Davenport?” The name left my voice in a whisper and all Bastian told me to do was scroll down. There’d been a photo accompanying the article I never got to read, the piece explained to me, and had I actually read it I would have seen it.
I would have seen Gray.
He donned a suit, a handsome smile on his face while he stared seemly into the light with his hands together. He’d been fashioned to pose this way, a promotional photo of sorts with his hair smoothed back and his face clean-shaven. The photo in color, no gray resided in streaks of his dark, almost raven-colored locks and something else I noticed, no age was under those bright eyes.
I had no idea why a picture of him was tagged to the byline of this article.
It didn’t make sense at all.
“That’s Grayden, Alicia,” Bastian said in my ear like he knew the exact moment I saw him, figured it out. “That’s Grayden Davenport, former CEO of Dalton Inc.”
My head shook involuntarily, my thoughts trying to catch up with his words and the vision in front of my eyes. No, Grayden wasn’t a former CEO.
No, Grayden wasn’t one of the richest men in America.
Grayden was a handyman, my Grayden was just Grayden.
My chest reeled in shock, my stomach pummeled. Speech wasn’t possible and breathing even questionable.
“Alicia, it is him,” Bastian went on, once again like he knew, he knew I couldn’t speak. “I actually met him albeit briefly. His people never really let anyone near him and even our business dealings had been through third parties. I only came across him at a party we both attended in the Hamptons. He’d been drunk off his ass then and not really company I tend to keep.”
My head was in my hands, my hair falling around my arms. We weren’t talking about the same Gray. Gray didn’t drink. Gray didn’t party. He hated parties, a social pariah.
My vision took the image again, this man really not Grayden. He didn’t have the weight of the world in his eyes, his face so much younger in this photo. It was only things here and there I could make out like his distinguished jawline.
And a smile that could easily capture hearts.
Other than those things this was a different person and completely different than the things Bastian said.
“I don’t understand,” I kept saying over and over. My hand to the monitor, I touched him, the warm heat from the screen under the pads of my fingers.
“What happened to you?”
My words went out to Gray, the man on the screen before me, but Bastian answered, his voice low in the phone.
“Click on the second link,” he said, and though shaking, I did. Another online article popped up but on the New York Police Department’s website. No picture accompanied this, but documentation was present. There was a warrant there.
It called for the arrest of a one “Grayden Davenport.”
My eyes skimmed, looking for the charges, but Bastian, on his game, gave me that one too. He said it right away and, again, gave my brain no time to catch up.
Nor try to hide the smugness in his voice.
“Kidnapping,” he said. “Kidnapping of his own kid.”
Chapter Thirty
Gray
A timid knock hit my door and I calmed only a little.
It has to be her.
But it wasn’t my daughter. It was Alicia, the drips of a steady rain around her as the raindrops hit her red umbrella and fell to the near-flooding ground. In the distance, her rental car sat but it wasn’t running nor was there a familiar face in the front seat.
My phone fell from my ear, the woman I’d been calling nonstop standing before me. She hadn’t answered one of my calls, and my truck keys in hand, I’d been in the process of heading over to her house.
I dipped into the storm. “Alicia.”
The sight of her told of my need for her, her mere presence like a way to recapture air.
“She’s missing,” I told her, blinking around raindrops. “Laura’s missing. I can’t find her. I…”
The words accompanied a sickness, which chased itself up my throat and I wondered if not for Alicia grabbing my arm if I’d been heading for the ground. Sometime, someway, she’d guided me out of the rain, my mind blank and the simple construction of words I found a heavy challenge.
“Gray?”
She materialized before me, long, dark hair untouched by the rain and full lips I took every advantage to kiss when I could. They deserved to be kissed, made love to every day.
Closing them, she pushed her hair out of her face, dropping the open umbrella to my carpet before closing my open door. She stayed there, at the door when closed, and sometime in that moment, I got my thoughts back.
“We have to go find her,” I said. “Something’s wrong. I tried to call you. I don’t know why she left.”
I could have only slept for a couple hours, but even that sleep had been restless. I’d been concerned about Alicia and where we left things.
I said a lot to her, Alicia, but even still she remained by the door. Approaching her, I would have made it to her had she not raised her hand.
She actually raised to me, for me to stop, and her gaze averted as her raincoat dripped droplets to my carpet.
“Alicia, did you hear me,” I said, not understanding. “Laura’s out there—”
“She’s fine, Grayden.”
She’d finally looked up at me with my name, the Grayden on her lips more than tense. Her expression had actually changed when she said it, her eyes sad as if something had caused her pain.
My phone dropped to my side, both her words and demeanor not making sense.
“You know where she is?” I asked and with her nod that calm again only lessened a bit. She said she knew where she was.
But I noticed she didn’t tell me.
“What’s going on?” I asked and with another step, she stiffened this time, as if me getting closer would actually hurt her. Her gaze had also averted again and her hand gripped her coat-covered arm like a safety net.
I stood stationary, the warnings in my head going off like alarm bells, her reaction to me and lack of information about my kid.
I shook my head. “Where’s my daughter, Alicia?”
She said nothing and I chose to repeat my words again.
“Alicia. Where is Laura—?”
“She’s safe, Grayden.”
There it was again… Grayden.
She hadn’t called me Grayden since I met her, the sudden formality not lost on me.
We stood in a room pregnant with silence, our accompaniment that of the anger that brewed outside. Tree branches rasped at my windows like they were tearing their way inside me, and again, no words of elaboration were said by Alicia.
Testing her, I came forward and despite how closed off she was being I didn’t stop. It actually took her saying the command to make me.
My steps froze with the sudden words and my swallow was terribly hard.
“Why?” I asked her,
my question of many. Why wouldn’t she tell me where Laura was other than the fact she was safe?
And why couldn’t I go near her?
My mind had travelled to that of the worst-case scenario in my life many times before. I’d had reasons, but over time, the anxiety of the thoughts lessened. It had partially to do with this town, most with a woman name Josephine, but even more with the woman before me. She allowed me to trust again, trust in people and the possibility of having goodness in my life.
My hand closed around my phone, the device I knew I ruined in the rain. Either way I hadn’t cared in the moment, so much more to care about in the present.
“I just need to know the truth,” she whispered, eyes lost and when she lifted her hand, she gathered a tear that clumped in her thick eyelashes. She rubbed it away with the shake of her head.
“I need to know the truth about you and why…” Her voice cracked on the end, her face cringing again with another tear she pushed away. “Why there’s a warrant out for your arrest.”
Her chosen words unleashed my greatest fear but not in the way I imagined. Real truth, if anyone found out my history and why I couldn’t stay in a city for longer than a few months, it’d be bad, but this woman in particular finding out cut me right at the core.
“You don’t know what you think you do,” I told her, a strong current coming from my lips. “This is so much more complicated than you could ever know.”
My words were putting it lightly, a history here she knew nothing about. This had been my fault I knew, but that fact didn’t make this moment any easier to deal with.
“That’s why I need to know the truth,” she said and I noticed she did come here alone. She could have come with other people, authorities, or not even have come at all. She came here.
She came here to talk to me.
My fingers pushed into my hair and the way the strands moved around, I knew I was shaking. My gaze lowering, I asked her to take a seat on the couch, noticing right away she made no moves to do so.
His Sweetest Song Page 21