“Ask your questions,” I told her, remaining where I stood. “And after, you tell me where my kid is.”
Alicia
I wasn’t going to make any deals with him.
I couldn’t.
The best of what I had in me allowed me to come over here unattended. I didn’t have to do that. My love for him made me.
That was what made this all so hard, a constant stomach toss making it hard to contain the contents of my insides. Still tasting the bile in my throat, I watched him in my periphery across the room. He ended up taking a chair from his kitchen table, sitting in it on the other side of the room across from me.
I’d taken the couch.
“Alicia, I’ll tell you… I’ll tell you what you need to know, then you need to tell me where Laura is. It’s important. Her safety’s at risk.”
“Really?” I questioned, looking up at eyes that seemed to have aged even more before me. He’d been scared when I came over, knowing his daughter was missing I wasn’t surprised, but that had changed now.
Currently, only sadness remained.
It only displayed at me and I found it hard to look at.
“Because it seems you’re the one who might be the danger to her.”
He said no words after mine, choosing silence. He shifted before me and when I looked up, his gaze had moved to the window.
His hand slid over his beard.
“I spent a lot of time wondering if what I’d done was the right idea,” he said, moving his gaze over to me. “But each time I reflected, every time I looked back and mulled things over, I came to the same conclusion every time. What I did had to be done and never not once have I regretted it.”
I saw that in his eyes, so many things I saw I didn’t understand. It went beyond me, and like he said, things I didn’t understand.
“What happened?” was all I could say, as if he was the photograph, that handsome man who had everything, but had suddenly seemed to have thrown it all away.
His hands dropped between his legs, his chin lowering as well.
“Laura’s mom I never got to know,” he said. “I didn’t care to know. She was ass, ass that I wanted at the time and so many had come before her. I partied like the best of them and have the notches in my belt to prove it.”
The man he spoke of sounded so foreign to me, a tale out of a dark storybook.
“I was a playboy like you’d never seen, Alicia,” he admitted. “I was rich, powerful, and I used it. Laura’s mom just happened to be who I wanted that night and come to find out, she found herself pregnant not long after a thoughtless fuck.”
His choice of words had me cringing like it did at the lake, but I wouldn’t look away, not this time and he didn’t either, his gaze affixed on me.
“I really wouldn’t believe it at first,” he told me. “And I didn’t. It took several paternity tests. After that, it became what did she want. How much, you know?”
His story had him laughing with no humor, the tone incredibly dry in his deep voice.
He looked up. “I didn’t want a kid, so I was willing to pay her off to get rid of it. She didn’t want that. In fact, she only wanted something I couldn’t give her.”
“What?” my own voice cracked, him cringing now.
“She wanted a goddamn father for her child,” he said, something he’d left out in his explanation at the lake. He said he gave her money.
He didn’t say she wanted him.
The reality of that played on Gray’s face, his omission clear between us.
He moved his lips. “That’s all she wanted, my time and basic child support. I couldn’t agree to the former, but the latter, as you know, I gave in to.”
He really had been different, so much different before me.
“We came to the agreement that every month I would visit when I paid the support, but only if the child didn’t have to be acknowledged,” he went on. “Laura doesn’t even have my last name.”
I noticed that. I noticed it on the warrant.
She was Laura Wallace on there, not Laura Davenport.
Grayden blew into his hands, a breath on them that filled the room.
“Everything was pretty good after that for a while,” he went on, dropping his hands. “She got her money and her visits and I got to screw around with whatever piece of ass I could find. I could continue being a bachelor with no ties and no kids.”
“What changed?”
My own voice sounded foreign to me and he stared at me, his head tilted.
“The drugs,” he said, something he had let me in on before. Laura’s mom and her connection with drugs.
“It was the woman’s habit that changed things,” he said. “Coke her drug of choice. We’d done it at the party we met at, which led to the sex. I pretty much got fried at all the parties I went to but it was only socially. Her mom was on a different level and something I only knew as I’d noticed her stash every time I’d visit her and Laura on our agreed-upon times. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even see her for hours on visits. She’d just go to her room and leave me with the baby. Eventually, she started to ask for more money, claiming it was for child support, but I didn’t believe her.”
Because she needed more money for her habit, the evidence there. I closed my eyes.
“She didn’t even want visits anymore eventually,” he said, that sad laughter back in his voice. “Just more money, money I knew she was spending on drugs and not our kid, a kid… a kid I was finally starting to see.”
His voice changed on the end and he squeezed his eyes.
“I wished I could remember more of those times,” he said. “How special Laura had been and her voice… Her laughter was infectious. I was starting to get attached to her, but I was also seeing what was happening with her mom. Eventually, I believed she was taking advantage of the situation and I had to cut her off. I stopped paying her entirely and threatened her if she came for me. Not long after, I started to get the paperwork together to obtain full custody of Laura. I didn’t want her near her screwed-up mother and ignored her calls until I could hammer out the details with my attorneys. We were almost done when I got a text from her.”
“What did it say?”
The fact he’d said nothing when he had been so upfront with everything now scared me.
As well as the haunted look in his eyes.
His gaze became empty, tortured, and I watched as words formed on his lips.
“It said, ‘You made me do this.’”
And that’s when his eyes filled with the sheen, a thick glow that made him wipe his eyes with one hand. Dropping it, he shook his head and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what happened next. I wasn’t sure I should hear.
“She sold her, Alicia,” he said, his words retched into open air. A tremor hit his lips with movement. “She sold her for drugs and told me when I tracked her down after that text. She couldn’t even remember where she left her. Our baby girl…”
The abyss I fell into resembled a dark cave, the world stopping and my brain unable to form thoughts, only the nightmares. The retelling itself sent Gray into a tailspin, his hands frantically moving, his eyes searching, and his voice choked.
“I had no idea how long she’d been with those people, or many of the details that happened after they took—” His rasp escaped with a pinch upon the bridge of his nose. He shook out of it. “Eventually, I found her, made calls, had people. Thank fucking God I had people.”
He looked up when he saw me move, where I should have been the whole time. Sitting at the base of his legs, I held onto him, for dear life if I could have. I didn’t want to let go, scared of what would happened if I did.
On my knees I remained at his waist, my arms wrapped around him and my face pushed into his chest.
“What happened to her, Gray?” I asked, closing my eyes between tears. “Did they hurt her?”
I really didn’t want the knowledge. It was a need for it the only reason I asked.
So much made s
ense now, that little girl, her pain…
“I know at least they didn’t do that,” he said, nearly hyperventilating. He had to take a second, calm himself as if he was reliving it all.
Maybe he was.
Using me, he found his voice again, his arms around me now.
“I was told when my people found her, the dealers explained they hadn’t touched her. They had plans for her and she was worth more if she was…”
My stomach rolled this time but I stayed.
I’d stay forever.
It seemed Gray couldn’t go on with that train of thought either, his eyes closing.
“They ended up locking her in this room,” he said, his voice far away. “Alone and by herself with no one else. I was there when my people located her and I just remembered how she looked.”
His stare vacant into the room, so far away like his voice.
“She was completely dirtied,” he said. “Covered in her own urine, vomit.” His lids lowered, the swallow hard in his throat. “And hadn’t been interacted with for days. I spent so much time with her, so many hours getting to know her, love her and she…”
His sniff cut him off, his eyes flashing at me.
“She didn’t even recognize me, Alicia. In fact, she cowered. It took me singing to her, a song I used to sing to help her go to sleep when she was a toddler. With it, she knew it was me, and eventually, she did let me take her away, away from that place with windows shot out and people passed out on the floor in a heap. We went and that was the last we saw of the place. Her voice completely gone. For over three years it was gone.”
My eyes closing, I rubbed his leg. So much pain they’d both been through and it all hit me at his conclusion.
“You took her then, didn’t you?” I asked, staring up at him.
He nodded. “I did.”
“But why, Grayden? You didn’t have to just take her and run.”
“But I did,” he said, his lashes flashing away. “I couldn’t risk her mom coming to her senses and realizing what she’d done. The woman, as fucked up as she was, is Laura’s biological mother. She could have a case for a claim over her one day and even if I did get full custody she could have rights to see her. I didn’t want her to see her. I didn’t want her having anything to do with her and mess up her life even more than she had.”
And so they escaped, disappeared into the abyss of anonymity. I had no idea where the two had been, but if they’d been places like Mayfield they’d be easy to hide in, disappear in.
“We’ve been running for three years,” he said, his arms finally holding me tight. It’d taken that long, took him that long to notice I was really there…
And he wasn’t alone anymore.
He sat in silence like that for so long, me on my knees at his lap and his arms around me. Eventually, that storm stopped and it was just us, us together and holding on for dear life that this all would work out, that we could take back everything we had before he’d admitted the truth and I found out. But I think we both knew with his admission things would change.
How could they not?
“She’s at Jasmine’s house,” I said, pulling away. “She’s there, but, Gray, you have to fight. I’m assuming she’s the one who put the warrant out for your arrest. Laura’s mom?”
He said he’d been scared one day she’d come back to her senses.
His arms falling away, he pushed his hand into his hair.
“Yes.”
“Well, what if she’s better? It probably took a lot for her to put that warrant out, challenge you and everything you said you were. What if she’s gotten herself together?”
“And what if she hasn’t?” he challenged himself. “What if that warrant is a way for her to smoke us out? Get us in a place where she can fight for her?”
“So we do like I said, we fight.”
“I have nothing, Alicia. We have nothing. There was fraud in my company before I left and I worked out just enough to give Laura and me a chance before putting it all behind us. We literally have little more than the shirts on our backs now.”
Bastian mentioned that, how he’d been smart and got out.
I closed my eyes, looking up at him. “You have me.”
One resource he hadn’t had before and his hands caged my face after the words, his forehead touching mine. His throat jumped, and even this close, the sadness in his eyes pierced my soul.
“We do have you, Alicia,” he said, his voice tightening. “But it’s not enough. I don’t think it will be. I can’t take the risk. I can’t lose my baby.”
The tears flooded my eyes in a river, his voice so final, gut-wrenchingly so.
My hands gripping his shirt, I closed my eyes.
“You can’t keep running,” I said, my voice shaking. “Someone will find you eventually. You’re trying to outrun time.”
“It’s a risk I have to take,” he told me, his thumbs smoothing down my cheeks. “I have to take it for her.”
“Well, I won’t let you. I can’t. You deserve the right to be her dad, for her to have your name and no longer live in fear.”
“What will you do if I can’t let you do that?” he asked and my silence told him I think all he needed to know.
I wasn’t lying. I couldn’t let him keep running. I’d fight for him, her until I had no more fight in me. That was who I was and the world I came from. I had a means and colleagues that could fix this situation for him and I would do it whether he let me or not.
I believed he saw that in my eyes, that fight, and suddenly, I witnessed something I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again, his smile so handsome before his lips crashed down on mine.
It’d been a soft kiss, the softest of kisses and it felt so final it broke my heart. He was saying goodbye and I knew right away…
He was letting go.
Chapter Thirty-One
Alicia
Gray made me give him forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours in which he could literally uproot his and Laura’s life.
Forty-eight hours in which he could run again.
I hadn’t been through what he had. I hadn’t seen what he’d seen nor experienced the things that placed so much pain in two people’s lives for so long. I was outside of all this, a bystander who achingly wanted to help but didn’t have the audacity, the place in this to do so. Because of that, I had nothing. I couldn’t make the man fight for what was rightfully his, the right to a safe haven with his daughter.
The right to be free.
He wouldn’t take that right and I couldn’t make him have it, and therefore, he let me go. He had to. He knew I’d fight for him.
I’d do so always.
Many weeks went by after that. In fact, so many I lost count. I started to lose reality of what my life had become versus what it could have been. I was living in post-Grayden Davenport mode, a sickness that couldn’t be alleviated with any type of medicine in existence. I was addicted to him, him and his feeling and his love for a child in the beginning he never thought he wanted, but in the end, gave his entire life for. I was addicted to her, his little Laura. I was addicted to the laugh I’d fortunately gotten to hear when she found it within herself again and the life we both could have had to influence each other. I may have been the adult and could teach her things like piano and life lessons, but she taught me so many things too. I learned I had a patience within myself and purpose that went beyond the walls of the office building and conference rooms I found myself in my day to day.
I eventually went back to that life, that world that felt so hollow now in comparison to what I’d literally lived for the better part of a year in a town called Mayfield. It’d been a world of simplicity, purpose I hadn’t easily untied myself from upon Grayden’s absence. His mobile home had gone vacant within hours and my heart just as emptied. I was bitter for a long time after he left, how he could cut ties and leave things so open between us, but as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months since I’d seen him and h
is Laura I stopped letting it be about him and me. It became about him, a man who was desperately trying to do the right thing when it came to himself and his young child, and in the end, I found myself hard-pressed to hold anger towards him anymore. In fact, when it all came down to it, the only one I had anger toward was one person.
Myself.
The papers had showed up at my office well after the holidays and into the start of spring, the ones I’d been avoiding since I decided to pack up and leave Mayfield. I actually sat with the developers who wanted to build on my aunt’s land with my dad, him looking over everything beside me. I trusted myself and my decisions not a year ago, but now, I’d been resorted to help when asked. I relied upon my attorney father in ways that had me ashamed in regards to handling my business in Mayfield. He took the reins and found me what he considered a perfect monetary deal, absence of any other thought outside of that. Once the meetings concluded, the papers were sent over—to me now.
I signed them.
The action was almost like a symbol of the past, where I was going versus where I’d been. There was nothing there in that town for me now that had changed my life for well past a summer. When I went initially, I believed I’d be there for no more than a week and came back with a lifetime of experiences and lessons I’d take well into the rest of my life. I was sorting through it all and believed it’d literally take me the rest of my life to do so…
But then her letter showed up in the mail.
Chapter Thirty-Two
April 16th
Alicia,
Please see the enclosed photos from your aunt’s home. With the house becoming a recognized landmark, the town has acquired the home and fashioned it for tours and other things as established in your contract. All personal items have been sold as instructed by you, but I hope you don’t mind that I saved these photos and sent them your way. I’ve been a part of the team that’s been going through the house to set up for the tours, but when I found these photos, it didn’t feel right to throw them away. They’re ones of you, your aunt, and various people around town, and even some of the pair of us in there as kids and I swear to God it’s me. I guess we both really have changed.
His Sweetest Song Page 22