Cherished by You: A Found by You Finale Novella

by Victoria H. Smith

  It made me gag.

  Sanitation wasn’t on the up, and I couldn’t believe the disarray of the place. I couldn’t believe… she lived there.

  Shaking my head, I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand so many things. Why was she here? In this city, my city, and living this way. She and my other former step-sister… She and Radha had an inheritance, albeit a small one, but I knew of its existence. My dad and his successes were equal to my ex-stepmom, Julie. They had some old money, family businesses in their family and what have you. Cassidy and Radha weren’t rich, but they were taken care of, and not…

  I eyed the environment. They weren’t this.

  My head lowered, questioning why again I had come, questioning what she said at my office. She told Stevie she needed to see me, sounding urgent to see me. Had Griffin been right? Was it money?

  With the state of this place…

  “Call,” I said, opening my mouth to the air. In the distance, I heard the car telephone feature warm up, then an electronic voice spoke back to me.

  “Call,” it said, repeating me.

  I watched the house, voices spilling out, more arguments.

  I parted my lips again.

  “Call dad,” I commanded, and then the phone rang.

  He picked up after the second ring.

  “Roxie?”

  His voice sounded into the cab of my car, booming a little as I wasn’t expecting it.

  I rubbed my hand on the steering wheel’s leather. “Hey, Dad.”

  I was currently in contact with my dad and had been for a while. We had a lot to work through over the years, a lot to work towards, but together we had made ground. I made ground with him, and though, I called him it wasn’t often, which was why he probably asked what he did next.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Squeezing my eyes, I shook my head as if he could see. “Dad…”

  “Roxanne,” sounded into the car, his voice direct then followed a breath. “Why do you sound upset? What’s wrong, sweet pea?”

  He called me that sometimes, always surprising me with it. It brought me back to a place, reminded me of him and good times of my youth. We did have them. I cherished them as they’d been limited due to the situation we’d both found ourselves in with my mom. He’d faded from her toward the end before she took her life and because of that, I’d faded from him.

  “Dad, I…” I hated calling him like this. I hated being weak. “Dad, Cassidy is here. She’s here in Miami.”

  The words whispered from my throat, and his sigh had my heart jolting, radiating deep in my chest. It was a sigh of expectancy.

  It was a sigh of knowing.

  “You know,” I said, speaking out into space.

  He knew, and he didn’t tell me?

  “I didn’t know she’d go to you,” he said, breathing. “But that makes sense, I suppose. I turned her away.”

  Sitting up, I maneuvered against the back of my seat. A bump tapped the wall of my stomach, and I moved my hand over my belly in small circles.

  It’s okay. Mommy is okay.

  It was like Jackson knew sometimes. He always made me aware of him when I was having an off day like my reminder of everything good in my life, himself and Griffin.

  “What did she want?” I asked my dad, getting Jackson calm.

  He breathed again. “Honestly, I don’t know. We didn’t get that far. She called me not long ago saying she needed help. I hadn’t heard from her since the divorce.”

  The divorce. I hadn’t been around for that. I was in the heart of my freshman year of college, but I could have foreseen separation. My stepmom could be cruel sometimes, passive aggressive in the way she condescended. My dad just didn’t see it until I left. She saved it for me under his nose.

  “I asked her about her mother Julie and why she was calling me instead of her,” he went on. “She couldn’t tell me. She just said she needed help. She needed me to help her.”

  “How did you respond?” I asked, swallowing.

  “Roxanne, I’ve…” he started, but then he stopped. He stopped for so long, and I didn’t know if he would finish, but suddenly, he did.

  “I couldn’t help someone,” he started, pausing a moment. “I couldn’t help someone who I knew had caused you pain. I love Cassidy. I love Radha.”

  Radha. I shook my head, not wanting to think about her. She’d been the worst of the two, the cruelest.

  “And I still consider them my children, but sometimes…” his voice lowered again. “Sometimes people have to answer to the things they’ve done. I could not help her. Whatever it was I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  He was looking out for me. He was protecting me, too, like Griffin.

  “Do you know she’s pregnant?” I asked. Because I did. There was no way that detail could be forgotten—the look in a mother’s eyes as she held her unborn child.

  This made my dad sigh again. “I didn’t, but that wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Roxie, I want you to stay away from her,” he said. “Julie, she can be manipulative, and I’m sure I don’t know Cassidy like I used to. I knew her in her youth. I didn’t get to know her as an adult. I’m sure the apple doesn’t fall far.”

  But Cassidy had never been that way. She’d never been cruel.

  She wasn’t until she was.

  My gaze moved to her building then, the place she was staying at. This was the closest I’d been to her in so long outside of the office, and we had been close, so close.

  My hand on the wheel, I went to let my dad go.

  I was going to leave. I was going to, like he said, but something stopped me.

  Someone stopped me.

  Cassidy had a sack in her hands, a white one, plastic and sagging with some kind of goods. Maybe it was groceries. Maybe it was something else, but it became irrelevant.

  It slipped from her fingers, pooling on the concrete by her plastic sandals, and her hair, so dark, wrapped around her face in the wisps of the wind.

  She pulled it away, and when she did, she lifted her head. That’s when her lips parted.

  Because she stared at me maybe twenty feet away from her.

  “Sweet pea?”

  I blinked, the gamut of millions of emotions widespread within me.

  “I…” my hand braced the wheel, my head shaking. I started the car, and that made something happen.

  It made Cassidy move.

  She took a step and only one, but it’s what her mouth did that made me stop. Her lips mouthed a sound. It mouthed my name as she lifted her hand.

  “I’m going to let you go, Dad,” I said swallowing, and from someplace far away, I heard him say my name. A phrase followed, and it was something I needed. I had heard him say it before, but he was cautious about it whenever he said it. He was cautious about revealing it, his love.

  My hands shaking, I had been cautious about revealing it, too. It was something we both had to work through, but whenever it was said it was genuine.

  “I love you, too, Dad,” I told him because I did, and not just because I needed him. I told him because I loved him.

  “Call me if you need me,” he responded, a clear smile in his voice. It always sounded when the words were said, and he never expected them. Especially, since in the beginning, he didn’t get a response. He waited for it. He waited patiently.

  We hung up with each other, the car cutting us off by my command, and I watched a woman who was only a few steps away. She picked up her sack, and I believed right away she’d be over, but for some reason, she didn’t. Her head simply dipped, holding her sack to her chest.

  Suddenly, she rushed away, and I watched, her sandals taking her toward the rundown building I assumed she lived in.

  But she didn’t go in. She simply sat outside. There was a bench there, one wide enough for two. She was waiting. She was letting me go to her.

  My key fob, the key still inside the engine, I wrestled wit
h. Did I come here actually expecting to talk to her? Did I intend to do something today like I insinuated to Griffin?

  I studied her again. She wasn’t looking at me, the bag in her hands her fascination, as she played with the plastic handle. She very much looked like a small animal, submissive as she bowed to her environment.

  I shut the car off, and the door dinged when I opened it. My foot hit the street below. Pocking my keys, I closed the car door, and then I came around. I came to her.

  Her head lifted a little, her gaze moving and flicking. Sometimes it was on me sometimes it wasn’t. It was like she was too scared to keep it. She never looked at me that way before. In fact, this very much felt like a role reversal. She’d always been the one to make me look up, stand tall.

  She’d always had the confidence.

  I got right in front of her, a sudden chill moving from the very tips of my fingers to my toes. I covered my arms, not knowing what to say.

  It turned out she was the one to make contact.

  “Hey,” she said, pushing another one of those wild strands behind her ear.

  I didn’t say hi to her. I think because that made it real, this moment real. But I did take a seat. Like I said there was room. It was near her, but not too close.

  Slowly, I lowered to it.

  Her hand went inside her bag.

  “Apple juice?” she asked, pulling out the very thing. It was a six-pack, those cardboard box-things I used to carry in my lunch sack in school.

  She shrugged a little. “They were on sale. I don’t normally drink them.”

  She didn’t need to explain herself, but she did need to explain why she was there and why she came to find me.

  I chewed my lip, my eyes on her. I wouldn’t look away.

  Her offer untaken, she revoked it, placing the juice boxes back into the bag.

  Her head lifted. “How are you?”

  My shoulders moved a little. I found I really couldn’t do anything else, but for some reason, that didn’t put her off. In fact, she did something so familiar it made my insides tear. It made them burn when she smiled at me.

  Her head titled with it.

  “You look so different,” she said, nodding a little. “You look good.”

  Again, what a role reversal, me the one looking so well. She seemed so frail, weak. I braced my arms again, another chill.

  “Roxie,” she went on, this conversation so one-sided. Her eyes closed a little, pinching tight. She opened them. “Say something.”

  And so I did.

  “What do you want?” came from my throat. It ached from my throat. It felt like such a loaded question, coming from a place of history.

  It also came from a place of torture. She’d put me through a lot, she and Radha.

  She cringed. “Roxie, I know this is a lot, my being here.” Her head shook a little. “But I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t need it. I promise you that.”

  I was sure she was right about that, for how could someone have the audacity after what she put me through? My childhood had been one of an intense heartache, my sisters what should have been my reprieve. Instead, they had been my agony, my tragedy.

  “How did you find me?” pushed from my lips, my nails biting into my arms.

  She answered quickly.

  “The TV,” she said, swallowing, and a shine coated her eyes. She rubbed them. “When you accepted that award, I saw you. I saw what you made. I saw…”

  Slow tears blinked from her eyes and down to her dress. She touched them, wiping them away.

  “I saw what you should have gotten,” she went on, her her lips quivering. “I saw what you deserved because you do, Roxie. You deserve every bit of the success, of the world’s appreciation and love.”

  And what, did she want that? Did she want to take that, too, what I’d managed to take back for myself?

  “And he seems amazing,” she said, sniffing. “Griffin.”

  His name coming from her mouth shot a red haze over me, my teeth coming down over my lip.

  My nostrils flared. “You stay away from him. You… You stay away from us. You had no right coming here. You have no right being here. You—”

  “You’re right,” she said, coming to stand. She stood because I did.

  She lifted her hands. “You’re right.”

  “And you’re damn right.” I came forward. I came to her. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough? Don’t you think that I’ve had enough? I finally can live my life without you. Without reminders of you and the mental burden I still have to fight through.”

  Because I did. I did. One doesn’t easily come back from a childhood of ridicule. A girl couldn’t easily come back from such pain, at least, not me.

  I pointed at her. “You and Radha put me through hell.”

  Her hands lowered as she pulled her lip in. “We were children, Roxie.”

  Laughable. That’s all this was.

  I placed my hand on my chest. “And what was I, Cassidy? What was I when you rallied your friends against me? When you threw food at me and called me shit? You called me those things knowing, knowing it would shred me. You know how my mom died.”

  Her head dipped, no doubt with the memories. They were ones I’d never forget, so why should I let her? She’d known all about my mom. I told her.

  My mom’s life ended in a battle with her weight, her mental struggles the taker. When she took her life, it sent me to a dark place, one I’d been able to come out of with the support of my new family. My dad had married so quickly, but it had been so good at first. It had been so good before things changed and before life changed us. Because when it was just the three of us, Radha, Cassidy, and me before friends and gossip and the bullshit of girls, it had been so good.

  “I was young,” Cassidy went on, pushing tears from underneath her eyes. “I was young. I was stupid, and I wanted friends, and when you’re that age…”

  Her gaze averted, finding her feet. She lifted her head. “It’s no excuse, I know, but it’s the truth.”

  My eyes coated and I watched her come forward.

  “And it killed me every day, Roxie. To hurt you. In fact, I numbed myself. I numbed myself, so it wouldn’t hurt anymore.”

  The thing was, I numbed myself, too, but I didn’t have friends to hide behind. I only had myself.

  I can’t do this...

  Shaking my keys, I turned. I turned, and she followed me.

  “I’m going to lose my baby, Roxie.”

  I froze, the tears leaking, streaming down my face. From behind, I made out steps coming closer, and a hand touched my back.

  I turned with it, eyeing the beholder, and though she looked at me, too, she had only one free hand. The other was on her stomach, that little nub.

  Tears blinked down a pretty face before me. Even with how messed up she looked, tired. She was still beautiful, always would be.

  “I’m going to lose my baby, and I don’t know what to do.”

  My lips moved. “What are you talking about?”

  Her hands moved over that bundle, squeezing. “The baby’s father, we didn’t work out. We’re divorced, but it was messy. I called for it, and he wasn’t accepting of it. And now… Now, he wants our child, Roxie. He wants to take the baby away from me, limit my rights. He’s got money, and he can do it. So much money.”

  I didn’t understand, but then she went on.

  “And I have nothing,” she said, swallowing. “I don’t have a penny. He’ll win.”

  I took a step back. “I don’t understand what you want.”

  Her body shook then, intense and quaking. “The TV said you were a lawyer.”

  A lawyer. She wanted me to help her. She wanted me to fight for her. How ironic, when she never fought for me?

  I moved away. “Don’t bullshit me. You have money and can afford a lawyer.”

  “I don’t have anything. Curtis, he…” she paused, those tears moving down her face again. “He’s smart. He is a businessman, and he to
ok everything from me. I had no protection, my whole inheritance gone. He got everything in the divorce.”

  Lifting my hands, I covered my arms again, listening.

  She breathed. “And I can’t get help from my mom. She never thought I should have gotten divorced in the first place. She didn’t support it, and has cut me out of her life ever since. And Radha… Radha only supports her decision.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, my former stepmom and step-sister real pieces of work…

  But the twos cruelty had always been toward Cassidy and me… Cassidy was their own flesh and blood.

  I guess some things never change.

  “Please,” Cassidy went on. “I need your help. I would never have asked if I didn’t. I don’t know where else to go.”

  From a distance, sirens filled my ears, voices from afar. They came from the rank that surrounded me, the environment I knew my former step-sister was legitimately a part of.

  I messed with my keys. “I’m not that kind of a lawyer.”

  I specialized in business law, but even if I didn’t…

  “But you have contacts?” she asked, coming forward. “Friends?”

  Something in her pleading must have gotten to her because her hand went to her mouth.

  Turning, she let more tears fall and I had never seen her like this. She’d always been the strong one. She’d always been the confident one, but now, she was here. Her life had taken her here, and mine had taken me somewhere else.

  How the world can change so much in such a small amount of time.

  Silence fell between us, only Cassidy, my ex-step-sister, and her tears, and suddenly, she walked away, leaving me.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, turning slightly. Bending over, she grabbed her bag, the one I knew to be filled with apple juice cartons.

  “This was dumb,” she went on, rising. “I was dumb for asking you, for thinking I could ask you, and I’m sorry, Roxie. I’m so sorry.”

  She brought the bag to her chest, rushing away, and I watched. I watched a broken woman hurry into a rundown house.

  I watched who used to be my closest friend, once upon a time, walk away.

  Griffin

  I spent a lot of time thinking after Roxie left, the sun setting around me. I often came out here and did that sometimes, the peaceful waves and sounds of the beach good for my thoughts.