by Kali Anthony
Her voice cracked and broke. She turned around, placed the ring on the side table and walked out the door, leaving all his dreams a tattered ruin in her wake.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GAGE DROVE HIS rental car through the iron gates of his parents’ home, roaring up the long drive past flowering hedges. He’d learned to ride a bicycle on this drive when he was five. His dad had taught him. Wobbling on training wheels with Gus always at his side, murmuring encouragement. The day those wheels had come off, he’d pedalled recklessly down to the end, the breeze whistling in his ears and his dad whooping and cheering after him.
His hands gripped the steering wheel hard. He parked the car, wrenched the door open and hurled himself out, slamming the door behind him. No, not his dad. Had both of his parents kept the secret, or was Gus ignorant? It was as if the people he’d loved his whole life, were now strangers to him.
He stood outside the front doors of his family home and looked up at the expansive portico above. When he’d been younger he’d seen this place as his heritage. All lies. His world was steeped in them so deeply he couldn’t see the truth for the darkness anymore. Couldn’t see any way out as everything he’d believed and known crumbled around him.
For so many years, he’d thought he’d known the enemy. Eve. Visions of her demanding better. Handing back the ring. Walking with her head held high out the door, that was a gaping wound he was sure would never heal. Yet again she’d left him. But she’d only been a bit player in this game, and he couldn’t process that pain right now. His enemies had turned out to be closer to home. The one place he’d believed he was safe from lies and it turned out even here truth was lacking.
What was left for him now? He’d been conducting this quest for revenge on behalf of a family that wasn’t even his. Every foundation he’d built his life on was an illusion. He didn’t even know who he was.
He grabbed his keys to the house and opened the front door. Maybe he should give them back, since it didn’t feel he had any rights here. This place had once been the happiest of homes. That had changed when Eve had left, the estate containing too many memories of her presence, so he rarely visited. Now he wondered whether there was reason to visit ever again.
His father would likely be in the den, so Gage made his way there, everything passing by in an amorphous blur. He was an imposter, with no place here. As he walked, he tamped down the sensation that grabbed his throat and squeezed till he reached the doorway. There the choking feeling increased till there was hardly enough air to fill his lungs. The man he’d once believed to be his father, a man he’d looked up to and admired as honest and good in a world full of fakes, glanced up, saw him. A smile broke out on his face as he stood.
‘Gage! What are you doing here? We weren’t expecting you.’ His father looked happy after his break away. A prelude to retirement and handing over the reins of a company Gage wasn’t sure he wanted any longer. Then the smile stuttered, died. Replaced by the tight mask of disapproval unvoiced. ‘Is Eve with you?’
The wound in his heart opened and bled a little more. While this place held too many memories, his parents had been the bedrock of his life. He’d always pitied Eve’s family and the conditional love she’d been shown. Now all he could do was stare.
He wasn’t this man’s child. If that dirty secret hadn’t been kept, he and Eve could have been together. All that had gone before came down to this. His family’s secrets and lies were the cause. His father, because he didn’t know what else to call him, frowned.
‘Son. What’s wrong? Are the Chevaliers causing trouble? Has Eve...?’
He could hear the unfinished sentence. Has Eve left you again? How could he say what was wrong when everything was now over? It was too much to articulate. Eve had gone. He didn’t know who the people who he’d once called his parents were anymore. His whole world had shifted and tilted, as if he’d woken up in an alternate dimension.
‘I’m not your son, am I?’
He didn’t know how he got the words out. They cut at his throat like ground glass. His father paled.
‘What do you mean?’ For a few moments Gage almost hoped that his father didn’t know. That at least one of his parents hadn’t been part of the duplicity. But the man who had always looked him straight in the eye now wouldn’t meet his gaze.
‘I’m. Not. Your. Son.’
Gus’s legs gave way and he fell back into the leather chair. He buried his face in his hands. After a few moments he looked up at Gage, eyes moist with tears.
‘How did you find out?’
Gage shut his own eyes for a moment as the words struck him with the force of a blow. Gus could not have hurt him more if he’d hit him. A punch would have been preferable.
‘Does it matter?’
The final conversation with Eve screamed loudly in his ears. Then her rejection. Nothing mattered, with his world collapsing around him.
‘No. It doesn’t. Because you have always been my son.’ The lines on Gus’s face were etched deeper now, like his father had aged twenty years in a matter of moments. Gone was the strong man, the head of their small family. This man was a ghost. ‘You were my son the day you were born.’
Gage shook his head, stabbed his finger at the air in front of him. ‘But you’re not my father.’
Gus flinched. Stood again. Walked out from behind the old oak desk that Gage had once been destined to inherit. ‘I took you fishing for bass. I taught you how to cast. We went to Little League together. I was with you every step as you pieced back together the heart a damned Chevalier shredded. I loved you then. I still love you, and you will always be my son.’
They sounded like fine words, but now it was all just a charade. His father glanced over his shoulder, a crease forming between his brows, pain written all over his face. Pain he’d last seen when Gus had bailed him out of a jail cell with a broken nose and terror in his heart. Pain Gage didn’t give a damn about right now.
Let them all suffer. Let it all burn.
‘Darling, it’s lovely to see you...’ His shoulders sagged. His mom. At least he knew one parent here was his. Gage didn’t turn to look at her. She’d hidden as much from him as the man in front of him had.
‘Betty, he knows.’
His mom stepped forward into his peripheral vision and grabbed the back of the chair in front of her.
‘Darling.’ Her voice was the barest of whispers. ‘Please understand...’
He didn’t want to hear. In this room the lies were the cause of all his hurts.
‘There’s nothing to understand, Mom. You lied to me. That man...’ He pointed to the man who’d raised him. Whom he’d once loved. ‘That man is not my father.’
Gus Caron looked at him. Stricken. His colour was grey. Gage didn’t care. The pain on his parents’ faces could never match the pain that was tearing him in two.
‘Betty. This is a conversation I need to have with my boy.’
‘I... I’ll get some iced tea.’
‘No. I think we need something stronger.’
‘Then I’ll leave you to talk.’ His mother looked at him, tears dripping down her cheeks, before she left the room. He’d made a woman he loved cry, yet again. His father walked to a sideboard, grabbed a bottle and held it up.
‘Want some?’
Gage shook his head. Gus poured himself a three-finger slug and his father was not a drinker.
‘Hiding this from you was never planned. It just...never seemed a good time to say anything.’
Gage gritted his teeth so hard he thought they might crack. ‘I asked you when I was nine why I didn’t look like you. You both said I took after Mom’s family.’
‘You need to understand—’
‘You all keep saying that and I’ve tried, but I’m out of ideas. Why don’t you explain it to me? Because you’ve had thirty years!’
Gus gul
ped down half his drink. Winced. ‘We were overjoyed to have you. And it didn’t seem to matter. You were all your mother and I wanted. We tried to have children when we first got married. We couldn’t. There was a problem with me.’
Gage had a small, sharp moment of bright hope, a shard that inserted itself and stuck. ‘So you used a sperm donor?’
His father shook his head and that hope was dashed.
‘You know your mom and I married young. It was one of the many reasons we were so against you and Eve, but especially given what happened to us... Marriage. It isn’t easy. Which is something you’ll learn with Eve if... But you’re both older. Better able to deal with what will come your way.’
Gage looked down at his hands, gripping the leather seat back of the chair he stood behind. His nails cut into it. There was no relationship anymore. He and Eve were done. He held on even harder, because it felt right now like he was bleeding out all over the floor.
‘We tried for so long to have a baby. Everything failed. Doctors said there was no explanation. Just one of those things. Idiopathic infertility.’
His father twirled the crystal tumbler in his hands. Took another mouthful of liquor.
‘We weren’t happy, son. Things were going wrong. And your mother and I, we both sought to ease our pain elsewhere.’
Gage rubbed his hands over his face. For as long as he’d been alive his parents had loved each other. He’d thought their marriage had been perfect. They had been an immutable force and now this? He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘You’re an adult and you need to hear this. It’s where it starts. Your mom fell pregnant. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. She didn’t want to be with the father. He didn’t want her either.’
‘Who is he? Do I know him? Did he know about me?’
‘Yes, he knew about you. No, you don’t know him. I can give you his name. He’s a businessman in California with a wife and two grown kids of his own. A whole lot of folks made a whole bunch of mistakes back then and in the end he didn’t want to be in your life. Your mom and I had a choice to make. We wanted children. And here was our chance.’
Gage couldn’t stand any longer. He pulled out the chair he’d been holding onto and sat, trembling. He regretted refusing his father’s offer, wanting a drink of whiskey now himself to numb the feelings that rioted inside him. ‘I wasn’t a commodity.’
‘No. You were our greatest success and greatest love. And yet you were a product of our greatest failings. Neither your mom nor I were innocent in this thing. In the end we had to fight hard for our marriage, and we succeeded. You’re a blessing. I didn’t care who your biological father was. I’d been no prince myself and it would have been hypocritical of me to criticise your mom for failing when I had first, and more than once. It wasn’t easy fixing our marriage. Both of us had a great deal to forgive the other for. The easy thing was always you. From the moment you were born you were my son. You were no one else’s.’
‘How did you do it? How did you forgive her?’
His father downed the last of his glass, sat back in his chair. Looked at him with soft warmth in his clear brown eyes. A look that had once been familiar and was now strange and confusing.
‘While saving the marriage was one of the hardest things I’ve done, in the end forgiving was easy. I forgave your mom because I love her.’
Gage left the house, wandered through the sprawling gardens, down to the edge of the property, to where the large magnolia grew. He leaned against the trunk, sliding down to sit on the ground underneath. Not caring if he ruined his trousers in the tree’s detritus, not caring about anything at all. He felt numb, broken by the revelations of the past few days.
About Eve leaving him.
He shook his head, refused to think about it, about her final words. Gage stared at the huge wall separating his parents’ land from the Chevaliers’. From a vantage point in the branches above he used to watch Eve in the garden. He’d been lonely, an only child with not many friends to play with, and a bright little girl picking flowers hadn’t seemed like the enemy but a possible friend.
To this day he still didn’t know why the Carons and the Chevaliers held such enmity towards each other. It had been ingrained in his psyche for so long he hadn’t questioned it. From imploring him never to go over the fence if he lost a ball or a paper plane there to the open hostility when they saw each other in public, he’d grown to accept something he should have fought, for Eve’s sake and for his own. As children they hadn’t embraced the hatred that had poisoned every interaction between their families. As young adults they’d naïvely thought they could end it. Until seven years ago when he’d believed he’d finally understood that a Chevalier could never be trusted. Turned out the people he shouldn’t trust had been far closer to home.
More fool him for believing anyone.
Footsteps scuffed through the fallen leaves surrounding him. He looked to his left, up at the pale, drawn face of his mom.
‘Darling, I’m so sorry.’
He shrugged. What did it matter now? Apologies changed nothing. He was here. Eve was gone. His father wasn’t his father. Nothing was right with the world as he knew it.
‘At least you’re my mother.’
‘Do not say that to me. I understand you’re angry. You have every right to be. But think.’ She pointed up to the house, her voice trembling. ‘That man has been nothing but your father since the day you were born.’
If he tried to intellectualise it, his mom was right. He couldn’t fault Gus. Apart from how they looked and that one question when he’d been nine, he’d never guessed his dad was not his blood. The man had given him unflinching love and support, had bailed him out of jail when he’d been arrested after he and Eve had run. Paying lawyers to clear his name. Never, ever questioning what had led Gage to flee in the dead of night with the daughter of a sworn enemy. Nursing him through the hangovers and poor behaviour after Eve had told him never to speak to her again.
Other kids had always been envious of how much his dad loved him, including Eve. He’d always thought how lucky he’d been. He knew it, but that didn’t stop the pain scouring through his veins like acid.
‘Were you ever going to tell me?’
His mom sighed, sat down next to him in her pretty dress on the leaves and raw earth. She’d get dirty too and he wasn’t sure why that worried him. His mom cupped his cheek. Her fingers were warm, but a tremor ran through them.
‘I wish I could say we were bigger people. But no. Time passed and the harder it became till we wondered what the point would be. Then you told us you were engaged to Eve—’
Pain struck him straight to the heart. He rubbed his chest. ‘You don’t have to worry about that. We’re not engaged now.’
The silence his words met flayed him some more. His parents’ disapproval had been clear. It had needled in the beginning, even if the arrangement with Eve was a fake. But right now he couldn’t bear to hear it. His mom took a deep breath.
‘Oh, sweetheart. Why?’
The words caught in his throat. A tight lump that he swallowed down before it choked him. ‘She knew all along about me not being dad’s son. Her father threatened to tell me if she didn’t break it off all those years ago. She was pregnant. She lost the...’
He couldn’t go on. The pain of it was too much. His mom wrapped him in her arms, like she’d done so many times when he’d been a child.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured into his hair. ‘I know platitudes will never be enough. As adults, we have so much to beg Eve’s and your forgiveness for. We’ve all failed you because we acted like children and couldn’t let things go.’
He took a deep breath. ‘She says I’m like her father.’
‘You must have made her furious to use that insult.’
‘I said and did things I’m not proud of.’
; His mom patted him on the arm. ‘That one statement tells me you’re not like him, because you have the capacity to learn. Hugo Chevalier doesn’t. He never did, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with your father. We may have had our problems. Serious problems. But your father could think and reason and he cared. He’s the best of men, even with his human frailties. You take after him, not that man next door who only ever wanted to tear things apart.’
Gage looked up at his mom, the belief in what she saw written in the gentle smile on her face. ‘You have so much faith in me.’
‘Your father and I both do, darling. It’s time you had faith in yourself.’
He didn’t know what to do, how to fix this. All he knew was that he loved Eve, had never, ever stopped, and he wasn’t sure how to tell her, how to forgive...either of them.
‘There’s one question I’ve never asked. Why do our families hate each other so much? How did it come to this?’
His mom looked at the fence separating the two properties then back to their home.
‘That’s a long story,’ she said.
‘Then tell me.’ Gage leaned back against the trunk of the old tree. ‘Seems I’ve got all the time in the world.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
EVE PUFFED OUT a breath, blowing at a strand of unruly curls that had fallen across her face. She wiped her hands on her dusty jeans and looked around at the packing boxes now filling her Paris apartment. She’d made a few hard choices after leaving Gage and America behind.
The agony of that decision still sliced right through her, stinging as fresh as a papercut, but she’d finally concluded that she deserved more. All her life she’d danced to the tune of others. She was tired of living the way everyone else expected, and now she’d had enough. This time was her own.