It had been three days since Tony told her to talk to Paul. In those three days, she’d tried not to think about it, but that seemed to be all she could think about. Every night, it felt like Tony was looking at her, wondering why she hadn’t done it that day, but he never asked.
It had also been three days since she visited that garden in Annwn. Three days since she had struggled to understand what her mother had meant when she told her to be careful about trusting the people around her, but to keep herself open enough to trust one. Three days since she learned the truth about her mother’s curse, three days since she learned that either Cei or Rhein might be a traitor.
She wasn’t sure she could handle learning any more truths.
The bell rang. Gwen gathered her things and made her way out of the classroom into the jungle that was a high school hallway between classes. No matter how highbrow, how expensive, or how academically superior a school was, a teenager was still a teenager. There was pushing and shoving, laughter and loud talking, bullies teasing their less popular targets and girls sneaking kisses from the boys they were dating, or watching enviously as the boy they wanted kissed some other girl.
Cei was in athletics this hour, so she proceeded alone to her math class. She was almost there—she could see the teacher writing new equations on the board—when Rhein stepped into her path.
“Haven’t seen you in a few days.”
“Been busy,” she said, attempting to step around him.
“Too busy to work on your po—”
“We don’t talk about that at school,” she said, glancing around to see if anyone had heard him. But, as usual, most of the kids in the hallway hadn’t noticed Gwen. A few girls were watching Rhein, but they didn’t seem to realize Gwen was even there. “Keep your voice down.”
“They wouldn’t understand even if I recited a whole list of the things you’re capable of,” he said defiantly, but in a lower tone of voice. “Have you been working with Cei at least?”
“My ankle injury flared up again the other day. I’ve been icing it every afternoon after school.”
Rhein’s expression twisted into something like concern. “It flared up? I thought it was only a sprain.”
“It is. But it swelled up against Sunday night after you left.”
“What were you doing when it did that?”
“Does it matter?” Gwen moved sideways, pressing her shoulder into a line of lockers to get out of the way of her classmates trying to enter the classroom. “It hurts. That’s all that matters.”
Rhein leaned closer to her. “You have to be careful, Gwen. There are people who would love to see you permanently out of commission.”
“So they snuck into the backyard and re-sprained my ankle?” She shook her head. “You’re getting paranoid in your old age, Rhein.”
He studied her face for a long second. “What are you doing after school tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should talk. I have something I want to show you over at my place.”
“I’ll tell Cei.”
“No, don’t,” he said, looking over her shoulder at something before he again focused on her. “I’d rather it be just between the two of us.”
Gwen looked over her shoulder, curious what Rhein had seen, but there was no one there. In fact, the hallway had, for all intents and purposes, emptied. “I should go.”
“Gwen,” he said, grabbing her arm as she tried to pass him. “This is important.”
“Yeah, well, so is this math class. I need to pass it to graduate.”
Rhein began to say something, but then he lowered his chin in a brief nod. “We’ll talk later,” he said.
***
She didn’t really do it to avoid Rhein. At least, she didn’t do it consciously.
Gwen slipped out of a side door of the school the moment the bell rang. She normally walked Cei to his track practice after school, but he was at a cross-country meet and had made her promise that she would go to the university and hang out with Tony after school. She got on the public bus with that intention, but somehow she failed to get off at the appropriate stop.
Instead, she rode all the way to downtown and the office of the Department of Children and Families.
It was time to get it over with.
He looked so achingly familiar, sitting there in his tiny office, talking too quickly into the phone. He couldn’t have known she was watching him. Kids weren’t allowed back here unless they were escorted by their social worker. But Gwen had snuck through the locked door when a worker escorted a big family through—what was one more?—and slipped away as they turned a corner. He couldn’t have known, but he seemed to just the same.
He looked up and met her eye. He wasn’t surprised. Wasn’t pleased, either. He was…accepting.
Paul ended his phone call and stood, untangling his long limbs from his cheap chair, and made his way slowly through the hallway to her.
“What are you doing here?”
“Tony says we need to talk.”
He glanced behind him, looking for a wayward office worker who might overhear their conversation. “Not here,” he said quietly as he turned back to her and gripped her upper arm.
Gwen yanked away, not ready to let him lead her around like she was a five-year-old.
“Not yet,” she said, turning toward him as she planted her feet and set her hands on her hips—every bit the defiant child. “I want to know the truth first.”
“Gwen,” he whispered, again glancing over his shoulder, “I could get fired.”
“Then you better tell me quick.”
“Tell you what?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Are you my father?”
Even she hadn’t been sure what she was going to say until it slipped out of her mouth. She could have asked him why he lied to her about knowing her mother. She could have asked what else he knew about the day she was abandoned in a restaurant parking lot. She could have insisted he tell her how the Langleys knew about her before she arrived on their doorsteps, or why he chose them specifically to be her foster parents. There were a lot of things she could have asked.
She hadn’t even admitted to herself that she knew he had to be her father. It made sense. The fact that he knew about her mother, that he wasn’t freaked out by the fact that Blodeuwedd was a Welsh goddess. It also seemed to fit that he knew the Langleys would know how to help her break that curse. Did he know about Cei, too? She assumed he did. Maybe even Rhein and Morgan as well.
And how would he know all this if he wasn’t a part of it somehow.
It was the only thing that made sense.
When the color drained from his face it made his eyes a deeper shade of green than his normal celery shade. A deeper shade that reminded Gwen of the green eyes she saw on a daily basis whenever she looked in the mirror. There was something about the shape of his nose, too, and the curls he was constantly disrupting in his never perfectly coifed hair.
“Gwen…”
“Just admit it.”
Paul studied her for a long moment, the emotion playing on his face slowly shifting from fear to anger to frustration into pride, admiration, affection. Maybe even love.
She wasn’t ready for that yet.
Gwen turned away and began a quick, stumbling walk toward the door, her boot catching on every little uneven patch in the carpet. She heard Paul return to his office and retrieve his suit jacket and slam the door before he rushed after her. Unfortunately, she had not made it very far before he again gripped her upper arm and turned her a new direction.
“You are not running away from me again.”
“No, that’s not really your style, now is it?” She glanced at him. “You’re more of a leave her in the parking lot of a restaurant kind of guy.”
Paul paled again, but he didn’t let go of her.
She was glad he didn’t.
Chapter 18
He took her to his apartment, a small efficiency not far f
rom the university campus. Gwen was not impressed with the décor—something like early ‘90s college dorm—with the tacky posters on the walls and the stacks of books against one wall. It looked like he might pick up any moment and move on.
Temporary. That’s how it felt.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“You can tell me how all this came about.”
Paul, who had been in the middle of slipping out of his tie, stopped moving as he studied her. The way he was holding his tie, it looking like he was thinking about hanging himself with it.
Gwen turned away, preferring to look at the crappy posters than him.
“Just like that?” he asked. “No preamble. Just jump right in to the story.”
“Just like that.” She tugged at the corner of one poster that was hanging crooked in its cheap, plastic frame. “I’ve waited fourteen years to know the truth. Don’t think I have the patience to wait much longer.”
“Okay,” he said quietly. But instead of beginning his story, he went into the tiny gallery kitchen and fixed himself a glass of water. From the sound of it, he downed the whole thing in one long gulp.
Gwen picked up one of the books stacked by the wall, surprised to find that it was a copy of Gone with the Wind. A first edition, according to the information on the title page.
Impressive.
She picked up another. A first edition To Kill a Mockingbird.
“They should be stored better than that, but I don’t have the means to do it right now.”
She turned, found him watching her from a casual stance against the far wall. He had finished removing his tie and had untucked his shirt. The look suited him.
“Where did you meet her?”
Paul ran his fingers through his hair—that same nervous habit—even as he continued to lean against the wall.
“A party,” he said. “A friend of mine threw a party on the beach. It got a little crazy, so I went for a walk along the shoreline and she just…she came out of nowhere.”
“Owls have a habit of doing that.”
He focused on Gwen for a moment, his eyes darkened again with emotion. “I didn’t know about that then.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
Paul pushed away from the wall and crossed to the couch, taking a seat as though he had decided this was going to be a long conversation. “She was just a girl. Told me she’d been at the party, but, like me, had gotten a little annoyed with the juvenile behavior. Everyone was drunk except the two of us…and the conversation had pretty much degraded to who could write their name the clearest in the sand with their urine.”
“Fun.”
“It was college. College in Palo Alto.”
“Stanford?”
Paul nodded. “Surprised?”
“Yes,” she said honestly.
“Far cry from social work,” he said, again dragging his fingers through his hair. “I was on the fast track to becoming a lawyer. Even had a partnership pretty much set in my father’s law practice. Just had to finish school and pass the bar and my life was planned out for me.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. And I was happy with it. The only thing I’d ever considered doing was the law.”
“How did you end up in social work?”
He looked at her, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he looked away, focused on his hands as he began to pick at his cuticles. “She said her name was Blu, like the color. We joked about her parents, how they must have been hippy want-to-bes.” He smiled with the memory. “We must have talked all night. I thought about it later, wondered if she had been watching me, if she had chosen me before she even spoke to me. I mean, it was pretty intense, it was a night like nothing else I had experienced up to that moment. But I still…I always wondered why she chose me when so much hung on what would happen that night.”
“You mean me.”
“Yes.” He sat back and stared at her, his gaze softening as he took in everything about her face, her hair that must have been so like her mother’s. At least, it wasn’t like his. His hair was more of a mousy brown than auburn.
When his gaze fell, he sighed. “I realized when I got back to my dorm that I never got her number, her address, or anything else. I had no idea how I was going to contact her again.” He shook his head. “The best night of my life and I forgot to ask if we would ever see each other again.”
“But you did.”
“I did.” He crossed his arms over his chest as though the memory gave him a chill. “She showed up at my dorm late one night…it was like after midnight, and my roommate was asleep. It was dark. I couldn’t really see her properly because she was wrapped up in this big, heavy coat. I didn’t even realize she was pregnant until she doubled over in pain.”
Gwen slipped over to a recliner he had stuffed in the far corner of the room, the farthest point from where he sat on the couch.
“She was in labor.”
“I wanted to take her to a hospital, but she said it was too dangerous. She said that I had to help her. But I couldn’t take her into my dorm room because we might have woken my roommate and then he would definitely have called the police. So I took her down to my car—”
“Your car?”
“Yeah. You were born on the backseat, my love.”
Gwen shook her head, not sure what bothered her the most, the idea of giving birth on a dirty car seat where other people have farted and done goodness knows what else, or the fact that he had called her his love.
She rubbed her palms on the thighs of her jeans. They were suddenly covered in a fine film of sweat.
“She handed you to me and said that she had to go, but that I should take care of you. I begged her not to leave, begged to let me take her to a doctor, but even as I was saying the words, I could see the blood flow was slowing and the tear that your head had caused was already beginning to knit itself back together. I guess that was the moment I knew there was something different about her.”
He leaned forward, again picking at his cuticles as he remembered the past. “She told me to keep you safe and to never take you to anyone who might reveal your true identity. I was pretty much convinced she was insane when she said that. I mean, who would want to hurt an innocent baby? So I took you to a hospital.”
“How did you explain me to them?”
He shrugged. “I told them the truth. That your mother was a one night stand who showed up on my doorstep with you. They checked you out and declared you perfectly healthy. But before they would let me take you home—which I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do at that point—they wanted me to talk to a social worker.”
“You didn’t want me even then?”
“No, Gwen,” he said, dragging his fingers through his hair again. She wanted to go over there and pull his hands away from his head, to make him stop. It made her want to do the same to her own hair and she really didn’t want to think they had anything in common other than DNA. “You have to understand that I was a college kid, six months from my undergraduate degree but with another three years of law school sitting over my head. What was I going to do with a kid?”
“You should have thought of that before conceiving me.” Gwen stood up and began to pace, nearly skinning her shin on the edge of his low coffee table. “Didn’t they teach you about condoms and all of that in high school all those years ago?”
A blush spread over Paul’s cheeks. “Don’t talk like that.”
“Like what?” She looked over at him. “You can’t possibly believe I’m innocent. Not after fourteen years in the foster care system.”
Paul shook his head. There was a flash of anger in his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. He just began working those cuticles again, like a manicure was the most important thing on his mind at the moment.
“Did the social worker take me away?”
“No,” he said after a moment’s silence. “She asked me a lot of questions before she finally convinced me to have
a paternity test run. While we waited, she told me that she’d been to see a lot of families in that emergency room and she could usually tell which ones really should not take their kids home and which should. She told me she could see that I wasn’t really all that interested in being a father, but that you would be better off with me than in the system. Said even an inexperienced parent was better than an indifferent parent.”
“That convinced you to take me?”
“That, and the way you stopped crying the moment she laid you in my arms.”
Gwen shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged. “I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m just telling a story, like you asked.”
There was so much affection in his voice. She didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to think that he cared about her. He abandoned her. No matter how sweet his story might sound, he abandoned her in the middle of a parking lot where someone could have run her over, or where a child molester might have grabbed her. How was that love?
“I took you home from the hospital and immediately set out to find an apartment. I couldn’t exactly take you back to the dorms, so I stayed with a friend until I found a place.” He sat back and studied her for a long second. “You were a great baby. Never cried, never caused much of a fuss. I would wake up in the morning and find you in your little basinet just smiling and staring at the world around you, as though you were just fascinated with it. And when I took you outside—it was like I had taken you to Disneyland or FAO Schwartz. You were in heaven.”
SONS of DON Page 29
