The point? He wanted to howl. The point is my son! A boy I didn’t know about. But if he said that, if those words came out of his mouth, he didn’t know what else would come out.
“What would have happened if I told you I was pregnant?” She asked.
“That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair. We were strangers. Would you have wanted a kid? A family?”
A kid. God. He’d never dreamed of having a child. He never thought he’d ever get close enough to someone to risk a baby. Sam had been the closest and he’d made sure they always were protected. Fat lot of good that did.
A flash of something, like a scene from a movie, or part of a dream that he didn’t quite remember, cut through his anger like a spotlight.
The three of them—him, Sam and the boy—around a table laden with food and Sam’s laughter.
A family.
And just as quickly he remembered his own family. The missing mother, the drunk father. The blood and tears.
That was what he knew about family. That’s the legacy he had for the boy and he didn’t want to give that to anyone.
“No,” he said and he watched her exhale like she’d been holding her breath. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you should have told me.”
“I know,” she whispered. “And I’m sorry.
Quickly, because his sanity depended on it, he hoisted his duffel bag onto his shoulder and muscled his way past her.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving,” he said, turning, briefly, one last time to see her. To memorize the curves of her face, the sun in her hair, the lies in her eyes. “I’ll send you the name of a good PI. Don’t call me again, Sam.”
6
J.D. could compartmentalize with the best of them. Drug lords, sociopaths, murderers—they had nothing on J.D.’s ability to take the horrors of his life, the things he’d seen and done, and prevent them from bleeding into his daily existence.
He could sleep like a baby after providing information that broke up a marriage.
He could make breakfast after sending a guy to the hospital.
He could look himself in the mirror after delivering a guy to a crime boss, effectively signing the man’s death warrant.
He could be a monster in the real world…and a different man at Serenity House.
It was a gift from his father, along with the color of his eyes and a temper like a powder keg.
The boy had J.D.’s eyes. The color was identical to his, to his father’s, to his grandfather’s. J.D. could only hope the boy didn’t get the temper that seemed to go with it.
Please, he thought, his stomach churning, don’t let him be like us. Let that kid be different.
Then, because he had to, he folded up the pain and the betrayal that Sam had served him on a silver platter and he shoved them deep into his head.
He locked them up tight with memories of dear old Dad and he drove carefully, obeying all traffic laws, toward the interstate.
It would take a while, he knew, to forget her. To forget the living, breathing nine-year-old piece of himself that was out in the world. To forget the man he’d been at Serenity House, the peace he’d found there. But he could do it.
Years of practice had helped him wipe out the memory of his father’s face, the smell of his own blood and the sound of metal bars slamming home behind him.
He knew it took time, and good solid locks on those memories he kept tucked away.
But right now, despite his steady foot on the gas, his hands shook. And sweat ran down the back of his neck in a cold annoying trickle.
Sam, he thought before he could stop himself. How could you do this?
The sound of his cell phone ringing cut through the silence of his car. Grateful for the distraction, he dug it out of the front pocket of his briefcase.
The number on the display was not Sam’s—not that he expected her to call—so he flipped it open.
“Jakos? Did you get my e-mail?” Greg Spili wasted no time with pleasantries, one of the very few reasons J.D. was still friends with the guy despite the fact that he called J.D. by his birth name, which was a huge pain in the ass.
“No,” J.D. said, wincing slightly. The Jane Doe situation. He’d totally forgotten. “I haven’t looked at my computer this morning. What’s happening?”
“It’s Christina Conti all right,” Greg said. “And we’ve got a situation.”
“Who’s we?” J.D. asked, a yawning pit opening in his stomach. “You and me? Or you and Uncle Sam?”
“You, me, Uncle Sam and whoever this friend of yours is who has her.”
J.D. shut his eyes briefly and swore without making a sound. He’d been afraid of this. And in the commotion of the morning he’d forgotten all about the very real threat bearing down on Sam and Serenity House.
Francis Conti. Crap.
“How big of a situation?” he asked. “Is Conti after Christina?”
“Not yet,” Greg said. “He still thinks Christina is visiting her sister at NYU. But the boyfriend has agreed to come in tonight.”
“For what?”
“For dinner, you ass. What do you think? He’s got information on Conti.”
J.D. pulled over to the side of the road before asking his question. “How does this involve me? Or my friend.”
“Are you being stupid on purpose?” Greg asked. “Because once this boy is off the streets, Conti is going to put two and two together, get five and come looking for Christina.”
That’s what J.D. had been afraid of, but the good times they didn’t stop rolling.
“And we need her,” Greg added. “We need Christina to stay put because once this boyfriend talks, we might be able to leverage her into talking, too. And we can’t do that if she runs again.”
“I can’t stop that,” J.D. said, wanting to fight the inevitable for as long as he could.
“No, you won’t stop it. It’s a choice. I’ve been telling you for years, that you’ve made your—”
“Weren’t we talking about the mob?” J.D. asked, grinding his teeth.
“Look, Jakos, if you won’t do it for the good of the girl, or for the United States government, or me…” He paused and J.D. didn’t say anything. Greg always put too much stock in their past. This friendship that Greg relentlessly held on to.
Greg sighed. “Do it for this friend of yours. This friend who found Christina. Because if Conti tracks his daughter to wherever your friend is, things are going to go real bad, real fast.”
Crap.
That’s what J.D. had been afraid of.
He couldn’t let Sam twist in the wind like this. Not with Conti threatening like a hurricane. No matter how much he hated her right now—and he did, he truly did—he didn’t hate her enough to want to see her dead. Or hurt.
J.D. checked his mirrors and pulled a U-turn, heading back to the shelter.
“This friend wouldn’t happen to be that woman, would it?” Greg asked. “The woman that runs the shelter? That you—”
“What’s the time frame?” J.D. interrupted. One night of too much ouzo with Greg and the bastard had all his secrets. His skin felt two sizes too small and he wanted to put his fist through something. Anything. Greg, preferably.
Greg sighed, but got back on task. “Boyfriend is coming in tonight. I can call you tomorrow morning. You should be off babysitting duty by the end of the weekend.”
J.D. hung up without saying anything else and tossed his phone onto the passenger seat. Babysitting.
Those compartments he kept all the messy details of his life in threatened to split, as his heart pounded hard against his chest, his rib cage getting battered with every surge of his blood.
He was going back to Sam. Christ, even after everything that happened, she was a magnet he couldn’t run from. But he wasn’t going back as the man she knew. That J.D. was gone. She’d come face-to-face with everything he’d tried to protect her from.
And the boy was there. The boy
with his eyes and Sam’s hair.
Curiosity, a bittersweet regret, welled up like tar, like poisonous gas. What was he like? J.D. wondered but then he squelched the desire to know.
The boy, like Sam, was nothing. J.D. had a job. A time frame and that was it.
And he repeated that mantra until his hands stopped shaking.
“You sure you don’t want to stay in our room?” Mom asked as Spence flopped down on one of the big comfy couches in the common area.
She looked around the room like there might be cockroaches in the bookshelves, or fleas on the two couches. He could tell she was just dying to coat the whole thing in that no-water soap stuff that she loved so much.
“Mom.” He sighed. “It’s cool.”
“What is?” she asked, blinking at him. She just had no clue.
“Being here,” he explained, twisting the wire of his notebook in the holes it was threaded through. He didn’t look at her face because he didn’t want to see how disappointed she was. “I like it here. It’s nice.”
Mom laughed and even though it was weak, Spence’s stomach relaxed. It had been a long time since he’d heard that sound at all, and he had to think that this road trip had been the right thing to do. He got answers and she laughed.
“I wouldn’t say nice, but it will do, I suppose.” She eyed him hard. “For a few days. That’s all. We can’t stay—”
“I know,” he told her, cutting off her lecture. But he didn’t know what she was in such a rush to get back to. Bed? Not work, since she hadn’t done that for six months. Their empty house? He hated the idea of going back there, with Dad’s shoes by the door and his magazines in the bathroom, and his smell everywhere.
She sat next to him, on the very edge of the couch, like if she sat all the way back something might rub off on her. “I’m really proud of you,” she said, stroking his hair, which he hated but he let her do it. “Have I told you that?”
Not recently. “Yep.”
“And I love you. Your dad loved you.”
Spence looked down at the miner on his note-book; he traced the edge of a green block with his thumb. “I know,” he whispered past the huge ball in his throat.
“Okay.” She sighed. “I’m going to go talk to Sam real quick and finish bringing in some stuff from the car. I need to make a few phone calls, too.”
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” he assured her. He was dying to open his notebook. He wanted to read what he’d written and add a few more questions to his “ask Sam later” list. Mrs. Brown, his therapist, told him that when he had questions for his dad that he should write a letter to him, which was sort of lame, considering Dad was dead. But, right now, it sounded like a good thing to do. There was so much he wanted to tell Dad. And Spence didn’t have any other way to do it.
Mom looked at him for a long time, something she’d been doing more and more of and it made him nervous. “Go, Mom,” he told her, unable to stand it any longer. “I’ll be fine.”
Finally she left and Spence sighed, flopping sideways on the couch.
“You okay, kid?” someone asked and he shot up.
“Who said that?”
“Me.” A skinny girl with dark hair stood up from behind the couch.
“Are you spying?” he asked. In the adult world, nothing was worse than spying. He’d gotten sent to his room more times than he could count for doing it. But he never realized what was wrong with it until right now.
His face felt hot and itchy when he thought of all the sappy things the girl must have heard.
“I didn’t mean to,” the girl said, leaning against the couch. “I was reading.” She lifted the big book she was reading and he caught the title. What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
Expecting what? he wondered. But then the girl stepped around the couch and he realized she was pregnant.
Following her was a giant black dog.
“Is that your dog?” he asked, pulling his feet up onto the couch in case the dog was hungry.
“No,” she said, then awkwardly patted the dog on the top of its giant head. “But she follows me.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere,” the girl answered. The pats turned into scratches and the dog’s mouth fell open. A giant tongue rolled out and the monster leaned against the girl. “She slept outside my door last night.”
“She?” he asked.
“Daisy,” the girl said. “Give her a pat. Don’t worry, she only looks mean.”
Right. Like Spence was going to believe that. But still he leaned across the couch, very carefully, and reached for the dog’s head. Daisy darted away for a moment and Spence froze, terrified. But then Daisy leaned forward and sniffed his hand, the whole thing. His fingers, his wrist, his palm, then that giant tongue came back out and licked Spence’s fingers.
“See?” the girl said, smiling a little. “She’s nice.”
Yeah, Spence thought, his heart beating like crazy. Nice and scary.
“You live here?” he asked. He’d never met a girl who lived in a shelter before. Why was she here? Why didn’t she live with her mom? Or the guy who got her pregnant? Why were her hands all splotchy with dark stuff?
“I’m staying here for a while,” she said, sitting on the far end of the couch. Daisy parked herself at the girl’s feet.
“Me, too,” he said. “Me and my mom.”
She nodded, but watched him out of the side of her eyes, like she had a bunch of questions, too.
“I’m not staying here, staying here,” he said, totally embarrassed because she was so pretty and still looking at him. “I mean, I have a home. That I live in. Usually.”
“Me, too,” she said, smiling. “Usually. I’m…ah… Jane.”
“I’m Spence,” he said. He wondered if he should reach out and shake her hand. That was what he was supposed to do when meeting a new person, but Jane didn’t seem interested and he’d already looked like a big enough dork.
She turned a few pages in her book and he opened his notebook, wondering if they were just going to sit here and read.
“So?” she asked, still flipping through pages of the book on her lap. “You okay?”
Yeah, jumped to his tongue, because that’s the answer he’d been giving to every teacher and doctor and nurse for the past six months. Yeah, he’d say. I’m fine. Yeah, he’d say. We’re okay.
He’d been lying each and every time and he wanted to stop. His father was dead. His mom was acting like a person he didn’t even know.
And what was really freaking him out, was Sam had a distant cousin who had Parkinson’s disease, and Spence wasn’t sure what that was but he bet he had it.
So, no. He wasn’t all right.
“Not really,” he said and with the words a big weight that had been sitting on his chest, making it hard to breathe, was gone.
The girl smiled with half her mouth. “Me, neither.”
Suddenly the front door opened with a wild bang and a man walked in, pausing slightly to look at Spence and the girl. He held a key in his hand.
It was the guy from earlier, the guy Sam had gone running after.
The guy with Spence’s eyes and nose and eyebrows.
The girl next to him sucked in a quick breath and tensed like she was going to run. Not Spence. He couldn’t have run if he had to. The guy was nailing him to the couch with those eyes. With his hard heavy look.
The guy flexed his jaw, like he was about to say something. He even opened his mouth, but then he shut it. Nodded real quick and left.
The girl sighed, her whole body relaxing into the brown couch. “Do you know that guy?” she asked.
Spence shook his head.
The girl whistled and shook her head. “He sure looks like you. I mean, those eyes, it’s weird.”
“Weird?” he whispered, thinking the exact same thing.
“He could…like…be your dad or something.”
Sam was trying desperately to get her life back on the rails it had been utterly bounced
off. It took superhuman effort not to go upstairs, medicate and crawl into bed. Start the whole day over tomorrow, pretend that none of this had happened.
Except Spence. She wasn’t about to pretend he wasn’t here. In fact, it was equally hard not to track him down and start asking some questions of her own. Are you happy? Do you like art? What happened to your dad? Why is your mother so cold and angry? Why does she hate me? Do you hate me?
All good questions, important questions. But Spence had looked as though he needed a break and Jennifer had looked about to break and Sam had a to-do list a mile long. So they’d all given each other some space.
The questions would have to wait. And her medicated vacation under her duvet would have to wait. Work was what was important right now. Work was always important.
She chewed on her thumbnail and looked down at a to-do list that used to make sense, but now seemed so removed from the present moment it was impossible to fathom when it was written, much less by whom.
Nowhere on the list did it mention getting to know her son. She’d also neglected to list “sleep with a stranger for ten years.” And it never occurred to her to add “lie to yourself about that stranger about a million times a day.”
Nope. Between calling the plumber, meeting with the accountant and interviewing day-care staff, she’d missed every important thing in her life.
How long had that been happening? How long had she been lost in the mayhem of running the shelter? She’d told Bob she didn’t want a family. Didn’t want a marriage, and she didn’t. She knew that. It was part of why she’d given up the baby. But how much of that decision was something she accepted as a byproduct of throwing her entire life into the shelter? And how much was truly her heart’s desire?
It was all so muddy right now. Confused. And her life wasn’t like that.
Shaken and frustrated, she pushed the list away. There was no concentrating on anything.
She’d muscled all thoughts of J.D. as far away as possible. She’d watched his car drive away until the brake lights vanished and she’d felt her life change, right then. A chapter over. Time to turn the page, start over. Start something new. A relationship with her son.
The Story Of Us: A Secret Baby Romance (Serenity House Book 1) Page 7
