TYLER (Blake Security Book 2) (10 page)

“Yeah, I’m alright.”

“You know who this kid is?”

“Yeah…apparently he’s not my brother, he’s my son.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Yeah, oh Jesus about sums it up.” I wasn’t sure how I was feeling at that moment. I had a son, which was exciting and terrifying. Ariana was hiding that fact from me. She knew how to get into the house. It had to be her who took the photos and emptied out the personal things in his room. I wondered if Sam knew too, and Michael. Shit. I took a deep breath and said, “What do you want to do about this Paulo?”

“What are you doing tonight?”

Asking Ariana why the hell she didn’t tell me I had a son.
“No plans,” I said.

“Can you meet my guy Leif in Nawlins at The Red Light?”

I looked at the time now. It was just after three. I had plenty of time to talk to Ariana before driving to New Orleans. “Yeah, I can do that. Just let me know what time.”

“Let me find out what shift Paulo is working. If he’s not working tonight, I’ll let you know that—otherwise, I’ll text you a time. I’ll give Leif your number, and I’ll text you his. I’ll have him text you when he gets there so you know who he is. He’ll have the rest of the details.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks Tyler—and I’m sorry you had to find out about your son like this.”

“Yeah, me too, but grateful you found out for me or I might have never known.” I ended the call and headed out to the Douglas house. For the first time ever, I felt a new emotion toward Ariana…anger.

ARIANA

              I did my best to calm down before I got there, but as soon as Max pulled open the door, I got angry again. “Is this my punishment?”

              He looked shocked and confused. “What?”

              “I take your son from you, so you keep mine from me?”

              The shocked, confused look changed to something akin to paranoia. He looked around behind me and said, “Come in, Tyler, please.”

              I followed him into the house. It looked almost identical to what I remembered from when I was a kid. I followed him into the living room, and just before we got there, I heard her voice. “Who was it Dad?” He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. She looked up then and saw me and her hazel eyes went wide. “Tyler…hi.”

              “Where is my son?”

              She looked at her dad and back to me. I was wearing a t-shirt with short sleeves and I saw her eyes wander down my heavily tattooed arms before they came back up and landed on my face. I expected her to lie, so I was surprised when she said, “He’s out riding his dirt bike. Dad, can you give us a minute?” Max looked at me as if he didn’t trust me enough to leave me alone with his daughter. Ariana saw it and said, “It’s fine, Daddy, please. Just let me know when Conner is home.” Max nodded and left the room. “Tyler sit down, please.”

              I didn’t want to sit. I wanted to pace. I wanted to put my fist into the mirror above the mantle where the photos of my son that should have been in my house now sat. But I forced myself to take a seat. “Why Ariana? I’ve lost everyone that ever meant anything to me. Why would you keep him from me?”

              “You walked away,” she said. “You left without saying good-bye, and none of us even knew where you were. We assumed after years of not seeing you that you were dead. I didn’t keep him from you, you weren’t here.”

              “Did anyone bother to look for me? What if I wasn’t okay? I was just a kid, why didn’t anyone come after me?”

              “My family was still grieving over Brandon. Your dad was grieving over your mother. You know how devastated he was. When you first left, we thought you would be back after you cooled off. When you didn’t come back, I went to your dad and asked for help to find you, but he was drinking too much at that time to do anything. It took a long time for me to convince him to get sober, and by that time, you’d been gone so long that the detective he hired found no traces of you. Maybe you were already in the military. I’m just guessing here, but those records would have to be harder to access than others.”

              “Was my son already born when you were looking for me? If you had found me, did you intend to let me be a part of his life?”

              She nodded. “After Conner was born, your dad changed.” I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want to hear her sing his praises just then. I was pissed at the world, even my dead father. She didn’t let it go, however. “He wanted to do right by him. I think he wanted to make up for all of the years he’d done wrong by you. He loved that boy with everything he had inside of him.”

              I knew the feelings of jealousy over my father not trying with me but being willing to try with Conner were stupid and immature. I tried to tamp them down, as I said, “You thought that after everything that happened to us, and all of the years I missed out on, that when I came back to town, the best thing to do would be to try and hide his existence from me, and mine from him? Do you think that I’m such a bad person that I don’t deserve to know my own son?”

              She stood up and wrung her hands. When she looked back at me, she had tears in her eyes. I resolved not to let it affect me. “I don’t know you any longer, Tyler. I don’t know what kind of person you are. It’s been seventeen years. People change, and above all else I have to protect my son.” I didn’t say anything, and she asked, “Do you have kids, Tyler?”

              “Just the one,” I told her sarcastically. The only emotions I was feeling at that moment had to do with feeling cheated out of one more thing in my life—and that made me angry. I wasn’t willing to let her off the hook so easily for taking my son’s entire life away from me.

              “He asked a lot of questions when he was a kid. There was no way we were going to tell him that you just walked out of our lives and never came back…so we made up a story. He thinks you’re dead, Tyler. I was shocked to see you at your dad’s funeral. I was shocked and scared to death. I had no idea how I was going to suddenly tell him that you were alive and you were here. I thought maybe if I kept you from knowing about him, you would leave again.”

“You wanted me to leave again?”

“Like I said, Tyler, the only thing on my mind at that point was protecting my child. Conner has seen lots of photos of you, but you look completely different now, so I didn’t believe he’d recognized you at the funeral.”

              “So you had Max whisk him away, and you weren’t going to tell him or me? I’ll just bet Max was happy to do it, too. Nice, you’re lying to us both.”

              The tears in her eyes were suddenly replaced by anger. “How dare you come in here acting all holier than thou? You left me! I was an eighteen-year-old mother. My mother resented me even more after that. Some days I cried all day long because I missed you so badly. Other days I looked for ways to get into trouble because I was just so hurt and angry. If it wasn’t for my dad and yours, I wouldn’t have made it. They were patient with me, and they helped me get through the rapidly changing moods that the pregnancy and hormones brought about. The more time that went by without getting a phone call or a letter or an email, the more convinced I was that you were dead. Or maybe that was what I believed simply because it hurt less than thinking you just didn’t want me enough to stay. Everything hurt back then, Tyler. Adjusting to my brother being gone and then you…it was overwhelming at times. I’m not complaining about raising Conner, mind you. He’s filled a void in my life that I didn’t even know existed.”

              “You didn’t want me,” I said softly. I knew it shouldn’t hurt as much as it did seventeen years later, but even saying it out loud now made my chest ache.

              “Are you kidding?” she said. “If that’s what you think, then you have no idea what you’re talking about. I wanted you more than I ever wanted anything in my life. I didn’t just want you Tyler, I needed you. I thought you needed me, too. We had so much loss all at once, and your idea of being there for me was walking away and disappearing.”

              “You looked at me that day at the cemetery like you hated me. I could hardly bear to see that look in your eyes. You said you wanted to know what happened that day with Brandon and me, but you never gave me a chance to explain.”

“You never tried,” she said. “You left.”

“My father threw me out of the house and my mother was dead. I was in the hospital for three days and you never came to see me one time, not once. You never came to offer your condolences for my loss. You never even took the time to yell at me for what happened to Brandon. I felt like I wasn’t even worth that much effort.”

              “You wanted effort from me? My brother was dead! My best friend for life was gone. I was having nightmares about how he must have suffered and I was watching my mother and father suffer. My mother never recovered from losing him. I’m sorry if you think it was selfish of me to not leave them when they needed me the most to go chasing after you. I called the hospital to check on you. I called Sam. You were going to be fine they both told me. At that point I just assumed I’d see you when you got out of the hospital and we would go from there.” The tears started to roll down her cheeks and she wiped them away angrily. “My whole life changed that day. I lost my boyfriend, my brother and my best friend. I lost life as I knew it. After Brandon died, every time I left the house my mother would freak out and think I wasn’t coming back. I didn’t like seeing her so scared and upset, so I just stayed at home and I kept telling myself that you’d come back for me…someday.”

              My rage was beginning to diminish and be replaced by that old familiar guilt again. I didn’t care for her mother, but I hated the thought of what Brandon’s death did to her. “I thought that you didn’t care. I thought that you hated me.”

              She looked like my Ariana when she said, “I could never hate you, but I was angry with you. I was angry with you for not explaining to me what happened that day. I was angry with you for leaving, and the longer you stayed gone, the angrier I got. But even while I fought through my own emotions about it, I made sure that Conner knew all of the good things about you. I made sure he was surrounded by things that reminded all of us of you. I made sure my parents didn’t say negative things about you in front of him, and I made sure that he had a relationship with your dad. But when you came back and I was faced with the real possibility of telling him that you weren’t dead and that I had lied to him, I panicked. I went in the house and I took or put away anything that I could, hoping you’d be in and out of town so quickly that you’d never notice. Tyler…I just can’t bear the thought of him being angry with me and not wanting anything to do with me. I don’t know how to explain that to you, Tyler. It’s a feeling that you’ll never understand unless…”

              “Unless I’m a parent.” It was a catch twenty-two.

              She sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes. I’m sorry, Tyler, I really am.”

              “So what do we do now?” I asked her.

              She looked at me with those big hazel eyes, the ones that I could never say no to, and she pleaded with me, “Please let me talk to him first. Let me try and explain to him why we lied.”

              “My dad went along with this? He told him I was dead, too?”

              She nodded, and more tears flowed down her cheeks. I guess Dad wasn’t really lying. He’d told me the night he kicked me out that I was dead to him. I guess he meant it. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

              I didn’t acknowledge her apology. I was still too angry. “I’ll give you one day, Ariana. You’ve already had a lifetime. Tomorrow, I get to meet my son, and if you haven’t told him the truth, I will.” I don’t know if she was going to agree or not. I couldn’t stand to be there any longer. I needed air. I turned on my heel and left her standing there. Brushing past Max in the hallway, I slammed out the door. As I was pulling out of the long driveway, I passed a kid on a dirt bike. My kid. I almost stopped him, but what would I say? I doubt that he would just take my word for things after his mother and grandparents had told him something different for years. So I just drove on, watching him in the rear view mirror and wondering what he was like. It was all just so incredibly surreal.

********

I was a bundle of nervous energy the rest of that day after I left Ariana. I spent a lot of time in that room, Conner’s room, and I tried to imagine what my dad might have been like as a grandfather. It was impossible for me. I’d spent so many years with the image of the drunk and the abuser in the forefront of my mind that it was hard to remember him sober and kind. From the looks of the room and the sound of Ariana’s voice when she talked about him, Conner knew a different man than I did.

Blake texted me to meet Leif at eleven at the bar in New Orleans. At nine, I showered and dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans. I hadn’t talked to Blake about weapons, but I had a bad feeling about this Paulo guy, so I tucked my gun into the waistband of my jeans. I got to the bar just before eleven. Leif had texted me to take a seat at the bar and not to go looking for him. The plan was for him to come on to this Paulo guy and see if he could get him to leave with him. When I walked in, I saw a young guy with dark skin behind the bar. He seemed to be flirting with a couple of college girls. I saw another guy sitting alone at the end of the bar. He gave me an almost imperceptive nod of his head. Leif, I presumed.

I took a seat and ordered a beer. Paulo sat it in front of me with a glass that I pushed aside and went back to cleaning glasses. I could see Leif out of the corner of my eye. He wasn’t a very big guy, maybe five ten or eleven. He had blonde hair and dark blue eyes and one of those grins that made him look completely innocent. I’d known a ton of guys like him in the army, and I’d be willing to bet he got whatever he wanted with that smile. Right now, he was using it on Paulo, the bartender. Paulo seemed to be flirting with a couple of college-aged girls who were sitting at the bar, but every once in a while he’d go over and see if Leif needed anything, and although I couldn’t see Paulo’s face when he looked at Leif, he had one hell of a smile when he turned back around.

I was on my second beer when the girls went over to sit at a table with their friends and Paulo turned his attention solely on Leif. If he wasn’t gay, he was definitely bi. I could hear him asking Leif his name and what he did for a living. In a thick southern accent Leif said, “I just got out of the service.”

“Wow, what branch?”

“I was a Green Beret.”

“Awesome,” Paulo said. He sounded impressed. “So you could kill me with your bare hands?”

Leif grinned and said, “You’d be surprised what I can do with my bare hands.” His tone was flirtatious, and Paulo laughed like he got the double entendre Leif had meant for him to get. I saw Paulo look around to see if they were alone. I stared down at my phone like I wasn’t paying attention, and then heard him whisper something to Leif. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it was obvious from his look what his intentions were. I heard Leif say, “I got all night.”