Things were passing between us as each of us tried to process the information that we’d been given. Out of all the signs that were blatantly right in front of us, I’d ignored them all. Now I felt like a complete and utter dumbass. Like I should’ve figured this out a very long time ago.
He was my Gabriel.
But he went by Malachi.
And now I was just seeing him in an altogether different light.
No longer was he just the sexy, dark, scary man that stood in the shadows at all of my brother’s parties. Now he was Gabriel—the man that I’d shared my deepest, darkest secrets with. The man that had been missing for two years and wrote me a few months ago and it was like no time had passed at all.
The man that had been caught and tortured as a prisoner of war.
The man that had a very good reason to be so scary and standoffish.
The man that was my dog’s first owner.
“Well, this is just great,” Sammy said as he clapped Malachi on the back. “But I have to go find something to eat for Hastings.”
He was a half-step in the direction of the food table when he whipped around.
A thought had occurred to him. “You knocked my sister up?”
Oh, boy.
Just when we were starting to make progress.
• • •MALACHI“That went… differently than I expected,” I admitted as I walked through the woods heading to my grans’—now also Sierra’s—place.
The woman next to me walked carefully through the woods with me, using her phone light for illumination.
I didn’t need the light.
I’d tracked through these woods for my entire life. I knew them like the back of my hand.
Not to mention the moon was so bright tonight that I could practically see everything for a hundred yards in front of me.
“You want to know what’s really wrong? The fact that I’ve been talking to you for years and didn’t even know it,” she countered. “How could I not know that? I even have your calendar photo up in my room right now! You’re freakin’ Mr. November!”
I thought about that for a long moment, then shrugged.
“We purposefully didn’t hand out that information,” I said. “Sure, did the thought of looking you up occur to me? Yes. But I liked our arrangement. I liked that I could talk to you about just about anything and you wouldn’t judge me. That the next time I saw you, you wouldn’t look at me with pity that my parents treated me like such shit.”
I looked down at Axe walking between us.
He was happy as a fuckin’ clam.
God, I’d missed him.
I owed her more information, though.
Information that she needed to really understand what had happened and how we’d missed something so big.
“I changed my name,” I admitted, returning my eyes to the house that I could see in the distance. “I started using my grandmother’s maiden name. Gnocchi. After everything that went down with my parents, I couldn’t look them in the eyes anymore, let alone have the same fucking name. So I changed it.” He paused. “And it was a big ass mess, me changing my name. I mean, I had to change everything. Driver’s license. Social security card. All my paperwork. Hell, if I’d been thinking straighter, I never would’ve done it.”
“And Malachi?” she asked softly.
“My first name,” I told her. “I told you that I went by my middle name. I don’t do that anymore, though. Not… after.”
Not after my parents had practically ruined my life.
That was to be expected, I guess.
I could see the wheels turning in her head, though.
“There’s more?” she guessed. “How did nobody else know this? I mean, why did you allow me to keep calling you Gabriel in all of your letters and texts?”
My head tilted slightly to the right. “Because I was always Gabriel to you. I didn’t want to be someone new with you. I wanted to be who I always was meant to be.” He paused. “And I didn’t really go about telling everyone about the name change. The only people who really knew were my grandmother and Luca. And with Luca losing his memory? My grandmother and me? We don’t show weakness. That means that anything that has to do with family, my grandmother is going to safeguard with her life. That means me, and why I changed my name.”
She looked away from me, almost as if she had so many questions whirling through her brain that it was hard to pick just one to ask me.
I waited patiently, then grinned when she practically leaped across the small bridge that I’d built for my grandmother to get over the creek safely.
Speaking of my grandmother…
“I think that my grandmother knew who you were the moment that she allowed you to rent my place,” I admitted. “She’d been waiting on me to move in there for years. That’s why it’s still vacant, and why she’s in the small house at all. She wants me to move back home.”