Breaking the Rules (Pushing the Limits 1.50)

She halfheartedly grins. “If that’s all you wanted to know, you could have asked Carrie or Joe or Keesha. All three of them know more than me. In fact, you have your mother’s family’s address in

your hands. Who better to ask than the source?”

I readjust, and the chair squeaks beneath me.

“But you didn’t do that. You called me. What’s going on, Noah?”

There’s a shifting inside me. Years of self-preservation fighting against the new trust formed with the head shrink. I scrub my face with my hands, hoping it will help win the war, but it’s still hard as hell to open my mouth.

“My mom ran away from them. At least that’s what Carrie and Joe said. And she never brought them up to me. In fact, she said they were dead, and she was an only child.”

“So your mother lied to you.”

“She didn’t,” I snap.

“She didn’t?”

She did, and I feel fucking betrayed. A strangled sound leaves my throat, and I lean forward. I feel betrayed and angry and pissed. “My mother never lied to me.”

Never lied and never downplayed. Not when one of our dogs died. Not when Grandma was diagnosed with stage-four cancer and then when Papa died of a broken heart six months after she passed. Never did my mother try to make a situation less than what it was.

* * *

Hurt is a part of life, Noah, she said to me when she held my hand at the hospital the last time I saw my grandmother. I’m not doing you any favors by shielding you from it. Besides, it’s always better to be honest.

“Tell me about your mom,” Mrs. Collins says when the silence must irritate her.

“She talked to me in Spanish.” Even when it pissed me off. She was a Spanish professor, and she was determined that I’d be as fluent as she was. “And she laughed a lot.”

My throat swells, and grief pulls at me. “She’d poke her head into my bedroom at night and tell me she loved me.” When I was younger, I used to say it back. Then somewhere along the way, I stopped.

I could throttle the guy I was then. My mother was there, in my room, night after night, and I never said the words back. Fuck me.

What’s worse, Mom told me she loved me before I left that night and told me to wake her when I got in. The opportunity was there. I could have opened my damned mouth and told her what I can’t tell her now. But I didn’t. Instead, I failed her. I failed her in the worst way possible.

I clear my throat and tug at the collar of my shirt as too much heat has built up around me. Fuck this. Just fuck this. “Do you know if it’s true? Did Mom’s family misunderstand? Did they think that Carrie and Joe were adopting me, too?”

Did they think I was being taken care of, or did they purposely leave me to rot in foster care? That coil forever ready to spring inside me twists one more time, and it’s like I’m racing toward an explosion.

“Noah, why does it matter now?”

“It does.”

“Why?”

I scoot to the edge of my chair and have to force myself not to fly out of it. “Because! What if they wanted me? What if someone fucking wanted me, and the system screwed it up?”

The door to the business center clicks open, and Echo hesitates when she spots me, then Mrs. Collins, on the screen. Faster than a jackrabbit, Echo spins to leave, and I swivel the chair to catch her. “Don’t go.”

The relief of seeing Echo makes me feel like a man teetering on the edge of hell only to be brought back to life. With the dinner I bought her in her hands, Echo’s eyes flicker between me and her computer screen. “I can come back.”

“Echo,” Mrs. Collins says, and my girl’s shoulders roll forward like she got caught shoplifting.

“Yes?”

“We still have a Skype appointment next week, correct?”

“Yep.”