Chapter 45
Crew
I slide a cup of coffee across the dining room table toward Adley. She took the day off. I didn't ask her to, but I heard her talking to Donovan. She explained that the man she loves lost his father. The words sounded foreign, the pain associated with them even more so.
How do you mourn someone who mourned your existence?
"How was your mom last night?" She asks as she takes a sip from the mug. I made it the way I always do for her, no milk, one cube of sugar and a small spoon next to it, so she can stir it herself.
"She's strong." I cup my hand around my mug. "She'll miss him. They were married a long time."
She swallows hard. "I know you, and your dad weren't close. I mean I assume that you weren't."
I didn't make a secret of the fact that my father wasn't on my list of favorite people. She'd heard me arguing with him on the phone in the past. She's watched me dodge any discussion of him since we met.
"It's still normal to grieve the loss." She glides her hand across the table to touch mine. "Do you want to talk about him?"
"He hated me because I wasn't his," I say it matter-of-factly. "I loved him despite that. Now he's gone."
She chews on the corner of her lip. "He was the luckiest man in the world."
"How so?" I raise a skeptical brow.
I won't fucking let her make him into a tortured saint who worked hard for his family. He chose work over everything and blood over promise. He was supposed to care for me, and he tried to destroy me instead.
"He got to be your dad, and even if he couldn't see it, that's a privilege that a lot of men would trade almost anything for."
She's too sweet for her own good. I'm grateful that she never met Eli. He didn't deserve the honor of meeting her.
It's fitting that he met Damaris. They were more alike than either would admit. She shoved my birth mother's death in my face whenever she could to break me down, and Eli reminded me of where I came from every opportunity he had.
"He died with a clear conscience." I take a mouthful of the now warm coffee. "I said my peace. He said his. It ended the way it needed to."
She stretches her legs. "What about your birth parents?"
"They've never been up for any parent of the year awards either."
She tosses me a look that says that she knows I'm deflecting the pain with humor. "My birth parents are both dead."
She visibly recoils from that. The cup in her hand shakes. "Both are gone?"
"My birth father died in a car accident. Speed killed him."
That's all there is to tell. I went to France to track him down since he lived under so many alias
es that it took years to rut to the bottom of the pile of fake identities. When I finally did, I was standing in a small graveyard on the outskirts of a charming town outside of Paris staring down at a tombstone with his real name on it.
"What about your birth mother?"
I scrub my hand over my face. It's been years. I've gone to therapy, thrown things against the wall, worked out until my hands bled, and yet the pain is still there whenever I talk about it.
Those conversations only happened with two people outside the safety of the therapist's office I visited weekly for a year after the night my birth mother died.
She wasn't in a comfortable hospital bed with the best care at her disposal. There weren’t family members huddled outside the door to her room, willing to do whatever they could to make her last hours more comfortable.
There was me, just me.
"She died in a fire."