Chapter 15

Blair

I scrubbed my eyes and stifled a yawn. The hall boards iced the undersides of my bare feet, and I shuddered. I’d woken up to an empty bed, and the lack of Samson’s warm body bothered me. It wasn’t just the heat; it was his presence I missed.

He’s probably gone to get something to snack on. We didn’t even have dinner.

My stomach rumbled agreement – the combination of Veuve Clicquot and the, uh, physical exercise had helped work up my appetite.

I trundled down the stairs, my steps masked by the gentle hum of the generator in the garage. A shout rang out and I froze, my foot halfway to the last step. I gripped the bannister and listened.

Voices from the living room? I turned my head. No, there was light in the kitchen, streaking out from the arch and lighting the parquet floor. I wriggled my nose and padded through the living room, bumped my toe on the edge of the sofa, and grunted under my breath.

Fuuuuuuuck.

How many times in one day would I bang this damn toe? At this rate, I’d end up in the hospital.

“You’re going to catch a fast wakeup call before Christmas is over, Mrs. Scott. I hope you realize that soon.”

I lifted my head. That was Samson’s voice – his smooth, sexy growl, except it’d been transformed into a tight snap.

“I won’t let her become a fuck up like her father,” Mom screeched in the next room.

My stomach dropped. What. The. Fuck? She didn’t know my father. I didn’t know him. It had never mattered according to her. I listened hard, my breath catching on every inhale, and my ears ringing.

“What?” Samson again.

“Her father.”

“You know who Blair’s father is?” My fake fiancé’s tone ground through the air.

“Yes,” my mother replied. “He was a loser. An artist wannabe, and I won’t let my daughter fall into the same trap.”

No. What? How? How does she know this? She told me – she told me –

“Blair doesn’t know who he is,” Samson replied, and the words came out squashed, compressed. They expanded in the space and filled my head. Suddenly, all the memories and hurt I’d hidden exploded in front of my eyes.

I’d never known. She’d said she had no idea, so we couldn’t look for him. That it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

“It doesn’t matter if she knows or not. He was a lowlife scumbag. I didn’t want my daughter exposed to someone like that. Someone who left me as soon as he found out I was pregnant,” Regina replied.

“You didn’t have the right to make that choice for her.”

“I’ll make whatever choice I deem necessary. She’s my daughter. My daughter!”

“She’s a fucking person, not a possession. You don’t get to own her, and you don’t get to decide,” Samson said, and his footsteps echoed across the tiles.

I snapped out of my reverie, stumbled back, and caught my heel on the edge of the coffee table. The pain of skin scraping, tearing, was nothing in comparison to the throbbing ache in my chest. It seared right through to my soul.

“Stop right there,” Mom yelled. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m going to find her and fucking tell her that you know who he is.”

“This is none of your business. It’s family business. You’re not family.”

“I’m going to be soon enough,” Samson said, without missing a beat and with such confidence it actually shook me. How could he act this well at a time like this? “Blair’s hurting because of you, you stupid woman. Do you realize that? She’s actually afraid of pursuing her dreams because of you.”

I couldn’t handle another second of this. I needed to think, to process, to pick over the words my mother had said.

He was a loser. An artist wannabe, and I won’t let my daughter fall into the same trap. The words reverberated in my mother’s voice. I spun on my now fucked heel and sprinted for the stairs, heedless of whether my steps were loud or not.

Away. I had to get away.

I jogged up the stairs and down the hall, past my shared room with Samson, the rumpled sheets and welcoming four-poster, past another guestroom, door closed. I halted in front of Mom’s door. It was ajar, revealing a sliver of light within. The messed sheets, purple velvet and black silk.

I placed my palm to the walnut panel and pushed it open.

Mom’s perfume wafted out. I choked back tears and stepped inside.

For the longest time, I’d pictured having a mother who didn’t just love me but cared enough that she’d stop all the crazy shit. All the flirting with ex-boyfriends like Carl, all the inappropriate comments about my appearance, or even the lack of support for my artistry.

I’d received none of that, and as there’d been no hope of ever finding or knowing my father, I’d lived with it.

But what would it be like to have two parents? What if my father was actually a good guy?

“A painter. She said he was a painter,” I whispered into the quiet.

I walked into my mother’s bedroom and toward the picture on her bedside table. An image of her and me – it’d been taken on the day before I left for Harvard. She beamed with pride, and I tried for a smile but it’d come off wan and terrified. Mom took center stage as usual, glorious in a barely opaque cotton dress.

My fingers itched. I moved toward the picture, picked it up, and weighed it in my palm. Heavy as my fucking regrets. I traced my fingers over the glass, then hefted the frame and whipped it at the wall.

An almighty shriek tore from my throat.

The frame smashed into the wall. Glass cracked, and shards flew, fell to the floor next to Mom’s grand armoire. I stared at the point of contact, at the picture that slipped from the wreck of the frame, one corner peeking at me.

And something else. Something yellow and faded.

What is that?

The walls inhaled and exhaled around me, a giant lung struggling to breathe, tissue blackened from internal rot. No, that was just the velveteen wallpaper she’d put up in mauve.

I blinked the image away and made for the frame. I shifted the glass aside with my fingertips, then picked up the yellow piece of paper.

“Not paper,” I muttered and bit my bottom lip.

It was waxy, and the yellow was from its age – a creamy color. Faded ink scrawled across the back in loping text. My mother’s handwriting.

Us. Summer 1990.

Again, the dark walls breathed. The date – six years before my birth – drove my blood pressure up. Fear settled around my shoulders.

I turned the paper over, and two faces smiled up at me from its front.

A beautiful woman, blonde and laughing. Regina Scott in her youth. Her arm encircled the trim swimmer’s waist of a handsome man with raven, curly hair, wild at his ears, and hazel eyes.

His smile twitched up at one corner, and he held my mother to his side with one arm, the other hand tucked into the front pocket of a pair of faded jeans, stained with splotches of paint – red, yellow, orange.

My vision zoomed in and out, grayed, and speckles drifted across the picture. I sat down, heavily. Held the picture in both hands, my thumbs bisecting the bottom border.

This was my father.

Not a hint of doubt. Nothing. Definitely him.

The man I’d never known, that I’d actually longed to meet, who I’d thought of as invisible, faceless, and here he was in front of me.

I touched his face, and a single tear dropped to the picture’s surface.

Footsteps thumped down the hall outside. “Blair?” Mom’s voice. “Blair, what are you –?” She cut off with a strangled yelp.

I swallowed hard but the lump in my throat refused to disappear.

“Blair, honey, put that down. Blair, look at me.”

“What’s going on?” Joseph’s unctuous tones. Fucking undertaker creep.

“Get out of here,” Regina hissed at him. “We need privacy.”

Joseph’s steps retreated.

“We?” I lifted my gaze from my father’s picture at last.

Mom held her silken-fur robe to her chest, arms folded across it. She entered, walking slowly, dragging her slippers. “Honey, we need to talk. It’s not what you think.”

“This is my father,” I said and flicked the picture up to give her a view of it.

Her face tightened, a hot flash of anger in those blue orbs. “Blair –”

“This is my father.” I scrambled to my feet and side-stepped the pile of glass. “This is my actual father.”

“Yes, fine,” Regina snapped. “It’s him.”

“Who the – how are you going to –?” I took a breath and steadied myself. Found my words. “Why didn’t you tell me about him? Why did you lie to me?”

“It wasn’t a lie so much as it was an omission,” Regina replied and squirmed a little. She opened her arms. “Oh, honey, you have to know that anything I’ve done has been for you. He knocked me up and left me in his tracks as soon as he found out the truth.”

“How do I know you’re not lying now?”

“Honey, please. I wouldn’t lie about that. Why would I?”

“Are you kidding?” I held the photo tight, and sweat gathered beneath my fingertips.

“All right, I can see why you wouldn’t want to trust me right now but you have to understand that I did this for you. I didn’t want you to get hurt. I couldn’t guarantee that he’d want to see you after he ran out. Understand?”

“I had the right to know,” I said and lifted the picture again, looking at my father. “He’s my dad.”

“He was nothing.”

“Then why did you keep his picture?” I asked. “You weren’t ever going to tell me, were you? So, why keep it?”

“I – I loved him once,” she replied. “We started dating in high school, and I made the stupid choice to be with him and travel, instead of going to study law at Harvard. I got knocked up and the rest is all in the past.”

“So, I held you back, and now you want to make sure that I do what you never could.”

“Honey, it’s not like that. I just want you to have a good future.”

Images of her flirting with Samson screamed into my brain. Her hand on him, leaning in. She’d flirted with my fiancé, knowingly, and had the gall to tell me she wanted what was best for me.

“He’s a painter,” I said and looked down at the picture. I traced him again, this figure who’d been nothing to me minutes ago and now meant everything in the world. “A painter like me.”

“He’s dead. Rick Stokes is dead.” The words burst from my mother.

My insides folded up into a tiny box and dropped through the fucking floor. “W-what?”

“He died,” she snapped. “A long time ago.”

“How long?”

“When you were ten years old. A heart attack. Probably from the inability to make ends meet. The stress of it.” She had no shame. None. Fuck all.

My hand trembled, and I swallowed one, two, three times. Dead. He was dead, and I’d never know him and this was her fault. It was literally my mother’s fault. I should’ve had the chance to know him, to hear the full story, but I never would thanks to her selfishness.

Regina took a step toward me.

I shoved my palm out. “No. No talking.” I walked past her and out into the hall, vision already blurred. I shoved the picture into my robe’s pocket.

A dark shape moved ahead of me, approached. The scent of black amber and cardamom hit my nose. Arms folded around me, and I sank into his chest.