Chapter 17
Matt
Instead of going home and getting ready for a wedding party, I went home and got ready for a pity party. To do that, I dove straight into the refrigerator. Way in the back, I had a few bottles of beer, and much to my liver’s dismay, I chugged those as fast as possible, hoping they’d wipe the day away. Beer doesn’t really do that, so I spent a couple of hours bouncing between my bed and my bathroom instead of in a blissful haze of not caring.
At this point, I have nothing left to throw up and I’m tired of sulking. My stomach grumbles at me, but I have no real desire to make it feel better. My own reflection is pissing me off, and the only thing I want to do is bury myself deep inside Cadence. She wouldn’t let me down like this. She wouldn’t fuck my life up and explode it into the tiniest pieces I’ll never be able to put back together. She wouldn’t lie about a baby.
Who fucking does that? Goddammit.
No, I wasn’t ready to be a father. Not even close. I was a wreck. A young kid who thought he had everything figured out. Little did I know, I knew nothing at all and my whole world would be crushed thanks to a girl, an email, and a lie.
But I wanted that baby something fierce. I wanted a purpose. Something more than just me. Something to care for and focus on. Joyce and that baby were going to be it. But they weren’t. So my life took a different path and I found another kind of purpose: work. And one-night stands. Which were fulfilling in their own ways, but never fully. I’m a man who wants more than that, but I didn’t realize that until Cadence.
Or, rather, Cadence makes me want to be a different kind of man. She makes me want more than one-night stands. She makes me want her.
I’ve thought about her every day for the last year. Either I was hoping she’d be on my manifest or she was on my manifest and I was hoping I’d see her. Then I met her—really met her, not just said hi in passing—and she’s flawed and messed up and fucking fantastic. She has her issues and her bad days just like I do.
Together, though—that’s where the magic happens. Together, we can heal, just like we said. Together, we can overcome. Together, we can get through anything.
And I’d call her right now so we could do this together if it wouldn’t fuck her sister’s wedding day up. But it would. So…alone. I guess I have to do this alone.
I knock my head against the bathroom door, my stomach roiling. This whole thing is so messed up. I didn’t want to hurt Cadence because we’ve both been so hurt in the past. And I knew I’d hurt her if I let her in. But it’s only happening because, yet again, I was hurt. Joyce decimated me with a letter I shouldn’t have ever had to read.
She lied about the baby. There never even was a baby. This whole time, I’ve been a disaster of a person over a fake baby.
This time when I think about it, I start laughing. Hysterical, uncontrollable laughter spills out of me, and I curl up on the floor of my bathroom. Into the fetal position, which feels both fitting and oddly inappropriate for this situation.
Honestly, I want to get up. I want to get to whatever part of the wedding I haven’t missed and be there for Cadence. Give her the one thing I promised I’d do without a doubt. But the one thing I never saw coming—namely Joyce—hit me like a Mack truck today and my mind can’t wrap itself around what she said.
A fake baby. What the fuck.
I sigh and relax my tense, tight muscles. The coolness of the tile sends chills through me now that I can feel it, and I wish I were back in that bathtub with Cadence like I was earlier this week. Back when things weren’t beyond fucked up. Back when life was simpler and Joyce wasn’t ruining me. Again.
As I shiver, I tug on fistfuls of my hair. Then, before I pull it all out, I dig into my pocket and fish my cell phone out. I turned it off the second I left the coffee shop, not wanting to be bothered. Or, rather, I couldn’t be bothered to answer it after reading Joyce’s fucked-up apology-slash-confession letter. So I turn it back on now and hover over Cadence’s name in my contacts.
Then a slew of texts stream in, all from the woman herself.
Cadence: Hey, it’s a little after 3:30. Just checking to see where you are. I hope everything’s okay.
Cadence: It’s 3:45 now. Is everything okay?
Cadence: Did your meeting with Joyce not go well? Please let me know where you are.
Cadence: 3:59 and the wedding is going to start. Why aren’t you here? What happened?
Ugh, Christ. I fucked up and feel even more like shit now. But now’s not the time to disturb her with my shit though. She wants her own life, so maybe I should just let her have it. I shouldn’t bring her down with this drama. Because that’s all my life is. As soon as something good with the potential to be healthy walks into my life, the past sweeps it away in one fell swoop.
Instead, I find Aidan’s contact info and press the button to call him. He’ll talk some sense into me. Someone else will know what to do when I clearly have no fucking clue. But the phone rings and rings and he never picks up.
Fuck. I don’t think I have a choice anymore. I have to pull myself together, get dressed, and go to the one place I shouldn’t right now. The one place I’m dreading the most. The one place where I’ll have to confess and tell the truth. The one place where everything might fall apart.
So I reluctantly drag myself up off the floor and go.
∞∞∞
Cadence
“If you check your phone one more time,” my sister says, out of breath from being nearly nonstop on the dance floor. Everyone wants a turn with the bride.
“I don’t know what else to do, Gina. I’m sorry if I’m ruining your night,” I say sincerely. I’m beyond worried at this point, but I don’t want to put my sister out.
We’ve only been planning this day for a year now. The last thing I should do is a let a two-week-old kind-of relationship get in the way of this. But he won’t answer a text. He won’t pick up the phone. My heart pounds every time I get a notification. Yet it’s never him.
There’s nothing. Total radio silence. And nothing about this feels right.
Even on the days we didn’t communicate, I knew we were thinking about each other. So I have to chalk this up to Joyce. Something she did or said probably messed him up again. He wouldn’t miss this otherwise—he promised me “no matter what.” This never had anything to do with strings of any kind attached to anything.
Even though I’d give almost anything to attach them right now.
Gina huffs a breath out before snatching my phone from my hands.
“Hey! What are you doing?” I ask, stretching my arm out to take my phone back.
She holds it out of my reach. “I’m doing you a favor. Once and for all, we’re going to figure this out.” With her thumbs, she starts furiously typing on my screen.
“I’m not sure what your great plan is, but I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” I tell her, giving up and sitting back in my chair.
“Oh really?” she asks, bringing the phone to her ear. “Nothing I can do, huh?”
I fold my arms across my chest and wait for her plan to fall flat on its face. Except someone on the other line picks up.
“Hi, yes, I’m hoping you can help me. My package deliveryman has been the absolute best, and I was really hoping I could call to leave some glowing feedback on his behalf. Is there a way I can give you my address and you can tell me his name?”
After a few mmhms and uh-huhs, she gives the person my address.
“Matthew Kent?” she says into the phone, flashing her gaze at me. “Great. Well, he’s always on time, accommodating my delivery needs…” She quickly raises and lowers her eyebrows as she lists all the things Matthew is good at.
I roll my eyes at her, but she actually accomplished something with her ridiculous plan. We have his name. Matthew. Not Brian, though that would have been hysterical.
Then a throat clears to my right, my sister’s left. So we turn to see who it came from and find our mother standing next to us, impatiently tapping her toe.
Gina rushes to end the phone call. “Okay! Well, thanks! Bye!” Then she hangs up.
Mom puts a hand on her hip. “Does someone want to tell me why the bride is on the phone with someone, talking about how accommodating some other man is of her needs?” She throws her arms out to her sides. “And who is Matthew Kent?”
Gina lifts one finger to Mom. “One sec, Mom. I have one more phone call to make,” she says as she lifts the phone to her ear once again. “Hi. This might be a long shot, but can you tell me if a Matthew Kent is at your location right now?”
I hang on every word, hoping her magical plan hasn’t run its course yet.
“He is?” Gina squeals, looking at me, her eyes wide and expressive. She slaps my thigh a few times in her excitement. “Great! Thanks!” Again, she hangs the phone up. This time, she hands it to me. “He’s at Sunnyview Senior Care over on Oak.”
“Why do we care where a Matthew Kent is? Especially right now?” Mom is becoming impatient, but so am I now.
“He’s with his grandfather,” I mutter mostly to myself.
Gina heard me though. “Yeah. I figured he would be if he wasn’t blowing your phone up. At dinner, he sounded like he cared about him and visited him a lot. Luckily, we don’t have many options for nursing homes in this city.”
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Thank goodness one of us was thinking clearly. Rushing up, I rise to my feet and tuck my phone into the clutch I brought to the wedding.
Gina rises too, a big smile on her face. She puts her hand on my arm. “Go to him. And bring him back so he can properly meet us, okay?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I tell her, a small smile on my own lips. “Thanks for your help, sis. I’m sorry I’m going to—”
“Don’t even.” She waves me off. “This day couldn’t have happened without you, and that kind of love is worth missing the rest of this night for. You deserve it.”
Before I start crying, I wrap her up in a big embrace. “I couldn’t have done this without you, either. I love you,” I tell her on a sniffle.
“I love you too!” she coos in my ear, squeezing me hard.
Then another pair of arms snakes around us, and we both turn our heads and find our mother joining in on the hug.
“I don’t know why we’re hugging, but I love you girls too,” she tells us, tightening her embrace on us.
“We love you too, Mom,” we both say at the same time and then giggle.
When I break away from our hug, tears glisten in her Gina’s eyes. My mom looks confused, so she raises her eyebrows as a request for what the hell is going on.
“Basically,” Gina starts for me, “Brian is actually Matthew Kent, and he’s not here because—”
“Something with his past came up today,” I finish for Gina so she doesn’t make it sound like something it’s probably not. I’m still not sure what happened, but I don’t want my mom to think something bad about him before he gets a chance to set the record straight. “So I need to go make sure he’s okay, and Gina found out that he’s with his grandfather.”
“Ahh.” Mom nods knowingly. “Matthew, huh?”
I squint at her and tilt my head a little. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I knew there was no Brian when you first mentioned him,” she says, smirking, “so I was wondering if that was actually his name when you brought him to the house.”
My jaw falls wide open. “What?”
Next to me, Gina exclaims, “You did? And you didn’t tell me?”
“What was there to tell?” Mom asks Gina. “If I was wrong, I would have upset everyone. If I was right, I would have hurt you,” she says to me. “I knew you’d tell me the full story when you were ready, though I have to say that I thought you knew it and just weren’t telling.”
“There’s a lot I have to learn,” I admit, “but his name wasn’t that important when everything else made enough sense.”
My whole body deflates as I think of how badly I screwed this up with my family. But I don’t have time to think about it. I need to get him and bring him back. Either back here or back to life in general. We’ll see what I’m up against when I get there.
Mom puts her arms around me and rubs my back. “It’ll be okay. But you didn’t have to lie to make me happy, sweetie. I love you no matter what.”
“I love you too, Mom.” Then I leave her embrace and dab at my nose to see if it’s running. All this emotion is getting to me. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?” I ask, gathering my things.
My mom and my sister nod in unison.
“Go,” my mom says. “Call me though and tell me how it went.”
I give my mom a small, sad smile in acknowledgement. “I will.”
Gina grins like an idiot at me. “Go get your man!” she whisper-shouts at me.
Her smile is contagious, so I give her one back, but by the time I get to my car, I’m wondering what I’m going to find when I get to the nursing home. Will there be any pieces of the man I knew as Brian?
Or will Matthew Kent be a bunch of fragments thanks to a past that has destroyed him once again?