Nash had told me he’d be home before eleven. After I put the kids to bed I couldn’t sit still so I embarked on an overzealous cleaning spree throughout the entire first floor of the old house.
All day my thoughts had been battling with each other and I still had no clear plan. Steve Brown was a family friend and a capable lawyer but I hesitated to involve him. Or anyone. Returning to Hawk Valley pregnant, alone, and without a degree had caused a ripple of gossip. I was Kathleen Doyle after all, the goody goody brainiac who left here with every intention of making a name for herself.
Instead I returned with nothing but a vague story about a failed relationship that didn’t begin to touch the truth. Emma was given my last name and I refused to list the father on the birth certificate. It wasn’t until I received a copy in the mail when the baby was six weeks old that I learned my mother had paid a visit to her friend in the county vital records office and changed my response.
The name Harrison Corbett stared back at me in bold typed letters.
“Stop howling, Kat. I was trying to protect you and Emma. You might change your mind someday and want child support.”
She meant well so I couldn’t be angry. She had no idea that the explanation I’d given her was missing some key elements, the largest of those being the name of Emma’s real father.
Cleaning was therapeutic. Getting on my knees and washing the hardwood floors by hand succeeded in calming the turmoil in my head. Roxie seemed offended when I booted her out of her corner so I could clean there. She watched me with puzzled doggy eyes and then plopped down in a huff when I set her soft bed down on a different area of the floor because it was already dry.
In the kitchen I discovered the crumpled piece of paper that had disturbed me so much this morning. It was exactly where I’d dropped it underneath the table. All day I’d avoided retrieving it because I knew I’d be unable to resist the pain of smoothing out the creases and looking at it again.
The three people in the picture were so young. Impossibly young. They hadn’t yet been touched by anything terrible and it showed in their arrogant smiles.
“Randall,” I whispered, touching his face and wishing I had the power to step through the web of time and warn him he only had a year to live. The game he played in that night was the last one before his knee injury. After that came the surgeries, and the addiction to pain medication, the desperate and futile effort to reclaim his life, and finally the fatal overdose.
I was about to tear the paper into tiny pieces so I couldn’t look at it anymore when I saw something in the bottom right hand corner. A phone number had been neatly written. It was probably the same one that had been left on unheard voicemails and listed at the bottom of discarded emails.
I snatched my cell phone and dialed before I had a chance to reconsider. The three rings took eternity and my heart thudded the entire time. He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Kathleen. About goddamn time you called me back.”
Hearing his voice after all this time immediately summoned a feeling that was something like being kicked in the chest.
“I’m only calling to order you to stay away from me,” I said coldly. “There will be legal consequences if you don’t.”
He sighed. “Can’t do that. I told you we needed to talk.”
I struggled to keep from shouting. I couldn’t wake up the children. “We do not need to talk! Stay away. Stop stalking me or I’ll have you arrested.”
He chuckled. “No you won’t.”
“The hell I won’t.”
“We’re not doing this over the phone, Kat. I’m here in town, staying at The Hawkian Hotel on Garner Avenue. You don’t need to tell me where you are. I already know. Expect me there in ten minutes.”
He ended the call, leaving me standing there in the kitchen, dumbfounded and staring at my silent phone as if it were a venomous snake. I could make good on my threat. I could call the police, claim he’d been stalking me, file a restraining order. But that would turn into a very ugly spectacle.
A car pulled up to the house ten minutes later. I wished I’d taken a moment away from my inner turmoil to throw on something more substantial than a long nightshirt with no shorts but it was too late. The moment was here. The only thing to do was to meet it head on.
I stepped out into the summer night to head off a knock on the door that would cause Roxie to erupt into a flurry of barking that was sure to wake the kids.
Even under the streetlights I could see that Harrison Corbett was as devilishly handsome as he was the night he pulled me out of a corner at a crowded party and made me his. But the joke was on me all along. To him, I was just one piece of a collection.
Harrison came around from the driver’s side and noticed me at standing on the cement walkway.
“Hi Kat,” he greeted me smoothly, as if we were friends instead of enemies.
“Stay there,” I warned, brandishing my cell phone from ten feet away as if were something else. Like a sword. Or a cattle prod. Something that would hurt if it touched him. “If you give me any reason to call the police I won’t hesitate.”
“Oh please,” he scoffed. “Enough with the fucking hysterics.”
“I don’t know what you want after all this time,” I told him. “But you’re not getting it.”
He laughed. “You think I’d make all this effort for you?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“I don’t want you, Kathleen. You’re not among my favorite memories.”
“Likewise, asshole.”
He didn’t care about the insult. He looked up at the house. “Whose place is that?”
“None of your business.”
“I know it’s not your house. You’ve been ignoring all my calls and emails so my only option was to come up here to deal with you in person. I was waiting for you at your apartment yesterday but when you finally did show up you didn’t stay and drove here instead.”
I remembered the creepy feeling I had on the way over here yesterday, that I was being followed. I took a step back.
“Is she in there?” Harrison asked and I went cold.
“Who?”
“The kid. Her name’s Emma, right?”
“Don’t you talk about her,” I whispered. “She is my daughter.”
“And what are you going to tell her when the day comes when she asks about her father?”
“Shut up.”
He advanced. “What are you going to tell her, Kathleen?”
“Shut up!”
He was right in my face now. “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO TELL HER?”
I pushed him, just to get him away. He was too close. If he’d been trying to intimidate me he’d succeeded. But Harrison wasn’t expecting me to strike out physically. He tried to step aside but lost his balance, grabbing onto my arm, perhaps on instinct, as he fell down on the front lawn. I fell with him. We landed in a pile of limbs and my nightshirt rode up over my waist, my bare legs slipping in the grass that was still wet from the automated sprinklers.
We were only sprawled there for perhaps two seconds but it was enough time for an overpowering spotlight to materialize out of nowhere and freeze us there on the lawn where we’d fallen.
I couldn’t tell where the light was coming from at first. Then the glare cut out abruptly and I blinked, seeing the shape of a moving truck in the street.
“Kat!” Nash roared and it seemed like he hurtled out of the truck, vaulted over the sidewalk and landed at my side in the space of a heartbeat.
I was still too stunned for words as he hauled me to my feet, inspecting me in the dim light with panic written all over his face. When he was satisfied I wasn’t bleeding and in one piece his panic morphed into rage. He turned it on the man who was now standing ten feet away.
“This is just fucking great,” Harrison muttered.
Nash shoved him. Much harder than I had. Harrison made a legitimate ‘oof’ sound and stumbled toward the sidewalk. The moment would have been comical if it weren’t so terrifying.
Harrison straightened up. Once a wide receiver on a university football team, he was still a physical force to be reckoned with. But given the muscles coiling in Nash’s arms and the murderous glint in his eye when he glared at Harrison, I’d put my money on him.
“Who the fuck are you?” Nash growled.
Harrison exhaled noisily. “I didn’t come here for this kind of trouble.”
“You have no idea what kind of trouble you just ran into, motherfucker.”
“Nash,” I said but he ignored me, keeping me behind him.
Harrison laughed. “I get it. You’re Kat’s pet guard dog.”
“I asked you who the fuck you are.”
“Nash!” I pulled on the sleeve of his t-shirt to get him to look at me. “This is Harrison Corbett. We, um, I mean I knew him in college.”
Realization dawned on Nash’s face. “He’s Emma’s father, isn’t he?”
“Aw hell,” Harrison swore. “You don’t stray very far from your lies do you, Kathleen?”
Nash snapped his fingers. “You shut your goddamn mouth.”
Harrison wouldn’t be silenced. “But she is known to stray from a man’s bed so be warned.”
“You bastard,” I hissed.
“You two-faced sneaky bitch,” he shot back.
Roxie barked from inside the house. It was a wonder none of the neighbors had heard all the racket yet.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Get out of here, Harrison, or I swear I’ll make sure you spend the night in jail.”
“Personally I’d rather make sure he spends the night in the hospital,” Nash growled.
I thought it was a small miracle that the two of them hadn’t come to blows yet. But this situation was ready to explode. I needed to get them apart before something did happen.
“I mean it,” I said and pointed to my phone as if I was getting ready to dial 911.
Harrison let out one last sigh. “We’re not done,” he warned, then got back into his stupid sports car and left.
Nash waited in a tense pose until Harrison’s taillights had turned the corner before reaching for me. “Are you okay?’
“I’m fine.”
“What the fuck happened?”
“We were having an argument.”
“And he just happened to knock you down?”
“No. That was an accident.”
Nash paused, put his hands on his hips and studied me with an expression I couldn’t read in the dark. “What the hell was he doing here? I mean, you haven’t seen him in years, right?”
“No, I haven’t seen him in years. He’s been trying to contact me for weeks and weeks though. Calling, emailing. I ignored him so he decided to come to town and confront me in person.”
“Because he wanted to see Emma?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then he wanted to see you?”
“No. I don’t think that’s it either.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he hates me.”
“Why?”
I lowered my head. “I screwed his brother.”
“What?”
I raised my head and said in a clear voice, “I screwed his brother. Randall was his name. That’s why Harrison hates me.”
Nash said nothing. He just stared at me.
I laughed suddenly, aware that I sounded like a maniac. “But that wasn’t the end of it. I got pregnant with Randall’s baby. And then he died. He was battling an addiction to pain meds, trying to get clean. I thought I could help him. But no one could help him and one night he swallowed too many pills and he fucking died!”
I had to stop because I couldn’t breathe properly. There was a pain in my gut, the memory of a wrenching grief that I’d never dealt with properly. And I wasn’t laughing anymore. Tears coursed down my cheeks now.
“I didn’t know what to do, where to turn. So I forgot every plan I ever had and came back here because I had only one thing left that mattered. Emma. I never told anyone the truth. Even Emma’s birth certificate is a lie. I’m not who you thought I was, Nash. And I know you think I’m repulsive now, that I’m this lying, scheming bitch and you’re right.” I sank down to the grass, gasping between sobs. “You’re right.”
“Kat.”
I heard his voice but I couldn’t respond. I was lost in the collapse of my own carefully constructed shield. I was broken. I couldn’t be fixed tonight.
“Kathleen.”
He was right there on the ground with me and I did not resist at all when I felt his arms pulling me toward the solid warmth of his chest. I stayed there until I was finished gasping out agonized sobs.