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 aliases 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."

Both of her hands leap to her chest. "A fire?"

I could leave it at that and the conversation would be over. It was a tragic death by anyone's standards but more so because her only child refused to help her and left her alone, in a house that was falling apart at the seams with a full bottle of vodka, a package of cigarettes and a lighter.

I nod as I bow my head. "I went to see that afternoon. I took her to a store to get her some food. She wanted that and more."

"More?" Her brows rise. "What do you mean?"

"I gave her everything she needed to set that house ablaze. I gave her every reason not to live."

She stands and takes two large steps until she's in my lap. Her arms wrap around my neck as she presses her cheek to mine. "Don't do that, Crew. Don't blame yourself."

I tuck her closer to me, needing her strength to get the words out. "I hired someone to track her down. They found her in Kentucky."

She nods. "You went to see her?"

"I surprised her." I had to. The woman didn't own a phone. She was renting the house and barely getting by. "She had no idea who I was."

"She must have been in shock."

"She was." I squeeze her closer. "I told her I was her son and she looked at me. She saw the resemblance then. I saw it immediately when she opened the door."

"What happened then?" Her voice is strong and calm. She's everything I'm not right now.

"I offered to buy her dinner but she wanted food from the grocery store, so we went. I had a rental car."
She runs her fingers through my hair. "You took her home after that?"

Swallowing hard, I go on. "We had bags of food and a bottle of cheap booze. I got her the cigarettes she wanted and the lighter she needed."

She taps my shoulder. "I understand."

She does, but she doesn't. It's not as simple as a person dropping a lit cigarette onto a tattered old chair when they're in a drunken haze.

"I asked what else I could do to help her." I stop to kiss her shoulder. She let me dress her in one of my T-shirts and my sweatpants after we made love. I pulled on a pair too before I brought her out here.

"What did she say?" She pulls back to look at me.

"Money. She wanted money."

There's no surprise in her expression. How could there be? I wasn't shocked by the request when it left my birth mother's lips. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her I'd arrange for her to fly back to New York to enter a treatment facility." I look over at my kitchen, where I keep my courage in an aged bottle of scotch that I'm craving. "I promised her a job and a place to live if she cleaned herself up."

Her hand finds my face. "She didn't want that."

"She didn't want that or me," I correct her. "She told me that I should be grateful that she didn't terminate her pregnancy and that she deserved everything I owned for having to put up with me for three years. Then she threw me out and told me to go to hell."

Tears well in the corners of her beautiful blue eyes. "That's so wrong. It's so wrong."

"She died that night," I say matter-of-factly. "In a fire set by a lit cigarette that had fallen onto the chair she was sitting in."

"That's not on you, Crew. You gave her a chance. She didn't take it."

I know she's right. Nolan has drilled the same words into my brain for years. I held out a hand to the woman who gave me life, she slapped it away and wishing it was different, won't make it so.