Gray
The thing about life is it can teach a person a lesson in less than a second. The faster the lesson, usually the harsher it is. I’m sure there’s some mathematical ratio somewhere to back this up. And this time was no different. One minute I was standing in the foyer at SBC talking with Beck. The next minute everything changed. Before I knew it I got knocked back by a one, two, three punch.
I was standing in the foyer at SBC talking with Beck about a new client’s wish list. The new receptionist Eli had hired was sitting at the front desk working on a crossword puzzle while chaos reigned around her. A client sat waiting by the window, Wyatt quietly made copies at the copy machine while Rhia made flirty eyes at him from the water cooler. Ash stood around looking like his case of the man flu had gotten worse. The only one missing was Eli.
“Don’t anyone move or the P.I. gets it.” A woman had entered holding Sinclair, our super-lame P.I., at gunpoint.
What kind of P.I. worth his credentials lets himself get held up at gunpoint? No, my heart didn’t start palpitating because the woman didn’t have a gun. I could tell it was just her finger. Which seemed even lamer for a P.I. to get held up at finger-point.
“What’s going on, Sinclair?” Beck took one step forward with Ash next to him, looking ready to squash any trouble.
“I believe I’ll ask the questions, thanks. Who the heck are you guys? You have five seconds to tell me who you are and what’s going on.” The woman poked Sinclair harder, drawing a growl. “Or your hired gun here gets it.”
“Just keep that up, woman, and I’ll forget everything my mama taught me about how to treat a lady,” Sinclair said.
“This big jerk says you bunch of losers may be my long-lost brothers. But I don’t have any long-lost brothers, so I figure it’s a scam of some sort,” the woman said.
It was official. We had a sister. I knew because the woman was the spitting image of Eli. She had Eli’s fair coloring. Her nose even had the same little crook his did. They could have been twins. Right down to the crazy behavior. I smiled. I hadn’t been sure about finding a long-lost sister at first, but this was looking like it could be fun. I liked this one.
She stood in front of a room full of strangers—tall, muscular strangers at that—and didn’t take any crap. She reminded me a little of the first time I met Tessa’s dog Sully. When he growled, grabbed my pants, and tugged like a vicious gnat.
“I quit.” The new receptionist stood from behind her desk, grabbed her purse from the file cabinet behind her, and backed toward the front door. “I thought I’d love this job on account of how good looking you Thornes are, but y’all are crazy. I can get my fix of good-looking men on TV. Crazy women holding men at gunpoint, people making out in closets, iguana lizards streaking down the hallway. Y’all don’t need a receptionist; you need Nurse Ratched. I’m out.” The woman backed out the front door and hightailed it to her car.
Iguana? I saw Wyatt and Rhia exchange a look. Right, because Rhia always had some stray animal in the office she was nursing back to health.
“Gentlemen, meet your sister Hope. I found her for you. Good luck. That’s all I’m saying.” If the frown on Sinclair’s face was supposed to intimidate our sister it didn’t seem to be working. “And that’s a finger in her pocket, not a gun.”
“You are such an asshole.” Her eyes narrowed, putting him in her sights as she withdrew her hand from her pocket and shot him with her finger gun.
Sue me; I laughed. This having a sister business was looking more fun by the minute.
“I’m an asshole?” He hunkered his six-foot-two stature until they were right in each other’s faces.
“Would it have hurt you to be a bit more effusive with information? You’re like a poker-faced secret service agent, only without the charm. Like the speak-no-evil monkey. Why not just wear a big ole piece of duct tape over your mouth?” She moved her gaze up and down Sinclair with distain.
“Lady, if I had any duct tape on me, I know exactly what I’d do with it. You just—never mind.” He swung his gaze over to us. “I’ll be in touch when I find Ryker.”
“Ryker? Who’s Ryker?” she asked, looking around at all of us.
“Our brother,” Wyatt said.
“Your brother,” Ash added.
“Oh, right. If I believed you, which I don’t.” She put her hands on her hips and notched up her chin in challenge. “I’ve never heard of you Thornes, and Lord knows I look nothing like you.”
“Well, that’s because Eli’s not here,” I said. Everyone except for Eli had figured he’d had a different father. Seeing Hope backed up that theory.
“How many of you are there?”
“Six.”
Hope’s eyes ran down the line of us, freezing on Wyatt.
“Which one are you?”
“Wyatt. The youngest. Was the youngest. I guess you are now.”
“Uh huh.” She kept staring at him, even moving closer and walking around him and giving both sides of his face a thorough examination.
Sinclair gave a grunt. “I’m out. I’ll call as soon as I’ve got a line on Ryker.”
Yeah, don’t think I’ll be holding my breath for that day.
“Oh, I believe I’ve got a line on Ryker,” Hope said, grabbing my attention and shocking me to the core.
“Bullshit.” Sinclair had frozen in his tracks and stood scowling at her.
Beck stepped forward. “I’ve been searching for him for over ten years. How in the hell would you have a line on a man you didn’t even know existed until five minutes ago?”
“Yeah, you want to explain?” Ash crossed his arms over his wide chest.
I’d crossed my arms over my chest, just like Ash. All of us had. We stood defensively, ready to either deal with her news or blast her if she was bullshitting us.
We’d been waiting for ten long years to fulfill Ryker’s vision of all of us finally together. Together living happy decent lives. Running a business together. That had been the dream that we’d clung to in order to make it through our ugly childhood of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. Even when the foster system had broken us up one last time, Ryker’s optimism had sustained us.
It felt every kind of wrong that we hadn’t found Ryker yet. He’d been our glue for so many years. I, for one, wouldn’t feel whole until we found him. Fulfilled the dream. Or, at the very least, knew he was safe and happy somewhere.
“What’s with all the hostility? Dudes, chill. Fine, maybe it wasn’t your missing brother.” Hope shrugged. “I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that I met a man who looks almost exactly like Wyatt here.”
In a blink it felt like I stood at the edge of a bottomless pit. I stepped right off into the fall. Because our sister Hope brought hope.
“When and where did this happen?” Sinclair had moved back until he stood in front of her.
She narrowed her eyes on Sinclair, then turned her attention to us. “Back home in Apache Junction. When? Maybe a month or two before my parents died.”
“Mom’s dead?” Wyatt asked.
I saw him look around, shocked at this new information. To be honest, I didn’t really care about the woman who’d run out on her six boys. Ryker was the one I cared about.
“I thought you knew.” She shot her gaze over to Sinclair. “What the hell, Sinclair? What kind of P.I. are you?”
“The kind who was trying to figure a way to tell them rather than just blurt it out with no care to their feelings.” Sinclair shot her a look. Looked like the P.I. was pissed. “Up until now, you’ve been unwilling to share a single piece of information with me, so forgive me if I didn’t consider the scenario where you’d just blurt it out like that.”
“What happened to your mother? To your parents?” Beck asked, his face like carved marble. “Your” not “our.”
Yep. I was totally with Beck on that one. Our mother had left us so long ago, she didn’t even feel like she was ours. I tried to maintain some sensitivity for Hope. And thankfully Eli wasn’t here. He’d always had some crazy pipe dream of us reuniting with her.
“Car accident. Near as the highway patrol can figure out is Dad got…uh…distracted, then a road runner darted in front of the car, he swerved, then overcorrected, went off the road, and slammed right into a Saguaro.”
“Shit. That’s awful,” Wyatt said.
“It is. But they died instantly and happy. So…”
“How do you know they died happy?” Ash asked.
“Because, apparently, Mom was giving him head.”
“That would explain the distraction,” I said. Sad, but seemingly fitting with our pitiful life story.
“Hope, I’m sorry to hear about your parents.” Wyatt nodded at her and she nodded back. “But could you tell us a little more about when Ryker visited?”
“Look, I don’t even know that you guys are who you say you are—let alone if the guy I met was your—”
“Where is she? I got Wyatt’s text. I got here as fast as I could.” Eli entered through the back entrance in a rush, the door slamming behind him. “Damn log truck turned over on the highway. Where’s our sister?”
“Well, holy crap,” Hope said, staring all big eyed and still at Eli. “It’s like looking into a mirror.”
“We look like identical twins.” Eli stood frozen. Only his gaze moved as he examined Hope. “Except you don’t have a beard.”
Five of us had dirty blond hair and some shade of blue or brown eyes. Only Eli had the white blond hair and light green eyes. And now Hope.
“So…wow. I have brothers. Six of you. And here I thought I was all alone after—”
“Oh, whoa, wait.” Wyatt interrupted Hope as quick as he could. “Eli, take a seat.”
I rolled the empty receptionist’s chair over, making sure Eli was sitting before we gave him the news about Mom. Mom and his possible father.
“Hey, Eli.” I settled my hand on his shoulder, giving him a light squeeze. “Hope just let us know that her parents passed away last year in a car accident.”
The smile fell off his face, and he glanced around at all of us. He closed his eyes for a few moments, then took a breath, opened his eyes and stood. “I’m sorry, Hope. I’m sorry for your loss. I really wanted to see our mother again. Maybe meet your father…find out if he was mine. I have a lot of questions about them.”
“Hang on, Eli,” Ash said. “Hope was just about to tell us about her meeting with Ryker.”
Hope shook her head. “No. I met him once. It was a couple of months before the accident. He came by the house. My father had just left for work. Mom answered the door, only she didn’t say anything. They stood there staring at each other for a long while until it got weird. I asked him who he was, and he said I should ask my mother. So I did…”
“What did she say?” Wyatt asked, fists clenched at his sides.
The silence in the room was because every one of us held our breaths, waiting to hear her response.
“She said ‘I can’t.’ Then she turned and walked away, telling me to close the front door.”
First punch.
How the fuck can a mother reject her child more than once? And Ryker? It killed me to think that Ry, the guy whose optimism got beaten out of him, had the strength to try one more time. And fuck her for rejecting him again.
“I’ll never forget the look in his eyes as he watched her walk away.” Hope blinked, her face stark. “First there was pain, but then his eyes went cold, colder than I’ve ever seen. That’s when he looked at me. He looked at me for the longest time, then handed me over a business card with a phone number. Nothing else, just the number. His eyes looked like the sky on a cold winter day. He said if I ever needed anything I should call him. And then he said, ‘Have a good life, Hope.’ And he walked away, and I never saw him again.”
Second punch.
Fuck me. I had to turn away from everybody because I was going to lose it. I leaned a hand against the wall while I got a fucking grip. Cold eyes? No. That wasn’t Ryker. Not ever. Not even at the end when he broke. And the fact that he was right there? Right in front of her? Fuck. I wanted to go back in time so I could be standing next to Hope when Ryker knocked on the door and tackle him. Tackle him to the ground so he wouldn’t run again. So I’d know where he was and that he was okay.
My heart clenched. And then it tripped up into painful palpitations.
“Did you call?” Sinclair said. “Not even after your parents died?”
“If some strange man handed you a card out of the blue and he looked like Rambo in First Blood, super intense, bordering on crazy—would you call?”
“Yes,” Eli said.
She hadn’t called. That wasn’t the punch yet.
“Hey, for all I knew he was just another weirdo, macho dude like Sinclair. Of course I didn’t call him.” She hit Sinclair with her annoyed gaze. “How was I supposed to guess he was my brother?”
“You weren’t. You did the safe thing.” Wyatt tried to ease the tension. “Did he really look like me?”
And I pulled in a breath. Had just gotten my heart rate under control. But see… Life still had to teach me that lesson.
“Uncanny. Hair, eye color, size. You two could be twins. Except for the scars.”
Third punch.
“What scars?” Beck’s voice shot out of his mouth like a sharply thrown knife.
“The whole left side of his face and neck…” We all saw the shadows in her eyes.
“Fuck.” Beck paced away and then back again, stopping with his hands on his hips and his head up to the ceiling. “God fucking damn.”
And then Beck left. Wyatt went after him. Eli sat still as a stone. Ash looked like he wanted to rip someone in half.
Me? I forgot how to breathe.
“I’m sorry. I thought you knew,” Hope said.
No, we hadn’t known.
That was the second my life exploded. That was my one-second lesson that life is a game of inches.
A split-second decision can hurt you and the people you love forever.
If Ryker could have waited, hung on, because six months later Beck had been granted custody. If I’d found some fucking courage and run with him—I’d have been with Ryker and we wouldn’t be worrying about where he was and if he was even alive.
I’d begged Ry to wait a day. I needed a day to think it through, for both of us to think it through. I’d even packed my bag that morning before school, hidden it in the hamper, ready to run with Ryker—but he didn’t get on the bus after school. He was already gone.
Ryker had needed me—he’d fuckin’ begged me—and I’d failed him. Worse was that it was the only damn thing I could ever remember Ryker asking me for. He’d never asked anyone for anything. He’d held it together. Half the time he held us together. I couldn’t count the number of times he’d kept us going. Come on! All we need is a little luck. I feel it; luck’s right around the corner.
We’d look at him and find a way to dig deeper because of him. He was always there for me. Took the blame and the beatings more than he should have. He said it was because he had a higher pain tolerance and it didn’t hurt him as much. Total bullshit. He just took it so I wouldn’t have to. Then he’d cry in the shower thinking I couldn’t hear him.
I’d failed him. It was the only time I ever saw something beyond fear in his eyes. He was afraid to go—but he was more afraid to stay.
I knew the minute I’d gotten home from school that day that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. Growing up with an abusive drunk of a father, you can believe over the years I’ve prayed. I’ve prayed on my knees. I’ve prayed hiding under my covers. I’ve prayed locked in a closet after being beaten for some transgression none of us could figure out.
But I have never prayed harder or longer than I did that night. Prayed Ryker would come back. That he’d sneak back in the window. Or at least stick his head in and say, “Come on, Gray, aren’t you coming?”
I needed to talk to Tessa. To tell her what the hell had happened. I even pulled out my phone and had my thumb ready to connect the call when a voice stopped me. Maybe it was in my head. Maybe my heart. Who did Ryker have? No one. Ryker had no one. The rest of us had each other. He had no one.
I slid my phone back away.
Because that was my fault. Until I knew Ryker was happy—I didn’t deserve to be happy.