“And just what in the fresh hell is this?”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes extravagantly at me. “It’s a cheeseburger, obviously. But sort of deconstructed.”
“Sort of?”
I was staring at a plate that featured what Cheyenne purported was a cheeseburger, but it was ground beef spread across the surface, drizzled with what looked like pepper jack cheese. To the side was a pair of crusty breadsticks. To the other side, all the traditional toppings a cheeseburger would have.
“Just try it,” she urged. “I’m not asking you to feature it. It’s just for fun.”
“I’m going to take all of this just-for-fun cooking out of your paycheck,” I groused, but dug in with gusto. No matter how strange her platings were, almost everything Cheyenne produced in the kitchen was delicious. We’d had the kitchen up and running for roughly a month now, with Cheyenne as head chef, and she delighted in making experiments to try and win me over to the weird side of cooking. She especially loved to change up the menu, organizing different kinds of feature days. I loved to complain about it if only to appreciate how beautiful she was when she was righteously outraged.
“So? What do you think?” She rubbed her hands together, excited, as she waited for my reaction.
“I just don’t understand why I have to do all the work to get the different parts of the burger into my mouth,” I complained.
“Oh, come on!”
“You know it’s delicious. You wouldn’t have let me try it if it wasn’t. It’s wonderful. Really.”
“You could have a hipster foods night at the bar,” she wheedled, her eyes shining with a devious light. “I could work with Brody to pair some super ridiculous beers with it. You know. Spaghetti with the noodles in one jar and the sauce in another. Sandwiches plated in sneakers. That kind of thing.”
“Do people actually eat sandwiches served in sneakers? Is that a thing?”
“It’s as trendy as black ice cream.”
“Black ice cream? Jesus Christ.”
“Stop blowing his mind, Cheyenne,” Chuck said, squeezing around her to sit in the booth with me. “James is as old school as they come on trendy things. Stubborn, too.”
“You think I haven’t noticed?” Cheyenne raised her eyebrows at me. “I’m going back to the kitchen to see what other foods I can destroy your love for.”
“Ouch,” I complained around a huge mouthful of her deconstructed burger. “As long as you leave beer out of it, I’m fine.”
“Oh, I was just going to talk to you about beer flights,” Cheyenne said as Brody slid into the bench. “Beer flights and appetizer pairings.”
I chewed on that idea for a moment as I gnawed on a breadstick. “Beer doesn’t fly.”
“Goddamn,” Brody said, sounding dazed. “Is this guy serious?”
“That’s it,” Cheyenne said, taking the plate back. “You’re done.”
“I was almost done,” I pointed out. “Still some cheese to smear up with the rest of that breadstick.”
“You don’t deserve the leftover cheese sauce,” she said, lofty, even as her eyes sparkled with mirth. “‘Beer doesn’t fly’? Really?”
“What are we talking about?” Sloan was here, which meant once Ace got here with Katie, we could start the Horizon club meeting.
“The fact that James doesn’t know what a beer flight is,” Brody said, resting his chin on his fist. “Unless he’s trolling all of us.”
“You’ll never know,” I vowed. I did know what a beer flight was. I wasn’t an idiot. I just liked to get a rise out of all of them sometimes. It was easier than they knew.
“We’re here,” Ace said, waving from the door, Katie at his heels. “Sorry we’re running a little late.”
“I will be taking refuge from official Horizon MC business in the kitchen with Amy,” Cheyenne said. “Let me know if anyone wants anything to eat.”
“Belay that,” I said, holding my hands up as everyone straightened up with excitement. Cheyenne just shook her head at me as she walked out. “Let’s get through with the meeting. I have somewhere I need to be later.”
“What is all this?” Katie asked, propping her fists on her hips. “What’s going on?”
I grinned at her, and extended my hand. “Have a seat.”
“Hell no.” She looked askance at the booth. “You’ve got it rigged with something. A whoopee cushion. You rubbed your balls all over it. Something. I don’t know.”
“You’re so paranoid,” I teased her. “Come on. We have good news.”
“Plus we’re all practically sitting on top of one another to be able to fit you in here,” Ace said. “Sit down. It’s fine.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you implying that my ass is too wide to fit in the booth?”
Sloan groaned. “Not a very graceful handling of the situation, brother.”
“Not what I meant!” Ace exclaimed. “Just that we’re going to maybe need a bigger booth.”
“That didn’t make it better!” she shouted.
“Someone take that shovel from Ace before he digs the hole too deep,” Chuck remarked. “Jesus, man.”
“How’s this,” Ace said. “Sit in my lap.”
“Oh, you son of a–”
“I like it when you sit in my lap.” He leered briefly at her. “But then you’ll know that there’s nothing wrong with the seat because I’m the seat.”
“Oh, there’s plenty wrong with you,” Katie muttered, but she perched precariously on Ace’s thighs. He looked somewhere between relieved and happy, snaking his arms around her waist as she slapped at his hands.
“Let’s call this meeting to order,” I said, knocking my beer bottle against the table.
“What… Is this a Horizon MC meeting?” She gaped at me.
“The prospect has not been invited to speak,” Brody pointed out.
Katie opened her mouth to retort, but Ace pinched her hip. She yelped and gave him a baleful look, but didn’t say anything else.
“This meeting has been called specially to vote on a matter of some importance,” I continued. “The addition of this chapter’s first female member, Kathryn Kelley.”
Her mouth fell open again, and I wished I’d had the foresight to hide Haley nearby to snap some photos of just how shocked Katie was. It was priceless.
“Is there anyone here who would speak in favor of voting in this prospective member?” I asked.
Ace’s hand flew up, and I nodded at him. “Katie – our prospective member – is maybe a better biker than I am. She’s poetry in motion on her motorcycle. Easy on the eyes, too.” She laughed behind her hand as Chuck’s hand flew up. I nodded.
“The prospective member has always had the club’s best interests in mind,” he pointed out. “She’s vouched for us in certain legal matters.”
“And turned a blind eye when things got hairy,” Brody threw in, no doubt remembering busting his knuckles on Nadine’s brother’s face during Thanksgiving. “But more than that, she’s stuck around when she could’ve moved on. Part of that might be due to an unfortunate fraternization with existing member Ace Black, but the other part has benefited Rio Seco and the region as a whole through her public service.”
“Okay,” I said. “Is there anyone here who would speak against this prospective member?”
Not one person raised their hand, so I did. The sigh around the table was fully collective, and Katie watched me warily, her lower lip sticking out a little.
“I would just like to say, for the record–”
“Come on, James.”
“Ace Black, you are out of order,” I said, trying not to laugh at him. “As I was saying, for the record, it should not have taken this long to add the prospective member to our ranks. She is obviously a valuable asset and will add many positive attributes to this club.”
Katie’s eyes were shining, goddamn her, and this was supposed to be much more fun than meaningful and moving, but there we were.
I coughed and continued. “So, if there are no other objections, let’s move to a vote. All those in favor of adding prospective member Kathryn Kelley to the club ranks, say ‘aye.’”
Everyone made a game of trying to shout louder than the person sitting next to them. Katie was loudest of all.
“Prospective member, you did not have a vote in this,” I said sternly, ruining the delivery with a grin. “But now you do. Welcome to Horizon MC.”
Katie launched herself out of Ace’s lap and into mine, hugging me tightly. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“A little overdue, but would you hate me if I told you it was kind of fun dragging it out?”
“I could never hate you. This is the happiest day of my life.”
“All’s well that ends well, right?”
“I’m going to gridlock every vote I can,” she said sweetly, squeezing me tight.
“I kind of suspected that.” I cleared my throat as Katie slid back into the booth next to Ace. “Motion to give the club president – me – broad veto powers on decisions reached by voting.”
“Denied,” Ace said, shaking his head at me.
“If there’s no more business, then,” I said briskly, “I move to adjourn. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Ace said, visibly relieved. “We should go on a ride to celebrate.”
“We’ll schedule it.”
“Not right now?”
“I have some business to attend to,” I explained, standing.
“Not club business, I hope,” Brody said.
“Or anything illegal,” Chuck joked, pointing exaggeratedly at Katie. “Consider our new member before you return to your evil ways.”
“You’re a comedian,” she said sweetly.
I shrugged. There was no reason to hide it. “I’m going to go meet with a lawyer to unravel some legal tangles, then see what I can do to convince my father that he didn’t lose a son.”
The booth was silent, everyone staring at me.
“Was that an overshare?” I asked.
“Thank you for sharing with us,” Sloan said immediately. “Be safe on the road. And with the lawyer.”
“And you can always talk to us about what’s going on in your life – all of us,” Ace emphasized.
“Thanks,” I said, and it stunned me again to realize that somehow, in some happy accident, I had ended up here in Rio Seco with the best friends a man could ever have. “See you all later.”
I followed my nose to the kitchen. It smelled amazing, as Amy had just loaded something into the fryer.
“What’s cooking?” I asked her.
“Deep frying some vegetables,” she said.
“What a waste of fried food.”
She grinned. “You could deep fry a shoe and it would taste delicious.”
“So does that mean you work here now?”
“It means I dabble in here from time to time.”
I shrugged. “I’ll take anything as long as it keeps me from doing actual work.”
“You’d love to work in the kitchen,” Amy said. “Cheyenne fosters creativity. I feel like breading and frying some vegetables? I do it.”
“As long as I get a taste of whatever you’re doing,” Cheyenne said, jotting something down.
“Ready to go?” I asked her.
She looked up from a notepad. “To your dad’s?”
“Yeah.” I looked closer. “What are you doing?”
“Just some recipe ideas,” she said, tapping a pencil against the paper. “I know we decided we just wanted regular bar food, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be back here cooking frozen burgers and lowering frozen chicken fingers into the fryer.”
“Are you going to be to the food, what Brody is to the beer?”
“Brody likes quality products. So do I.”
“I am just going to start hemorrhaging money at this place, aren’t I?”
“If you cook and pour it, they will come,” she intoned. “The right food and beer, anyway. Quit your bellyaching. You’re just putting off going to your dad’s.”
“Maybe I am. That, and the lawyer.”
“The lawyer’s going to be fine.”
“What I did was illegal, Cheyenne.”
“Sure, if you’d had intent. But there was no real way for you to know what you were doing. Any doctor can attest to that.”
“But before…”
“Before, you were planning something, sure. But at the last minute, you swerved away from that path. You tried to do the right thing. It just went wrong.”
“If you say so.”
“James.” She put her arms around my waist, hugging me tightly, but it was still strange to hear that name come from her lips. “I didn’t say so. You did. You have memory of that.”
“I just…” I stroked her hair, trying to buy myself the time to figure out what to say. “How can I know they’re real memories? What if it was just some delusion I created to make myself feel better?”
“You have to learn to trust your own mind. When you said your memories were back, it was because they were. You know what’s real. And right before that explosion, you tried to save your cousin.”
“I wish I felt as sure about it as you sound.”
“It’ll just take time.” She looked around at the clock on the wall and grimaced. “Time we don’t have. We’re going to be late if we don’t hurry up.”
It was just an excuse to take the roads fast and furious, Cheyenne’s arms around me acting as an anchor, reminding me why I was doing all this in the first place. If I had lost the chance to do right in the past, good intentions torn away by circumstance before I could make things better, then I had to do it now. I couldn’t go on living a lie. If there were consequences I needed to face, now was the time.
“You’re going to be okay,” Cheyenne assured me as we walked inside the lawyer’s office, right on time.
“I just want to get this over with.”
“And it’s fine to feel like that.”
I snorted at her. “Have you been reading self-help books?”
“More like help other people books, but yes.” She smiled at me. “Just trying to be supportive. Is it working?”
“I love you.”
“Ah.” She let me kiss her a couple of times before leaning back. “It’s working, but you still have to sit down with that lawyer.”
“I thought I might be able to distract you and miss the appointment.”
“It almost worked.”
The meeting went well. I explained everything, showed every document I had, medical and military, to the lawyer, gave him lists of people who could vouch for me during the time I truly thought I was my cousin, and simply sat back and waited.
“That’s a hell of a story, you know,” he said.
“I know.”
“You thinking about writing a book?”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’d be a bestseller, I think.” He loosened his tie. “I mean, I was riveted.”
“I hope so. You’re supposed to be helping me figure all of this out.”
“I mean beyond me paying attention,” the lawyer said, laughing. “It’s an interesting story, is all I’m saying.”
“I get it.”
“So what are you aiming to do?”
I shrugged. “Straighten things out. Change my name back to James. Pay any restitutions I might need to for my uncle’s life insurance policy payout. Figure out if anybody is going to sue me and prepare for that.”
“Mr. Ryder, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I intended to.”
“I am sure every person in this wide world has intended to do something nefarious at some point in their lives – well, if not intended, then at least thought of it. The bottom line is that you didn’t. At the end, you tried to save your cousin. The intent was no longer there. And when you woke up and didn’t have any memories from before the explosion, it was doctors and nurses who told you that you were Jack Ryder. You accepted it because you didn’t know any better.”
“They told me I was my cousin because I had prepared for that. I got the same tattoo he did.”
“There should’ve been some other way to verify your identity. A DNA sample. Fingerprints, even. They shouldn’t have assumed. Would’ve saved you a lot of heartache.”
“Maybe.”
The lawyer leaned over the desk, clasping his hands. “Well, the good news is that while Jack Ryder was his father’s beneficiary, you are your cousin’s beneficiary.”
I blinked rapidly. “Wait, what?”
“When you believed you were Jack Ryder, you received the payout,” the lawyer told me. “But when you realized Jack Ryder was dead, the payout for James Ryder was still correct – in a roundabout way.”
I sat back, dumbfounded. “I can’t believe my cousin would’ve done that.”
“Done what?”
“Named me as his beneficiary. After everything I did…everything I was planning to do.”
“Your cousin seemed to recognize the good in you.” The lawyer reached across the desk and patted my shoulder. “Maybe it’s time you started to do that, too.”
I walked out of the office more confused than when I went in.
“What’s wrong?” Cheyenne asked, frowning at whatever expression she saw on my face.
“Nothing is.”
“You can tell me, James. Just talk to me.”
“I’m saying that’s what wrong – that nothing is. Everything is straightened out. Jack ended up naming me as his beneficiary, so the payout was correct.”
“That’s great news,” she said, looping her arm through mine. “Why don’t you look happy about it?”
“I expected to go to jail,” I explained. “For fraud, or identity theft.”
“You had no way of knowing that what you were doing was wrong.”
“I expected to at least have to give the money back.”
“It was your money. Even if it went on some twists and turns.”
“Why did he name me his beneficiary?”
“Because he loved you.”
I shook my head harshly, feeling like one big exposed nerve ending. “He shouldn’t have trusted me.”
“But he did.”
“He was an idiot.”
“James, can I tell you something?”
“You can tell me anything.”
“Family was important to Jack. You were important to him. That’s why he loved you. Why you were his beneficiary.”
“But it’s all wrong. I wanted to kill him. To take his identity. He was a fool if he trusted me.”
“You can’t think like that anymore. What you wanted to do in the past and what actually happened are two different things. You have to let it go.”
“I…” God, even my words were failing me now. I didn’t know what to say to that. Was that something I could do? Let go of the bad parts of the past, even if I had only just now gotten all my memories back? It was too easy to glom on to the horrors, to guard everything like a dragon over rotting treasure. It was mine. I had lost it, but then I’d gotten it back, and it was mine.
“James?”
“Sorry. Yeah?”
“Can you try to let it go?”
I sighed and kissed the top of Cheyenne’s head. “Yeah. I can try.”
She peered up at me. “Have you ever stopped and wondered why you’ve been doing so many good things for Rio Seco?”
“What?”
“With Horizon MC and all the fundraisers it organizes. James – the James I knew, anyway, before you and Jack shipped out with the Army Rangers – would’ve never put forth the effort to do charity work. It wasn’t that he – well, you – was a bad person. You just didn’t care that much.”
“Cheyenne, you can’t keep separating the James before the explosion and me now. I’m the same person.”
“You feel different. I think you changed. People can do that, you know. Change.”
“Are you sure?”
Her arms tightened around me. “Of course I’m sure. I think that somewhere, deep down, you knew that you really wanted to do good. That you wanted to make things right, for some reason. Why else would you care about all of your pet projects so much? I’m telling you, James, that you’ve changed. For the better, even.”
The ride to my father’s house was surprisingly swift, but it probably spoke a lot to the dread I was feeling at telling him the truth about things. That I was his son. His son who had never died in a terrible ambush and explosion. He needed to know. It wasn’t something I was about to hide from him. But at the same time, I was deeply afraid that maybe he had gotten used to not having a son. We’d never gotten along. Maybe it was something of a relief for him that he didn’t have to be disappointed by me anymore.
It was a stupid thing to be afraid of. I knew my father was broken up by everything that had happened. But it was in the realm of possibilities that he wouldn’t exactly be happy that I was back from the dead, so to speak. In death, I was a war hero. In life, things were much more complicated than that. Uglier.
I parked the motorcycle on the curb, in front of the house, pointing it to the exit of the subdivision in case we needed to make a quick getaway.
“You’re going to be fine,” Cheyenne said. “This is the final hard thing you have to do.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have saved it for last,” I mused.
“You got a good chance to practice on the Horizon guys and me beforehand,” she reminded me. “Now you know what to say.”
But I didn’t. Not really. The relationship I had with my father was so much more complicated than the relationship I had with my friends. Even the relationship I had with Cheyenne made more sense to me. It was simpler, in some ways. Things with my father, though, had never been straightforward.
“Just knock on the door,” Cheyenne whispered in my ear, and I realized I had been standing at the front door for God only knew how long.
The look on my father’s face was the same as it always was – hope, dashed quickly as he remembered that his son was dead but his nephew was alive. How was he going to take me telling him that he had been right all this time, that he thought I looked like his son because I was?
“Is this a good time?” I asked, even with the knowledge that I’d called him before to ask to swing by. I just wanted an excuse to put this off. “Because I can always come back, if it’s not.”
“All I have is time,” he said, gruff as always. “I guess now is as good a time as any.”
If I was different, now, he was different, too. Older. He’d lost a lot. Was it going to change him to know that he could get back some of what he’d lost?
“There’s someone here I’d like you to meet,” I said, stepping aside, drawing Cheyenne to me. “This is–”
“I know who this is,” he told me in a tone of quiet outrage. “I’ve seen her on your arm often enough. It’s been a while, though.”
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Ryder,” Cheyenne said politely, holding out her hand. “It has been a long time.”
“You’re as pretty as you’ve always been,” he said, ever the gentleman, shaking her hand gently. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I have some things I need to discuss with you,” I said.
“Some pretty important things,” Cheyenne added. “Which is why I’m going to be planted in this porch swing until you’re finished.”
“Cheyenne–”
“No arguments,” she said, grinning as she sauntered over to the swing and made good on her vow. “I’ll just be right outside.”
I knew she was right to do that, that what I had to discuss with my father was a private matter, but that didn’t stop me from wishing she would’ve just come inside with me and at least sat beside me while I slogged through the mess this was going to be.
“Can I get you something to drink?” my father asked. “It’s getting to be a little warm out here, especially with the sun.”
“Maybe that means spring will come early this year,” Cheyenne pointed out. “But no thanks. I’m all right. You all better get on inside and figure all of this out.”
My father raised his eyebrow at me as I walked in, shaking my head.
“You going to ask my blessing to marry her, or what?” he asked, closing the door behind him. “Because I’d say snap that up. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission. That girl’s too good to let get away.”
“That’s…” I paused to cough, aware that my face was almost painfully flushed. “That’s not why I’m here, actually.”
“Then spit it out.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I want something to drink?”
“You’re just stalling.”
“So were you, offering Cheyenne a drink.”
“Well. Like uncle, like nephew, then.”
There was another saying that would’ve made even more sense than that, but I didn’t want to just spring it on him.
“Let’s sit down,” I said, pointing toward the living room. The television in there was still flickering, tuned to a re-airing of a basketball game that was on a couple of nights ago, though the volume was muted.
“Go ahead and get this over with, whatever it is,” he said, rocking back in his recliner as I perched on the edge of the couch. “You’re killing me with the suspense.”
“You told me, the last time I saw you, that you were as healthy as a horse. Is that still true?”
“There’s not a thing wrong with me. That’s what all the doctors say.”
“No heart troubles?”
“No. What’s this about?”
“I’m trying to warn you that what I’m about to tell you is…shocking. To say the least.”
“I’ve had all the shocks a man could stand to have and then some. I’m still here.”
Inhale. Exhale. I could do this. I had to do this. “I regained my memories.”
His eyes widened. “Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“The doctors said there was only a small chance of that happening, didn’t they?”
“They did. But it happened all the same.”
“So you can remember what happened, then? You can remember James?”
He looked so hopeful that it made me feel ugly inside. I hadn’t loved this man very much, and it often felt like he didn’t care for me at all. That I was a thorn in his side. Something to be ashamed of, when his own brother had fathered a son who was a better man, all around. What would it be like to have him as a father again? Would anything change?
“I do remember James,” I said carefully. “I remember him quite well.”
“Are you up to talking about him?”
“That’s why I came here,” I said. “To talk. About this. About me. And you. Us.”
I was really flailing through this, but it was hard to know the right way to do it. There probably wasn’t a right way. I just had to try and break the news as gently as possible.
“Say what you came here to say,” my father said, drawing himself up. I recognized this body language. Even as his spine straightened, he was retreating inward. Protecting himself from what he thought was bad news. Some message from beyond the grave that his son had once again disappointed him. And maybe that would still be true. Maybe I would still be a disappointment. But he deserved to know that I was still alive. That was something.
“The thing is, I regained my memories when I found an old journal, here in this house,” I said. “The last time I was here.”
“Is that a fact?” I could practically hear the cogs turning in his mind as he weighed this revelation. “I wonder what triggered it. Any idea?”
“Yeah. I do have an idea or two about it.” Inhale. Exhale. “I think it took me so long to get my memories back because I was busy trying to remember the wrong person. I spent too much time comparing myself to Jack and trying to be him that it had shut out any possibility of being James.”
“I’m confused. I don’t…you’re confusing me. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“I’m trying to say that when I woke up after the blast that killed my cousin, the doctors told me I was Jack Ryder, and I believed them because I thought I could defer to them. Because I had no memory of being anyone, and they all seemed so sure.”
“Are you…are you not Jack Ryder?”
I shook my head. “I’m James. James Ryder. I’m your son.”
He gaped at me, and we sat in silence for a long time, longer than was probably necessary, but I wasn’t sure how anything else I said would be received. He’d promised that he didn’t have any health issues, but there was probably only so much someone his age could take.
“I messed up on a lot of things–”
“I knew you were my son,” my father said, his voice raw with emotion. “Every time I saw you, once you came back. It didn’t make sense. You and Jack had always looked so alike. But I knew you were mine, even if my brain told me it wasn’t possible.”
“I stayed away from you when I still thought I was Jack,” I said. “Because I knew you thought I was James – well, me. And I couldn’t stand to hurt you like that, to show you this face when you were still grieving. I knew it hurt you.”
“Is it even possible? Can you really be James?”
“I got fingerprinted, a DNA test, too, after my memories returned. Just to be sure. I’m James Ryder.”
“My son.” He stood slowly, looking like every single one of his years weighed heavily on him, and shuffled over to me. I stood, too, quickly, afraid he was going keel over, collapse with the weight of what I had just unleashed on him.
“You need to know some things about me,” I said. “They’re not nice things.”
“I don’t care.” Obstinate, bull-headed old man. “You’re my son. I don’t care about anything else other than you standing in front of me. Alive. Here.”
“No.” I refused to sink into the comfort of that kind of happy reunion. I wasn’t blameless in all of this. If I hadn’t been planning to so ruthlessly assume my cousin’s identity, maybe there would’ve been a chance that I would’ve rejected the doctors’ assumptions I was Jack Ryder. I would’ve never gotten the tattoo, and that had been the main identifying factor for everyone else.
I could’ve avoided this heartache, and my father needed to understand that.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I wasn’t a good person. I was…well, I was almost a really bad person. And you need to understand that before we move forward. Can you sit back down? Can we sit back down?” Because I was afraid for him. Afraid that if news of his son being alive didn’t strike him down, news of his son and the shit he’d been plotting would. But this wasn’t something I was willing to hide from my father. He needed to know that I wasn’t some kind of prodigal son. I was the villain of this story.
“I was jealous of my cousin, Jack,” I said. “I spent my whole life being jealous of him. He got all the girls I wanted. The grades. The accolades. Everyone thought he was a good person, and they were right. He was good. The best. And I was nothing compared to him.”
“You weren’t nothing.”
“I was. You remember. Or has it been too long for you to remember? I just liked to lounge around and get drunk. Jack worked hard for the things he achieved. I wanted them without all of the hard work.”
“You…just needed the right kind of motivation. To understand the man you were meant to be.”
“I found the right motivation. It was just the wrong way.” Inhale. Exhale. “I plotted to assume Jack’s identity after getting him killed on one of our Army Rangers missions.” I paused to let that sink in, for my father to try to make some sort of excuse for me, but he just stared.
“He had Cheyenne. He had the support of everyone in the town. They wrote an article about him in the paper when the news came in that he was shipping out with the Army Rangers, but there wasn’t so much as a paragraph about me. It didn’t matter, though. I thought that if no one remembered me alive, no one would care that my identity died with Jack. Look. I even got his tattoo.” I lifted my shirtsleeve to show him the eagle spreading across my muscle. “That’s why doctors thought I was Jack. Because I planned for them too.”
“You killed your cousin?”
I could’ve told him yes. Part of me wanted to so he could hate me as much as I hated myself on the bad days, the days when I couldn’t get over what I had almost done. But I was through with lying. If this was going to be a new start for everyone involved, I needed to be honest.
“No. I didn’t. I had plans to, but I didn’t.”
“How did he die? What happened?”
“We were working to clear a cluster of IEDs,” I explained. “I’d planned from the start to make it happen during one of those missions. The explosion would cover up everything enough for me to get away with what I wanted to do – assume his identity. If they couldn’t properly identify his remains, it would make it easier for me to pretend he was me and I was him.” I hesitated. “We were ambushed while we were clearing the IEDs. I tried to get him away, but he triggered one of them, and the rest went up, too.”
“He died in exactly the way you planned for him to.”
The irony wasn’t lost on me, either. “Yes. But in the concussive blast, I lost my memories. And woke up as him, believing I was him, thanks to the tattoo. And the doctors.”
My father seemed to consider this, which surprised me. His calmness was the most shocking part of it. When I used to screw up even minor things, he would fly off the handle at me. I was accustomed to him losing his temper. I didn’t understand the logical approach he was taking to all of this – asking questions and actually listening to the answers.
“So what happened to make you change your mind about going through with everything?” he asked.
“That I would have to live the rest of my life – his life – knowing that I was a fraud. That I was a fake. And as badly as I wanted what he had, it would always be tainted with the truth. That I could never get away from myself, even if everyone else thought I was Jack.”
“You were both Army Rangers. Handsome young men. Similar in a lot of ways. What did he have that made you so jealous?”
My eyes prickled, and I dawdled in giving this particular answer. This was a tough one, but it needed to be said if my father was going to understand me.
If we were going to move forward from all of this.
“I was primarily jealous of the support Jack enjoyed from his father. My uncle,” I said. “Your brother. I felt like my uncle was supportive of everything Jack wanted to do, even if it seemed like a bad idea at the time. He was a father figure to a lot of our friends. And I always felt…closer to him. Than, you know. I did to you.”
I was glad my father was sitting down, because I was certain that revelation would’ve knocked him on his ass otherwise. There was a time when being able to gut him so efficiently would’ve made me savagely happy, but it didn’t give me an ounce of pleasure today.
I plunged onward because I didn’t know what else to do. “When my uncle got sick, Jack was telling me about the life insurance policy he’d taken out. Jack kept going on and on about how his father was making sure his death wouldn’t be a financial burden to anyone in the family, but that the policy was so large it was obscene. It offended Jack, that kind of money that would be released to him at the time of his father’s death. He said he didn’t need a payout reminding him that his father was gone.”
“That’s the thing about having a kid,” my father said, his voice sounding weak. “You don’t understand yet, but maybe someday you will. You’ll do anything for them. You want them to be successful. To thrive no matter what. And if you can set them up with something that ensures they’ll be all right after you’re gone, you will.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t have the will to do well. That I was so unmotivated. You just wanted the best for me.”
“You were at a difficult stage of your life. Still trying to figure out who you wanted to be.”
“And I wanted to be Jack. I wanted to be him so badly that I hatched this entire fucking plan. I wouldn’t have even gone into the Army Rangers if it weren’t for him. I wanted to be him, to have the good relationship with his father that he had. But most of all, I wanted that payout. That money would’ve taken me away from here. It would’ve paid for me to escape all of this and make a new life somewhere else.”
“Everyone wants the chance to start over,” my father said. “You wouldn’t be wrong to want that for yourself, especially if you were so unhappy with the way things were.”
“Stop. Just stop. You can’t justify what I was planning to do. It would’ve been murder.”
“But you didn’t do it. You remembered your humanity. And then life got in the way of everything.”
“So–” I broke off awkwardly, looking away before I forced myself to lock eyes with my father. “Now you know that your son was a real piece of shit.”
“No. Now I know that my son is still alive.”
“Dad…”
“I’m sorry. You came in here and you told me a lot of things, but the biggest thing I’m taking away from it is that you’re alive.”
He heaved himself to his feet and I leapt up, too, afraid of what he was going to do. But he simply reached out, gripped me on my shoulder, looked me in my eyes.
“I knew it was you, you little bastard.”
“You would know, Dad.”
From an outsider looking in, those sounded like fighting words. We’d said similar things, and much worse insults, to each other before. But these were different. They were almost tender, like a gentle prodding as we felt out the situation between us. They were almost terms of affection. But his grip on my shoulder didn’t lessen a bit.
“I’m sorry I failed you,” he said, and if I wasn’t broken down and turned out before, I certainly was now.
“Please don’t say that. You didn’t fail me.”
“I did. I’m your father. My brother was a good man, but the fact that you had to look up to him instead of me…that means I failed as father.”
That wasn’t the conclusion I wanted him to come to. “We had a difficult relationship. I didn’t help by acting like an asshole all the time.”
“It was a difficult relationship because we’re very similar.”
I snorted a little bit. “I hope you realize you just called yourself an asshole.”
“Well, I was. No shame in owning up to that.”
“If you say so.”
“The way you feel – felt – about Jack, that competitiveness, the jealousy. I felt that toward my brother. When we were younger, I thought he was our parents’ favorite. I could never seem to stay out of trouble, and he never seemed to find himself in it. I resented him all the time, but he never even seemed to notice, which pissed me off even more.”
I nodded. “Jack was always so oblivious. He was used to being successful, to being loved.”
“That comes easily to some people,” my father acknowledged. “My brother was the same way. I felt like I always had to work twice as hard as him to even receive a fraction of the praise he did. It sounds like to me that you know how that feels, and that’s why you need to know that I’m sorry.”
“I’m trying to tell you that you don’t have anything to be sorry for. I’m the one who needs to make amends.”
“No. I’m sorry because I knew the way I wanted to be treated, the way I wanted my father to treat me, and I continued the cycle in spite of my best efforts not to. It must’ve been something subconscious. Seeing myself in you. That’s why I treated you the way I did. I wanted you to be better than your old man. And everything backfired.”
“I was sullen. I was a brat. A complete asshole.”
“You were your father’s son.”
“And I’m going to be better. Do better things. Especially now that I have my memories back.”
“That’s all I ever wanted to hear. That you were in pursuit of better things. That’s all any parent wants to know – that their child has dreams and they’re chasing them.”
It meant a lot to hear him say those words, but I couldn’t resist a little jab. It was probably a panic response to the conversation going to such deep places. “You’re getting pretty mellow in your old age,” I told him, cracking a smile. “I remember a time when you would’ve told me to get my head out of the clouds and my ass to work.”
“Losing my son put things in perspective,” he said. “And regaining him meant the world to me. I just have one more question, though.”
“Shoot.”
“You got your memories back, and you realized you weren’t Jack.”
“That’s right.”
“But you had a chance to continue the charade. You hadn’t thought it was a charade, and you’d made a life for yourself as Jack Ryder. People knew you as that person. Why didn’t you continue being Jack? You had everything going for you.”
“I would’ve had everyone fooled, sure,” I said. “But I didn’t want it like that. They’re good people, my friends. I wouldn’t have wanted to lie to them. And the person who meant more to me than anything was already figuring out that I wasn’t Jack.”
“Someone was figuring it out? Who?”
“Cheyenne.”
“She could tell the two of you apart?” My father shook his head. “I used to drive myself nuts trying to do the same for you and Jack. You were little doppelgängers.”
“She couldn’t at first. She knew things were off, but we both thought it was because of the amnesia. I didn’t have a baseline to establish for myself, and when she started telling me things we used to do, things I used to like and dislike, none of it matched up.”
“You didn’t seem like Jack,” my father confirmed. “I just chalked it up to combat changing you, the whole explosion and everything.”
“All of the doctors I went to said the same thing. That it was completely natural, for cases like mine, even for personalities to be different after brain trauma.”
“But you were an entirely different person. Without knowing it.”
“That’s right.”
“And Cheyenne – are you all an item?”
“Going steady and everything.”
“You smartass.”
“That was one thing that didn’t change.”
“Cheyenne led you back to yourself. She was the only one who knew both you and Jack from before.”
“She saved me.”
“You love her.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re head over heels.”
“It feels that way, sometimes.” Because it did. I was sometimes so overwhelmed with how much I loved her, how deeply I owed her for being there for me as I found my way back, that it was almost intimidating. But the fear of not being good enough was what had messed me up before. Now I had to focus on accepting myself, flaws and all. I was just lucky that Cheyenne seemed to accept me so effortlessly, flaws and all.
“I still think you should marry that Cheyenne,” my father said, elbowing me. “You definitely have my blessing on that.”
“I thought you said I shouldn’t ask for permission to snap her up.”
“I’m your father. At least give me a heads up.”
“I will. I promise.”
My father. He was my father. Nothing was going to be solved immediately, but when I grasped him quickly into a hug, hoping I could convey more in the gesture than I had been able to with my explanations, he relaxed into it. Hugged me back.
And that would’ve never happened before, me initiating a hug, or him accepting it.
One small step for our revived relationship.
Cheyenne looked up from her phone with a smile as we stepped out onto the porch. Outside in the warm air, my chest loosened, and I felt the lightest I’d ever felt. There was something to be said about the healing power of confession, but I knew it was more than that. I knew my father had finally accepted me. That we were going to get through this. And no matter how long it took, I was going to have closer ties with him. Like real fathers and sons had.
“I was afraid you might run off,” my father said.
“I’m a stand-and-fight kind of girl,” Cheyenne told him, getting up from the swing. She could’ve asked how everything went, but she could probably tell things were going to be all right just due to the fact that we came out together, neither of us shouting or weeping angrily.
“Welcome back to the Ryder family,” my father told her, after a small hesitation, and it was the perfect thing to say. Cheyenne grinned and gave the old man a hug.
“Felt like I never really left,” she admitted, and, wow, were we joking about this now? Had we officially entered into this territory? Because I was relieved in a big way.
“Don’t be a stranger around here, now,” my father warned her, and she laughed.
“It would be impossible,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll be back here way more often, now. And you’re welcome in Rio Seco at any time. You should see the business your son built. Most popular bar in town.”
“Only bar in town,” I clarified, but my father was still dazzled.
“You own your own business?”
“That’s right.”
“His own very successful business,” Cheyenne threw in.
“That’s enough.” I shrugged at my father. “She has to say that. She runs the kitchen.”
“Best food in the county.”
“That much is true.”
My father was speechless for a moment, and I wondered if that had been a little too much information to take in at once, that his no-good, lazy son was back from the grave and he wasn’t no-good or lazy anymore. But I recognized the tears of joy in his eyes and had to bite the inside of my own cheek to keep from crying myself.
He was proud of me. It was a foreign feeling, especially since I hadn’t done a whole lot for him to be proud of prior to joining the Army Rangers. But now he was proud of me, for the work I’d put in and what I’d achieved because of it.
“I’d like you to see it one day,” I told him, “if you feel up to making the trip. I could always come up to get you, or send somebody.”
“Or you could even move into town,” Cheyenne suggested, then stared at our mutual reactions of mild panic. “What? You really could. Get in while the getting’s good. Didn’t James tell you? He’s almost singlehandedly responsible for the renaissance of Rio Seco. With all the fundraising and beautification projects he’s been sponsoring, almost all of the historic main street buildings are occupied now, and undergoing preservation and renovations. New businesses are setting up shop on streets that used to be empty. If you wait too long, the real estate market is going to explode. It’s a buyer’s market, and your son should be elected mayor.”
“Stop it,” I scolded her. “It wasn’t all me – you’re such an exaggerator. Dad, my best friends and I have a club that organizes the fundraisers, and we–”
The old man threw his arms around me again, squeezing me to his chest, his thinning frame trembling.
“You are exactly the man I wanted you to be,” he whispered into my ear, and even pushing my sunglasses down over my eyes did little to conceal my tears. “Maybe you had to forget about yourself for a little while, forget about all the pressure I put on you, to be the person you were meant to be. A good person.”
“Thank you,” I whispered back, not fully trusting my own voice. “Thank you.”
He stood on the porch and watched us go, and it squeezed my heart a little to imagine him still standing long after we’d gone.
“He’s a tough old man,” Cheyenne shouted into my ear, correctly guessing what was on my mind. “He’ll be fine. Especially now that he knows he has something to live for.”
“Did you really have to invite my dad to come live with us in Rio Seco?” I joked back to her. “Because you’ll be in charge of that, not me.”
“Look at you, passing the buck.”
“It was your idea.”
“And it’s your father.”
I revved the engine cheerfully, obnoxiously. “Can’t hear you.”
Miles down the road, Cheyenne squeezed me tighter. “I’m glad it went well,” she said, the words barely carrying over the wind.
“Me too.” I took my hand off the throttle for a moment to squeeze her knee. “Thanks for being there for me.”
“Always. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Before I understood who I truly was, the open road had always given me solace. The constancy of the rhythm of riding was something of a comfort, the way that I could lose myself in the miles.
But with the woman I loved a presence behind me and the whole world stretched out in front of me, heading back to Rio Seco with the promise of spring in the air, a warm wind we slid through easily, I finally felt something I had craved for a long time. Peace.
Peace with myself, with my past, present, and future.
Peace with my friends and my family.
Peace with Cheyenne, peace with loving someone so damn much.
Peace with whatever waited beyond the horizon.
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