I shook my head. “No. I’m done giving you what you want. Get back on the road.”
He checked his mirrors and pulled back on, and we were quiet for a while, him focused on driving, me working through my snacks.
“I need you to tell me what happened to make you like this,” I said. “Every single step along the way that made you hate your father so much you were willing to fuck over so many other people in order to get to him. And I’m not just talking about my family. I’m talking about all the other people who owe you money. Everyone you planned to use.”
“I’m not his—”
“Stoplying!”I screamed. “For once in your fucking life, just tell the truth.”
He was quiet for so long that I didn’t think he would do it, but then he ran a hand over his face, looking exhausted, and let out the longest sigh I had ever heard. “Maryanne Margaret Neumann,” he said. “That was my mother’s name, but everyone called her Meg. She was nineteen when they met. Richard was thirty-five.”
I frowned becauseIwas thirty-five, and nineteen-year-olds looked and acted like children to me.
“There are bigger age gaps out there, but she was young for her age,” Tyler said, and I felt my stomach drop. “And she was naïve, easy prey for someone looking to take advantage of her. She was also new to the city, had scraped and saved just to get there, barely escaping the poverty she’d been born into. Her parents ran a dairy farm that had been in her father’s family for over a century. By the time she came around, it was underwater, and she and her seven siblings were doing most of the manual labor themselves. It... wasn’t a good childhood. Her parents were strict, deeply religious, and fuckingmean. The worst combination.”
“At fifteen, they forced her to drop out of high school and toil in the fields during the day. At night, she worked at a twenty-four-hour diner serving handsy truck drivers and saving every single cent she could hide from her parents. It took her four years, but finally, she had enough for a bus ride to the city and the cheapest studio apartment she could find.”
I shifted in my seat, thinking how I’d been born with a silver spoon in my mouth and had the audacity to be mad about it growing up. No wonder Tyler hated me. Hell,Ihated past me, still, even after the hours I’d spent in therapy trying to unpack my resentment.
“When I was little,” he continued, “and we didn’t have much food in the house, I remember Mom telling me at least we weren’t mixing ketchup and hot water to make tomato soup like she had when she was a kid.”
“Tyler, I’m—”
“Don’tsay it,” he snapped. “I don’t want your pity.”
I shut my mouth.
He took another deep breath. “She was a waitress in the city, saving up to take community college courses, when they met. Mom was pretty spare on the details. All I know is that Richard came into the restaurant one day and swept her off her feet. She said he’d been charming, wealthy. That they’d had a whirlwind romance and she’d fallen quickly. Not that I could blame her. She’d never had anything nice in her life, and suddenly here was this man, buying her expensive clothes and taking her on impromptu trips.”
“It wasn’t until several months into the relationship that she learned he was married, but by then, she was deeply in love. But it was okay. He swore he was going to leave his wife for her. He just needed time to get his affairs in order first. So my mom stayed with him, waiting, hoping. Believing. And then she found out she was pregnant with me. She told Richard right away, sure the news would be the final push he needed to file for divorce, but instead, he stopped taking her phone calls. Pretended not to know who she was when she publicly confronted him. Claimed she was nothing but a random woman trying to cause a scandal. And everyone in his life believed him, which must have included your parents since theywerehis best friends.”
The man from Tyler’s version of events was so different than the one I’d known all my life that it sounded like two different people. Literally. I was tempted to ask if Tyler was sure he’d found therightRichard, but one thing I’d learned about Tyler was that he was meticulous, so I had no doubt that he’d done the work to confirm it. Plus, the city might be a big place, but I highly doubted there weretwoRichard Lawsons who owned real estate firms with a twenty-five-year-old long-lost son.
“That is very different than what I remember,” I said, carefully.
“You were a kid, and you overheard whispers. This is my fucking origin story, Stella. I think I know what I’m talking about.”
I fell quiet again, because he was right.
“After the ordeal, Mom moved back home. Broke, pregnant, and heartbroken. She was so desperate that she went to her parents for help, even though they’d done nothing but abuse and neglect her all her life.”
I braced myself, sensing what came next.
“They turned her away because she’d had premarital sex,” he said. “So we stayed with my aunt Jenny in her shitty apartment over a laundromat. We moved around a lot after that. There are huge gaps in the welfare system, and we slipped through them. The nearest food bank was half an hour away, but Mom worked two jobs and didn’t own a car, which meant she hardly ever made it there, and when she did, it was so picked clean that there wasn’t much left for us. I was never starving. But I was always hungry.”
I swallowed down the rising lump in my throat, hating how easily my mind conjured an image of him, much younger, too thin, scared and hungry.
“Mom must have been hungrier, because she always gave me the larger portions, but she never complained. Sometimes, there were men to help out, but they didn’t last long, and they were even worse to her than her parents. I wasn’t able to keep them off her when I was younger, but I tried.”
My mind went back to the first time I saw the circular scars on his back and wondered what they were, thinking they were exactly the circumference of a cigarette. I couldn’t imagine how awful someone would have to be to do that to a child, and god only knew what they’d done to Meg. It was horrible, what she and Tyler had been through. More than anyone should have to endure.
“She ran herself down to nothing,” Tyler said, shaking his head. “It was like she was disappearing right in front of my eyes. The fall I turned sixteen is when I really remember looking at her and starting to worry. Well, more than usual, at least. She was only thirty-five, but her hair had gone completely gray, and yeah, I know genetics and blah, blah, but none of her siblings had gray hair, so no one can convince me it wasn’t caused by stress. She was just so frail, always exhausted, never able to catch up on sleep. At that point, I was old enough to get a job and help out, but even after she went down to working normal hours, she kept getting worse. We didn’t have insurance, but I forced her to go to the doctor anyway. Two months later, she was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer.”
I had to turn my head away and bite my lip. Somehow, the story just kept getting worse.
“No one visited her in the hospital,” he said. “I think the nurses felt bad for us, because they broke the rules and snuck a cot into her room so I could sleep over. One of her oncologists caught me once, early in the morning, but he must not have said anything because the cot stayed put.”
I braced myself, because I knew Meg was no longer with us, but I’d demanded Tyler tell me every single step that led to him becoming who he was, and now I had to face the full reality of that.
