He touched his stomach feeling the scar from when he’d been shot, it had covered another. The one he had since he was a kid. “The scar, the one I had since I was a kid . . .”
“We told you that you fell and got injured,” his mother finished for him.
“All these years you’ve been lying to me. How come the doctors didn’t mention this to me when I went for all those physicals?”
“I had it removed from your record,” his father told him as he wrapped his arms around his mother, pulling her close to him, giving her the support that she needed.
That shocked him in more ways than one. “What? Why . . . why would you do that?”
“We never thought this would happen because you never showed an interest in men . . .”
“And you thought everything would remain a secret,” Lucas snapped. “Why would you do that? Didn’t you think this was something I should have known about?” He felt betrayed by his parents; something he never thought would have happened.They should have told me.
“We are so sorry, Lucas,” Marilyn said to him. She went to hug him, and Lucas stepped back, out of her reach. The hurt that he saw in her eyes nearly broke him, but he couldn’t forgive his parents. “We thought we were doing the right thing. Son, we never meant to lie to you.”
He looked at Tucker holding onto his hand. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t be here right now.”
“Lucas, come on, don’t leave like that,” Tyler said following behind and stopping him before he reached the door. “They . . .”
“No!” he yelled surprising himself and Zoi who started crying. “You don’t get to do that. Think of how I feel. All this time they kept a secret from me about my health, and if I hadn’t told you guys I was pregnant, I would never have known about it.”
Tyler went to say more but Lucas shut him up by putting a hand up. “You’re my best friend, Ty, and right now I need you to keep quiet before I say something I could never take back.” He walked over to Tucker who had quieted Zoi down. They walked out of the house and to his car in silence. After putting Zoi in her car seat, Tucker wrapped an arm around him, pulling him into his arms where he broke down releasing his anger and hurt. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he overreacted to the entire situation and all his parents did was save his life when he was only a baby.
* * *
