“Mia…whether you like it or not, he is as much my son as he is yours. And he deserves to know.”
I gasped and clapped a hand over my mouth.
My blood ran cold. I exhaled roughly as though someone had just punched me in the gut.
I staggered back, trying to get as far as humanly possible from the scene I’d just witnessed. I only stopped when I bumped up against a hard chest. I turned around, still distressed, and met Neil’s eyes. They were fixed on mine, watching me like always.
He examined me thoroughly, trying to figure out what was wrong.
A rivulet of cold sweat made its way down my back.
“What happened, Babygirl?” he asked, making me gulp. I wasn’t sure about anything. My brain had somehow committed every word of Mia and John’s argument to memory without deriving any conclusions from it. Only questions. Enormous questions.
“Selene.” Neil cupped my face in his hands, freaked out by my silence, and forced me to look up at him. I’m sure my eyes must have been wide with shock. He furrowed his brow and looked over my shoulder at the partially opened door. Afraid that he might actually figure out what had me so shaken, I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him back into the waiting room. “Will you tell me what the fuck’s wrong with you?” he snapped, but he followed me without complaint.
I stopped abruptly and hurled myself at him for a kiss. Neil went rigid against me, but he didn’t push me back. He welcomed the kiss, which I kept sweet and brief to hide my bitter feelings. Before I could deepen it, however, he took my face in his hands and pulled us apart so he could look me in the eye. No amount of flirty behavior was going to distract him; he was too sharp. Maybe if we’d been in a bedroom, it would have been a bit easier.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, Selene but I’m not an idiot. Tell me what’s wrong,” he insisted, more firmly this time. I scrounged up all my courage and deployed the only weapon I knew he was weak against. I grasped his hips and pulled him against me to kiss his neck, then along his jaw, and finally brushed my mouth over his beard scruff. Neil tracked my every movement through heavily lidded eyes.
He was suspicious; I needed to make something up quick before those suspicions grew.
“This place stresses me out. It makes me think about what happened to you and the stories I heard from the other people in the group… Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to see the bibliotherapy. You can apologize to Dr. Keller for both of us, and we’ll come back to see him some other time,” I told him in what I thought was a pretty convincing way. His stare softened as he felt the sincerity in my words.
I was honestly stressed out even if it wasn’t for the reason I’d stated. He gave me a small, melancholy smile and nodded his head.
“You’re the one who said I should come here; I would rather have given you your surprise,” he chided me. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and shuffled me along toward the exit. I walked quickly, eager to get out of there as fast as possible. I didn’t even want to think about what would have happened if Neil had been the one to overhear the conversation between Dr. Keller and his mother. I myself was struggling to process it, and I couldn’t tell him something so potentially earth-shattering until I was absolutely certain about what I’d heard.
Did Mia really have a son with John?
And was that son Neil?
The idea itself was insane.
I wholeheartedly hoped I had somehow misunderstood.
Finding out a truth like that would only be more trauma heaped upon Neil.
I almost broke down and told him everything when we stopped beside the car. He held his shoulders taut as he watched me warily, and I could see the old fears surfacing in his mind. He opened his mouth as if to say something but closed it again, silently, and got into the car.
He was running away, like always.
I knew that outburst of distress was making him insecure about our relationship again. Neil undoubtedly thought I was judging him—judging his past—and recoiling from it like a coward when, instead, I was grappling with a different but equally grave discovery.
I was afraid that this might be how I lost him for good.
This was a situation that couldn’t be fixed with a heated discussion and a peaceful compromise.
Neil was going to hate his mother for lying to him.
He was going to hate John for not being there for him.
He was going to hate William for taking out his anger on an innocent child. The scars on Neil’s arms, the years of abuse he’d suffered from that man, and the years of barely suppressed hostility—all of it would take on a new meaning.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked, one hand on the steering wheel. He shot me a dubious look, and I shivered. “And don’t try to bullshit me, Selene. I’m not a fucking idiot,” he added irritably.
Apparently I hadn’t been sufficiently convincing after all. Neil just knew me too well—I couldn’t lie to him. “Nothing, really. It’s just that sometimes you say things that make me think…” I said, offering yet another real thing that had occupied my mind at one point in the hopes of diverting him from what was actually bothering me at the moment.
“What do you mean?” he pressed, clenching his jaw.
