Silence mingles with our steady breathing. If it weren’t for his continued caressing, I’d swear he fell asleep. Possibly to get out of answering me.
Eventually, he finds the words and the strength to share them. The same way I had to. Walls like ours don’t crumble instantly or easily.
“Since I was four when I was adopted, almost five, I always knew I wasn’t theirrealchild. Yet I didn’t fully comprehend what it meant to be adopted or how it worked. Not only was I too young, but I also had no foundational knowledge of what a family was. We were given up as newborns. We never had a mom or dad. Only a rotation of caregivers. What makes a family—mom, dad, sister, babies, grandparents—none of those things were in my sphere of awareness. All I knew was that one day I was in a random house with my brother and a bunch of kids. The next, I was Reed Hayes.”
When his words seem to trail off, I squeeze him a little harder to nudge him. I don’t have an FBI agent’s toolkit, so I’ll have to coax him through this my own way.
“Mynewmomwas pregnant with Kenzie, and they did all the bullshit to prepare me to be a big brother. As her belly grew, the idea of a mother became concrete. I saw it happening. And I knew I didn’t grow in this lady’s belly, so where the hell is the belly Perry and I came from? Where’s our mother?”
After another weighted pause, he says, “From that point on, I assumed our parents didn’t want us, or they were dead. I hated not knowing. As I grew older, it got worse. It ate at me. I had to fucking know.”
“I get that. Ignorance isn’t always bliss.”
“Exactly. The Hayes family dynamic made the urge to learn the truth about my birth family so much intense.”
“What do you mean by the dynamic?”
“I didn’t belong with them. I’m not a real Hayes. Never will be. And to be honest, I never wanted to be. I was perfectly happy in that fucking foster home with my brother.” His voice holds a ghost of a tremble that breaks my heart. “Except for the bare minimum of affection my dad showed me, I had no clue what it was like to be loved and wanted.Trulywanted.”
“But theyhadto want you. They adopted you. That’s a big deal.”
“Oh, I’m sure they did at first. Then Kenzie came along, giving them the baby they always wished they could conceive. At that time, I remember constantly crying and begging to go back to the only family I knew. So my connection with them wasn’t strong. Likewise, theirs with me. After Kenzie was born, they no longer bothered to make me feel welcome. I was just there. A burden or obligation. Unwanted all over again.”
I hate that for him. So,somuch. The anger makes finding a response difficult, especially since it rings true with how I felt in my family after Zara died. An unwanted obligation.
Reed continues sharing before I know what to say. “I was away at college when I finally snapped. And it was a freakingpsychology class that illuminated some of my dark thoughts. The ones always under the surface. They haunted me like phantom pains when someone loses a limb. The core of who I am was a mystery, familiar but also completely out of reach. I needed to know who made me. Or madeus, actually. Did we look like my birth mom or my dad? Did my birth father have the same voice? Did they have brown eyes too? Why did they name us Perry and Reed? If they were alive, where have they been all these years? Was there a chance they’d want to know me as an adult? And most of all, did they ever love us at all? I needed to know how they justified throwing us out like trash.”
“You aren’t trash.”
Instead of responding to my declaration, he presses on. “Since I was over eighteen, I was able to petition the court for the information on my birth mother. I started there. And I found her. Alive and well in Tennessee.”
My heart catapults into my throat.
His next words might as well slice their way out of his throat with rusty blades from how harsh they come out. “Turns out, the truth was far worse than merely being unwanted. My mother had a choice. And she made it. Perry and I paid the price for her selfishness. She could have kept?—”
The shrill ring of his phone silences Reed’s words.
“Shit.I need to get that.” With an annoyed huff, he releases me to grab his cell. “It’s Andrews. Fuck me running. This is gonna be bad.” He taps the screen and raises it to his ear. “What is it?”
Reed slides to the edge of the bed and swings his legs out, resting his feet on the floor. Meanwhile, my mind reels over everything he shared. More importantly, where it was leading.
His mother made a choice. A selfish one.
What could that possibly mean? It sounds far worse than simply choosing to put them up for adoption.
It might kill me to wait until after this phone call to find out what he was about to say. Talk about leaving me hanging.Not only am I not getting that BJ lesson tonight, but the chance for him to get this off of his chest is fading fast.
“I can’t leave Lila alone. Especially not now,” he seethes into the phone.
Shoot. He needs to leave. And apparently, something else has happened to put me in more danger than I was when he left me alone last night.
Unless I’m totally misreading this. Too bad I can’t hear what Agent Dad is telling him. Instead, it’s just a rattle of an indecipherable voice that escapes past Reed’s ear.There’s no doubt he needs to leave, though.
Reed’s entire body stiffens. “No way. After what happened with Riddick, you think I’ll trust one of them with her? Not a fucking chance. Who else can we get?”
Okay, sounds like I wasn’t wrong. I’d like to feel proud of my ability to decode a one-sided conversation, but this isn’t the time.
I watch him get progressively more agitated as he shoots down suggestion after suggestion, presumably for someone to babysit me. Eventually, he finally accepts the last suggestion.
