“I thought you said your last name was Alarcón?”
He gave a bitter laugh, and something akin to a grimace passed over his features. “My mother used her maiden name on all her books. My father’s last name is Alarcón.”
I shook my head slightly as if trying to clear it. “I can’t believe this. Lindy Parker is my favorite author. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
He sighed and set the book back in my hands before pacing a few steps, putting some distance between us. “I don’t know. It just never felt like the right moment.”
“I’ve read all her works,” I said. My whole body was humming almost uncontrollably as a rush of excitement and admiration flooded through me. “She’s brilliant!”
Jay let out another sharp laugh. “Yes, so everyone likes to remind me.”
My smile faltered, and the reality of the situation crashed down. Lindy Parker had taken her own life. The headlines hadn’t revealed much about what had happened—only that she’d been struggling with her mental health. I had read Lindy’s author’s note many times in the back of her novels. It always mentioned a son, but I had never honestly stopped to consider who that child was.
“I’m so sorry, Jay,” I said quietly, the excitement draining from me all at once. I struggled to find the right words. For years, I’d felt like I knew Lindy in some weird way through the stories she’d created. I’d been a devoted reader, obsessed with her art. I would consider myself a super fan.
But standing here now, I realized how little I actually knew about Lindy. All the things I did know came from five hundred carefully chosen words in the“About the Author”section and a few online Google searches.
“Were you two close?” I asked softly, the question slipping out before I could stop it.
Jay looked away. His fingers fidgeted briefly on the edge of one of the tables, his shoulders slumping just a little.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that.”
I didn’t want to pry, but it felt like retreating now would be worse. If the rumors were true, if Lindy Parker’s life had ended the way people said, then this wasn’t a story I could tiptoe around forever.
“Is it true,” I asked quietly, “that she?—”
“Took her own life?” Jay finished for me. His jaw tightened, and he nodded once. “Yes.” He stared at the table between us, tracing his finger along the grain of the dark mahogany. “She had bipolar disorder. For a long time, it wasn’t properly treated.”
I stood very still, barely breathing.
“She was intense with her writing,” he continued. “Sometimes she’d lock herself away for days to write. Sometimes longer. She wouldn’t eat or sleep. Wouldn’t answer when I knocked.”
His voice stayed even and unemotional as he recalled the events, but his eyes drifted somewhere far away.
“I’d find her pacing,” he said quietly. “Talking to herself. Writing entire conversations out loud like the characters were in the room with her. I’d have to beg her to come back. To ground herself. To be my mom again.”
There was a long silence.
“She tried to get help, and sometimes she did. But stability never seemed to last. The cycles always came back.”
“How old were you?” I asked quietly.
“I was nineteen when she took her own life,” he said, with that same emotionlessness in his voice. My heart clenched, trying and failing to imagine precisely what it must have been like for him.
“And was your father here too?”
“They separated when I was sixteen, and then he moved back to Spain.”
I sucked in a breath.
“You don’t have any family here then?”
“No siblings. My mother’s parents aren’t alive anymore. She has a sister, but she lives in New York and doesn’t come around much. My father is an only child, and my grandmother is the last living relative, and she’s also in Spain.”
“Did your father visit you? And did he come back after…” I felt a lump form in my throat.
“He tried to contact me a few times after he chose to leave us, but I was so angry that I basically cut off all contact. And then after my mother passed, he didn’t show at the funeral.” His expression was still hard as stone. “I was an adult at that point. Everything in my mother’s will had been given to me, and they’d been officially divorced for a few years at that point. So there was no need for him to come back.”
