Page 122 of Chasing Home
“It doesn’t matter if you knew or didn’t know. That makes little difference to me now. I’m thirty years old; the chance to go back and make it right has long passed.”
“You’re right.”
“Wanda’s only a year younger than me. How long exactly was it from the time you broke my mother’s heart to the time you found someone else? A week? Two? Were you with her at the same time as you were my mother?”
My words hit their mark. He flinches and tugs at the collar of his fancy button-up as if that’ll help him breathe easier. It won’t, and I hope he chokes on his guilt long enough to feel half the amount of pain my mother did.
“I didn’t cheat on your mother. I loved her, and if I had known she was pregnant with you, I wouldn’t have left.”
My laugh is cold. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? A relationship out of obligation is a one-way ticket to divorce down the road, and I wouldn’t have wanted that. My mom found a good man who took us in and raised me without that obligation. He chose us because he wanted us.”
“If these are the questions you want to ask me, then what I came to Cherry Peak to offer you is even more important. These aren’t answers I want to give here.”
“In public, you mean? Where everyone can listen? Or maybe where they can take pictures of us and post them so the world knows about me. That would be terrible for you, wouldn’t it?”
I hate the way my voice cracks as I speak, decades’ worth of pain and hurt and anger that I hadn’t ever felt before now alive and burning through me. But none of those emotions come close to the raging curiosity that still lives inside of me, never calming, even as I remind myself that nothing he could tell me would matter.
It’s a lie. It would matter. Every single answer would mean something to me. Whether good or bad. I hate that I’m so desperate to learn about him. There has to be something wrong with me to still crave that knowledge. That connection and bond with a man who I don’t even know.
He leans forward in his chair, pushing his mug to the side to fold his hands on the table. “Come back to Toronto with me, Aurora. Learn everything you need to there. You can stay with me, and I’ll tell you everything about the Roses and my life from the moment I went to Toronto until now.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I ignore it.
It buzzes again, and I know then who’s trying to reach me. I was supposed to have dinner with Johnny tonight, the way we do every night. Just the two of us on my back porch beneath the stars. But I’ve stood him up, deciding not to tell him about this meeting out of fear he would tell me that I didn’t have to come.
I should have gone home and listened to him.
“I’m going to ask Wanda to come as well. I didn’t give her the proper attention when she came to see me, and, well, I’ve had a bit of a wake-up call here with you. We can all get to know each other. You want that, don’t you? Surely you don’t hate me deeply enough to turn down the chance to get to know me and your sister,” he adds, exposing every single one of my soft spots.
“You make it sound as though you’re doing me a favour, Riley. I don’t want any favours from the man who’s supposed to be my father.”
His jaw ticks, at which part of my statement, I’m not sure. “I want to know you, as well. You share my DNA.”
“I spoke to my mother after I left your place. She told me how you met and about how happy you made her. Did she make you happy too?”
“Your mother was an amazing woman.”
“I suppose if I ask why you left her despite that, you’ll say I can find out in Toronto.”
“She deserved better than me and what I could have given her at the time. That’s the answer I’ll tell you now, in this place.”
I suck in a shaky breath, sweeping my eyes over the busy diner. Dread drips slowly into my belly. “I have to think about it. I’m . . . I’m happy here right now.”
“You can come back afterward. Cherry Peak doesn’t change regardless of how long you’re gone for.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I disagree, looking back at him and wishing he wasn’t so hard to read. “I think you’re just too hell-bent on hating where you came from to see that it has changed. You just weren’t here to witness it.”
“Maybe that’s something we can uncover together.”
My gut tells me to tell him to go fuck himself. His twisted opinion on this place doesn’t matter to me, and his past shouldn’t either. But my head and heart say the opposite. They tell me to give it a chance, an opportunity to learn what it is I so desperately want to.
“I’ll think about it,” I repeat.
Because there’s someone I need to talk to first.
39
JOHNNY