The winning defense, p.25
The Winning Defense, page 25
“I definitely don’t.” Bitch.
“Can you just please, please tell me if you were that baby? Was my mom pregnant when she went to rehab? Did she have you? Were you adopted? How did you find out the truth?”
She was good. I could almost believe that the tears in her eyes were from anger and sadness, confusion, too. I could almost trust that her quivering chin was an attempt to hold back a huge flood of those emotions. I could almost imagine that her questions were genuine and that she really didn’t know that her mom had abandoned a child, that the whole sordid story of my life had been a family secret.
But that was ridiculous. Soleil, Warren Wilde, and the rest of them had lived in a public sphere. Every detail of their lives had been noted and reported on, especially up here in this teensy, tiny media market where the main focus of everything was the Woodsmen. It would have been impossible to hide it and impossible for this woman to be ignorant of it.
Right? Wasn’t that right? She hadn’t known about her real father, though—no, she must have known that, too, but due to the embarrassing circumstances of her birth, she just didn’t want to admit it. None of them wanted to admit what they’d done because they didn’t want the disruption to their lives, they didn’t want the bad publicity about child abandonment.
“You’re not fooling me,” I told Camdyn Riordan. “You’re pretending not to know because you have all this perfection going on and you don’t want anything to mess with it. You knew that your mother had a premature, drug-addicted baby and that your father coerced her to pretend that it never happened. Y’all want to pretend that I never happened, but I’m right here. A living nightmare, right?”
“It is true,” she said. “You’re my sister.” Her skin was without any color, not even the tan she’d had the last time I’d seen her, not even the flush of anger she’d had before.
“Fuck you,” I answered. “Fuck you and Warren Wilde and everyone who thought that ditching a sick baby with the state of Florida was a great idea, fuck you and Wilde for leaving me with nothing for twenty-two years. You’re lower than dirt and I hate you. Even if I accomplish nothing else, you’ll remember that someone in this world knows the truth about you and your disgusting family.”
“If we’re related—if we’re sisters—”
“What are you going to do about it now? Say you’re sorry?” My voice was shaking and my chin was quivering too, like I was totally giving in to my emotions. Ray popped into my head and what he’d said about apologies. “It doesn’t matter what you say because words don’t take away actions.”
She actually did give into her emotions and tears rolled down her cheeks. “I know that’s true but I am sorry. I really didn’t know any of this. I’m angry at Warren because he should have done something, and I’m angry at Soleil for leaving you. I’m so sorry.”
I turned and walked away before I did something bad, like hit her across her beautiful face or start sobbing so that she could see how it was affecting me. I walked, stumbled, back toward my office, the place where everyone’s biggest concern was me checking my phone and some imaginary romance I was having with Ray—
Ray. The green Rasant was parked on the sidewalk again and I broke into a run. I got there just as he was opening the door and I waited until he stepped out.
He greeted me with, “What the fuck happened? What’s the matter? Is it the baby?”
“No.” That was what I tried to say, and I did shake my head.
“Did you see Hidalgo again? Did someone threaten you? Chase you?”
I shook my head for the second time.
“Chloe,” he said, and his voice sounded urgent. “What happened?” He bent slightly and I stepped closer, then closer, and then I leaned my forehead against his sternum.
“Ok.” His arms went around me, first one and then the other. “Ok. Are you crying?”
I was, yes. “I saw Camdyn.”
“What the fuck did she say?”
“That she’s sorry and she didn’t know about me.” I sobbed, and it hurt my throat. “Didn’t she? Wasn’t she just ignoring me so she could keep living her best life? I looked at so many pictures of them and it was perfect, always perfect. Like when she was ten, they took a vacation to Bali. That was the year when I was living in a house with five other kids where they treated the dogs better than they treated us. The animals definitely got more food. We were hungry and scared while that woman was flying around the world with Warren Wilde. How didn’t she know?”
“She didn’t know who her own father was, either. They were better at keeping secrets than you imagine.”
“She pretends like she’s sorry. She doesn’t even understand what she should be sorry for,” I told him. “I hate her. I hate her and I’m so jealous I can’t even—I can’t let her just keep going like that, right? I can’t allow her to be ok. It’s not fair.”
He let me stand there and cry on him on the sidewalk next to his sports car, until I realized what a spectacle I was making with one of the most famous Woodsmen who was also the man I worked for. Maybe it was whom. I pulled away and looked up at him. “Sorry I cried on you.”
“I’m used to it from Deacon. You have less snot.”
“I just hold it in better.”
“You can cry on me,” Ray said. “I don’t mind. I kind of like it.” He watched as I wiped my face with my cuff. “It feels like you trust me.”
“I guess I do.” I nodded. Yeah, I did.
“You don’t have to talk to her. Next time she bothers you, send her to me,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll tell her what I said to Warren. Figure out how the hell this happened. Apologize to Chloe and fix it for her.”
“You talked to him about me?”
“I told him a few things,” he said.
“What did he say back?”
Ray took my hand and directed it to wipe a different place on my cheek. “You had black stuff there,” he explained. “He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, and I told him to cut the S-word. I said that he couldn’t lie himself out of this because you weren’t going away.”
“I haven’t found anything that incriminates him as a cheater, though,” I sighed. “He won’t admit to anything until we hold his feet to the fire.”
“We’ll see.” Now he used his own sleeve to dab under my eyes. “You’re a mess. Do you have more of that stuff to put on?”
“Makeup? Yes. I always come prepared.”
“Which rule is that?”
“Thirteen,” I said, and sighed again. “Camdyn really sounded sorry.”
“She’s not that bad. I’ve met her before when she cursed me out for missing her events, but I didn’t mind her too much. Her husband isn’t that bad, either.” He frowned at me.
“Is there still makeup all over my face?”
“No, you still look like you saw a ghost, though.” He opened his arms. “Come here.”
I put my head on his chest again, so he couldn’t look anymore. Also, because it felt so damn nice that I might have stayed there forever.
∞
Ray had a meeting with team execs. He’d come to check on me and Deacon, he said, but he also had to go talk to them about his suspension and about his brother. They were concerned about off-field distractions but also concerned about bad publicity.
“A-holes,” I’d summed it up, and he hadn’t disagreed. I’d wanted to hear more of what happened with his brother Gaston at the jail but there wasn’t time after my emotional breakdown outside of the building, and after I had to waste precious minutes convincing him to park in a normal spot instead of up on the sidewalk where people needed to exit and enter the building. Although their problems didn’t concern him much, he did finally move the car.
“You ok?” Eloy asked me when I got back to the office. I guessed that my makeup repair hadn’t been as successful as I’d hoped—there must have evidence on my face of my breakdown.
“There’s nothing wrong with Deacon, is there?” Barb chimed in nervously. He was a favorite in the bullpen (of course).
“No, he’s good.” I wiped under my eyes again. “I was peeking at him and I ran into…someone.”
“Did you get into a fight with Ray? We all watched you hugging him on the sidewalk,” Jeri said.
“How?” I asked, aghast.
“If you stand on chairs in the smoothie room, there’s a great view,” she explained. “Barb figured it out.”
“Y’all are crazy,” I told them. “We weren’t really hugging.”
Jeri rolled her eyes but Barb focused on something else. “When you talk like that, you sound like you’re Southern.”
I swallowed. “I am. Southern Californian.”
“No, I mean the real South. My mom was from Texas and you talk just the same, enough that sometimes when you say stuff, I have these really vivid memories of her.”
“You remind me of someone, also,” Eloy said. “I’ve been thinking about it since the day the two of us were at her house.” He waited, but I didn’t respond. “Camdyn!” he filled in. “Camdyn Riordan. Don’t you guys see it?” he asked the other two ladies, and they stared at me.
S-word. “I don’t think so. She’s beautiful and I’m gangly.”
“Don’t say that!” Jeri scolded. “Do you know what I would give to be so tall and graceful?”
“You do look like her,” Barb said slowly. She was staring at my face, her own eyes narrowed. “You look so much like her! I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. I bet that if your hair was lighter, you two could be sisters.” She still studied me. “Actually, you really look like her mother. The rest of you are too young to remember her, but Camdyn’s mom was a knockout. A knockout with problems.”
“Did you know Soleil?” I asked eagerly.
“I did. How did you know her name?”
“I—I—”
“Were you hanging with Warren Wilde, Barbie?” Eloy asked. “You never said anything! Oh my God! Did you sleep with him, too?”
“I sure as hell wasn’t hanging with him and no, I wouldn’t have touched him with tongs! What an a-hole,” she sneered, and she was right about that. “My mother was a seamstress and she used to do alterations for Soleil Riordan and Warren’s wife, her sister. They had to have everything taken in and they liked to talk a lot about how small they were.” Both she and Jeri rolled their eyes. “I never saw Warren Wilde in person, and we had no idea that there was something going on between him and his sister-in-law, Soleil.”
“How did you know about her, Chloe?” Eloy asked.
“I—no, I don’t know her.” He looked like he was going to ask more, but Barb kept talking.
“She came to us when she was pregnant to have all her clothes let out instead of taken in, for once,” she went on. “She’d hidden it as long as she could and she would never, ever tell us who the baby’s real father was. She said it was a solider, and then she said an actor in Hollywood, and then an astronaut…she was kind of nutty.”
“Your mom fixed Soleil’s clothes when she was pregnant?” I asked eagerly. It was hard to contain my excitement and my West Texas accent. “For both her pregnancies?”
“She only had the one baby,” Barb said. “Camdyn. Her daughter, Camdyn, our old boss.”
“No, she…” I stopped. “You didn’t know? Really?”
Barb looked at me in confusion. “What are you saying, Chloe?”
“Hey guys,” Kaori interrupted us. “Are any of you busy with something that can’t wait?”
That was rarely the case for us, but I could tell that my coworkers wanted to continue to quiz me just as much as I wanted to get the hell out of their crosshairs. “No, we’re not doing anything,” I answered.
“Great. Can you join me in the conference room?”
It wasn’t time for one of our regularly scheduled meetings and we all looked at each other, wondering what was up.
Kaori got right down to it. “I’ve decided not to take Camdyn’s position,” she announced as our butts hit the seats. “I was offered the job, but I’m going to tell them thank you, I decline. I wanted to let you guys know first, because it will mean me returning to the bullpen and our team getting a new boss.”
“Why don’t you want it?” Jeri asked, and she spoke for all of us.
Kaori had a lot of reasons, and a lot of them made sense: the position entailed so many hours which meant less time with her family, it was also a lot of stress that she didn’t need, and the bad experience at Fan Day had made her rethink her feelings about being in management. Everyone turned toward me when she said that last one and I stared at the window.
“I wanted to ask if any of you are interested in applying for it,” she said, and looked at us seated around the oval table. “I’ll fully back you. Barb, you’ve been here for the longest.”
“No, thanks. I like my job the way it is.”
“Eloy? Jeri?” Kaori prompted, but they both shook their heads.
“If you don’t want it, then Chloe should do it,” Jeri announced.
“Me?” My voice had actually squeaked. “No. No way.”
“I did think about you, Chloe, and I wasn’t trying to exclude you,” Kaori assured me. “It’s just, you’re very young.”
She had no idea because she only knew the birthdate on my résumé. I was actually three years younger than that young age in her mind.
“Chloe can do all our work. She does at least half my stuff right now,” Eloy volunteered, and the other two said the same thing.
Our (maybe temporary) boss frowned. “I knew that she was taking on some extra responsibilities, but half of what’s assigned to you guys?” she asked them. They nodded.
“I’m not interested either, if it’s actually a possibility,” I put in. For one thing, moving up would mean that someone might take a moment this time to actually check the birthdate and everything else on my résumé. For another thing, I didn’t know how long I would stick around. I was tired—not of doing all their work, I realized, but tired of lying to them all.
I didn’t think I could keep this up forever. I couldn’t even keep it up for much longer.
“Kaori, I really think you should reconsider,” I said firmly. “I know that you’re always comparing yourself and I didn’t work under the former person, but I think you’re a great boss. You care about us and you care about the job. You’ve produced some amazing community events and I know you have ideas for a lot more. I think maybe you’re still scared that you’re not filling someone else’s shoes, but it’s like—it’s like getting ice cream. You may always get chocolate and it’s great, but one day, you get mint chip. It’s different but it’s just as good. Better in some ways.”
“I love mint chip!” Eloy announced, and Barb told him to be quiet, he was missing the analogy.
“No, that was the end,” I assured them.
“Don’t tell them no quite yet,” Jeri suggested. “We’ll all help you. We’ll even do our own work and stop asking Chloe to do it for us.”
“Yes, please stop that!” Kaori answered, but then paused. “I will think about it more. It means a lot to me to have all your support.”
That meeting ended, like many of them did, with hugging and calls of “Go Woodsmen!” I definitely participated in both those things.
Ray had texted that the new cars had been delivered and he’d taken his to come back to the stadium and get Deacon early. “I wanted to see him. I missed him,” he wrote. That meant I drove home by myself and didn’t have to talk to anyone or play weird baby music. The trip wasn’t half as fun as it usually was.
“Chloe, get in here,” Ray called the moment I opened the door. I’d been about to say something about the new cars in the parking lot, the beautiful, blue, sparkling car that was mine and that I’d put my arms around and hugged. “Come here quick!”
I ran into the living room. He knelt on the floor and his phone was set up on a tripod on the coffee table. His attention was focused on Deacon who stood holding on to the couch. The baby grinned and held up one hand, gesturing to me, and I started to go to him.
“No, come here,” Ray ordered instead, and patted the floor next to himself. “He’s going to do it. He’s going to walk.”
“You are?” I asked the baby. My eyes filled with tears. “Deacon, are you going to take your first steps?” I sat next to Ray and held out my hands to him. “Come here, buddy!”
Ray looked down at me, but he didn’t tell me not to cry. Instead, he put his arm around me, and he held out the other to the baby like I was. “You can do it,” he told Deacon. “Come on, come to us.”
Deacon looked solemnly at us and then he broke into another smile. He stepped away from the couch, his little body lurching. Then he took another step, wobbled, and took two more in quick succession before a third brought him to Ray and me and we folded him up in a hug.
“I’m so proud of you,” I told him. “I’m so proud, buddy! You’re amazing!” I kissed him over and over.
“Good job, Deacon. I knew you could do it.” Ray kissed him, too, and when I looked up at him, smiling with tears running all over my face, he kissed me as well. He bent close and gently touched his lips to mine.
When he pulled away, I didn’t move a muscle, but when he leaned down again, I stretched to meet him halfway. It was just as soft but lasted longer, and this time when we broke apart, Ray smiled at me. “He did it,” he said.
I nodded, my heart beating too hard in my throat to let me talk. I leaned against Ray and hugged the baby and he laughed, very proud of himself and very happy.
That night, after he was in his baby jail and asleep, I watched the video again, then again, and again. I watched Deacon’s determination and I saw Ray smiling with total joy as the little guy stomped his way over to us—I’d had the exact same expression on my own face. I watched Ray look down at me and saw his features soften before he kissed me.
He’d kissed me.
