Truth, p.1
Truth, page 1
S.J. Sylvis
Truth
Copyright © 2019 S.J. Sylvis
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form including electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher, except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. This work is a piece of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published: S.J. Sylvis 2019
sjsylvisbooks@gmail.com
Cover Design: S.J. Sylvis
Editing: Jenn Lockwood Editing
Prologue
Reid
The blood rushed to my head as a chill traveled down my spine. My heart all but flat-lined as my hand rested on the shiny, golden doorknob. I twisted it slightly, swallowing my fear, and when I opened the door, I could feel the unhinged cages on my heart closing and locking with each breath that escaped my mouth.
Several months ago, I brushed off her disappearance as one of her stupid games—those games she liked to play and then later say, “I just wanted you to know what it was like to miss me as much as I miss you when you’re on the road.” After that first month had passed, I was pissed. I was pissed, and the only thought in my head was, This isn’t worth it. So, I did what any other man would do—I ended it. I called her voicemail, hearing her flirty voice on the other end, and told her I was done. It was a freeing feeling, although it stung a bit, too. I mean, we were together for a little while—longer than I’d been with anyone else—but I just couldn’t deal with the bullshit anymore. She finally ended up calling me and begging me to take her back. She apologized and gave me every excuse under the sun, rambling on about someone named Lori whom she was with the entire time, but I was too busy focusing on my music and the upcoming tour to truly let her words affect me. Distraction at its finest.
The phone calls were endless there for a couple of weeks. I usually brushed them off, ignored them, irritated that she was acting so hung up on me when just a few months ago she acted as if I were some annoying fly swarming over her untouched food.
It was always a cat-and-mouse game with Angelina. When I’d catch her, I’d feel like I could truly see myself with her—maybe even love her—but then, when she’d slip out of my grasp, I’d have to take a step back and ask myself if she was even worth the chase.
The second month after our breakup, I hadn’t heard from her. The tabloids had died down a bit; they stopped speculating about what had happened between Reid King and his up-and-coming model girlfriend. Things seemed to even out. But I couldn’t help the unusual feeling that slithered through my veins when I’d think about how she basically dropped off the face of the earth. I didn’t hear a single peep from her. The late-night voicemails had stopped, the abundance of text messages faded, and I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a little lighter without her constantly trying to get back with me, but it was strange for her to just stop.
And then her parents called me.
I’d actually never met her parents. Angelina and I weren’t a traditional couple in the slightest. I’d met her a year prior, through some friends who I’d consider “up-and-coming,” just like Angelina with her modeling career. She and I never did much of anything in the beginning, except have sex, but then she started accompanying me to red carpet events, hanging off my arm like a bronzed beauty with her dazzling smile—she lived for those things. The woman I met a year prior was replaced by someone who had stars in her eyes as she gazed at flashing cameras and famous people.
When her parents had called, I realized that they had come to me as a last resort, looking for their daughter who apparently had also stopped talking to them. No one had heard from her since our breakup, and that didn’t sit well with me.
At first, I chalked it up to typical Angelina behavior, but something inside of me began to fester. The irritation and annoyance of her behavior was replaced with worry and fear.
I realized that I might have cared for her a little more than I thought, because I truly was fearful that something had happened. It wasn’t often that I grew close with someone, and that was simply because I’d been burned so badly in the past. Anyone that I’d ever loved in my life had disappeared within a flash, which is why I’d kept her at arm’s length at all times.
Angelina had been in my life for several months—close to a year—and now I was standing here looking down at her as she began to disappear, too.
Right in front of my very eyes.
A strangled noise sounded from my mouth, and those hinged-up cages around my heart weren’t only locking, but the key was being thrown into the Pacific Ocean, floating down to the sandy bottom, salt water eroding the metal. Every wall that I had unknowingly let down rebuilt itself as fast as the blood was pooling out of her stomach.
I rushed over to Angelina’s lifeless body and held back my vomit. Sweat coated my forehead, my dark hair sticking to the skin. My head bodyguard came flying into the hotel bathroom after finally catching up to me, and his eyes grew wide as he watched my hand press firmly on the open wound in Angelina’s torso. It was sliced open, bright red blood seeping through my fingers.
Frank grabbed his phone, his jaw locked and loaded, and called for help. My teeth clenched as I applied pressure to her tiny stomach, my mind reeling with questions. I kept thinking back to when she’d called twenty minutes ago.
She finally called as I was about to step my foot onto the stage, the crowd roaring so loud that I could hear them all the way into my dressing room. I instantly began to reprimand her. I kept my voice at a neutral level, but with every word that came out of my mouth, a bitterness was clipped onto it.
“Your parents are worried sick about you! Where have you been? These disappearing acts have to stop, Angelina.”
Then, she started to sob, and the words that came out of her mouth were enough to make me run in the other direction to the hotel I was just occupying hours before.
“Reid!” Frank yelled, pulling me from my panicked trance. I quickly took my eyes off the slowing blood and stared at his worried face. He hurried over and kicked the knife out of Angelina’s unmoving hand. “Move.”
I shook my head gruffly.
“The paramedics are here. You’ve gotta move.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t move my hand. I was too afraid to see what was underneath it.
Frank growled and rushed over to me with his broad shoulders and unusually large hands and pulled me backwards at the same time the paramedics came barreling in with black bags strapped to their backs and a gurney in tow.
“Holy fuck,” one of them said, their eyes on me being held back by an annoyingly strong Frank. “Are you Rei—”
“It’d be best if you kept your fucking mouth shut and do your job, or you’ll regret it,” Frank urged, his grip on me tightening.
The young paramedic’s face turned a bright red as he dove down to Angelina’s body, feeling for a pulse. The pair quickly got to work and placed her body onto the gurney, her black hair flinging upward as they pulled her up and onto it.
My body relaxed a smidge due to the relief that washed over me knowing she still had a pulse. Frank let go of my body, and I rushed over to the one paramedic as the other talked rapidly into his walkie-talkie. “Do you know what happened?” he asked, his face now a normal shade of peach. They began to roll the gurney through the doors and down the hallway.
I could barely get the words out. It felt like my throat was being crushed between two jack stands. My nostrils flared as the words left my mouth. “She said…” I clenched my eyes, bringing my hand up to the bridge of my nose. “She said she was cutting our baby out and that Lori told her to do it.”
The men paused their rushing for a split second out of shock. “Who is Lori?”
I shook my head. “I—I don’t know.”
They each gave a curt nod before climbing into the elevator with a few of my other bodyguards and Rod, my tour manager. When the hell did they show up? I heard Rod yelling to anyone in sight to keep this situation out of the media, as if that truly mattered at a time like this.
Me, on the other hand? I stayed in the same spot on that red-and-gold swirled carpet, staring after her lifeless body, even after the elevator doors shut. A wicked vine of both guilt and fear wrapped its thorny fingers around my entire body and all but strangled me.
A heavy hand came and rested on my shoulder. “Did you know she was pregnant?” Frank asked, his voice softer than I’d ever heard before.
My jaw was as hard as it could possibly get. “No.” I shook my head, my eyes still trained on the closed elevator doors. “I didn’t know.”
Chapter One
Brooklyn
My desk was piled high with music sheets and papers I desperately needed to grade. The picture that a student drew for me in their art class had a coffee stain on it from my morning cup, and a strange-looking, coiled mess of pottery that had every color of the rainbow sat perched in the corner, holding my stack of permanent markers. I knew very well that I should have been grading those papers, or creating a lesson plan for the last week of school, or hell, maybe even cleaning off my desk and dumping out my five-hour-old coffee. But instead, YouTube was pulled up on my computer, and I sat back to admire all the amazing up-and-coming artists—the ones that didn’t hold back. The ones that put their entire soul on the line, the ones that took their mind and heart and interweaved them together and formed something so be autiful.
I almost envied them. Especially as I sat at my desk, sitting in a fifty-year-old swivel chair that had most of its springs missing, in the middle of a sweltering classroom (because why would the school pay for air conditioning?). Of course, the introverted side of me knew that I would rather chop my arm off than record myself on my phone, singing one of the songs I’d written, and upload it to some social media outlet to get “likes.” Because you know what the problem with likes is? You also get dislikes. Likes and dislikes went together like peanut butter and jelly, especially on the internet. What was it with people gaining so much confidence on the internet? Like the screen of their smart phone or Macbook hid their face, so all of a sudden, it didn’t matter that they were throwing the Golden Rule behind their shoulder and completely demolishing someone’s work.
To be honest, I was more afraid of getting a dislike from someone out in the real world (and by that, I mean on the internet) regarding my music than if there happened to be another lice outbreak in my classroom. (Like, seriously. Bugs in hair or someone saying my songwriting sucked? I choose the former.) If I were an extrovert, someone who didn’t care what people thought, someone who had the confidence of say… Beyoncé, I’d gladly put myself out there. I mean, look at all those brand-new pop artists who were scoring Grammys left and right. They started at the bottom. They put their video up on social media, and BOOM, they were famous.
Okay, fine. I knew it didn’t really work like that. But it usually started with said person somehow gaining followers or a second look online, and then they were climbing the rails to the top.
I’ll admit, I was a little resentful.
Instead of uploading a video of myself with my thrift shop guitar in my shabby, poorly lit apartment, cooing the words of some heartwrenching song that I’d written—one that I’d fully formed from my own head—I was making a mediocre income as an elementary school music teacher.
I mean, I was fine with it. Sure, the loose spring in my chair was digging into my butt so hard it was beginning to ache, and my classroom smelled like rotting cheese due to my last set of students coming straight from gym class, but I was being paid to teach music all day to little smiling faces, and I got to wear cute dresses with pockets. What could be better than wearing a dress with pockets?
Sympathy washed over me as I took my gaze away from my computer and slid it over to the photo collage I had on my desk. I loved my students, along with dresses with pockets, and I had a pretty good life, but writing songs was something that fed my soul. It always had, even from a young age. A ghost of a smile covered my face as my eyes roamed the photo of me when I was a child, a guitar in one hand and a crumpled-up piece of paper in the other, a pencil tucked behind my ear with my auburn hair a curly mess. Freckles dotted my chubby cheeks as a toothless smile took up over half of my face. I shook my head and put my eyes back on the computer.
Songwriting was a childhood dream, one that I never sought out to reach. Now, writing songs was an outlet for me. It was profoundly personal, and I had basically kept it locked inside all my life. Once I went to high school and realized that burying my head in a notebook while tapping my foot obnoxiously to a tune that only I knew wasn’t considered cool and was kind of… odd, I’d stopped being transparent with it.
I knew it was too late for me to be discovered. My dreams burned up in flames the second Jacob Keller, my first real crush, told me I was a weird freshman for always singing songs and scribbling jumbled words down on a piece of paper. He snatched my notebook out of my hand one day and read the muddled mess, embarrassing me to no end. Honestly, I wanted to melt into the lockers I was cowering against.
The memory still made me sweat. Heat blasted my cheeks any time I thought of his taunting laugh.
I couldn’t blame it all on Jacob, though. It was me, too. The doubts, the embarrassment, the shyness that I could never really get over. I wasn’t destined to put myself on the line like that, to put my heart on the line. So instead, I lived vicariously through all the rock stars and pop artists that Jane, my best friend, wrote articles on, all while eating Ramen noodles in my holey sleep shirt, listening to my upstairs neighbor have kinky sex every Thursday.
“Watching YouTube again?”
My head snapped up as I quickly clicked the red square in the top right-hand corner of my computer screen.
“What?! No! Who? Stop.”
Jane smashed her pink matte lips together. “You’re doing that thing again where you get caught doing something you’re not supposed to be doing and you start stringing words together that make zero sense.” She laughed. “I love how awkward you are, Brooklyn. It’s why I keep you around.”
I rolled my eyes, leaning back in my chair, a squeaky noise filling the room. “You keep me around because I’m your best friend, the comic relief is just a bonus.”
She shrugged. “So true. My life would be so mundane without you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Lie.” I placed my hand over my chest. “My life is mundane. Boring with a big ol’ capital B. Your life? You get to interview famous people, you learn all the gossip, and plus… shall we bring up last weekend?” I wiggled my eyebrows as her face turned pink. “Big. Shlong. Those are the two words that stick out to me the most about your endeavors. I have the text right here; let me get it.”
My best friend, Jane, was the definition of cool. We couldn’t have been more opposite if we tried—which is probably why we were the best of friends; we evened each other out. Jane climbed the ladder after graduating college with her journalism degree and now worked for one of the most popular tabloids in the celebrity world. And there I was, graduating with a “safe” degree and working an 8-3 job, teaching rugrats. Total opposites.
“Don’t you dare!” she hissed, pointing her finger at me. “What if there is a student hiding in here somewhere?”
I laughed. “Why would a student hide in my classroom? And where?”
She rolled her eyes as she crossed her arms. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about these booger-heads you hang out with all day.”
I gave her a pointed look. “What are you even doing here? I was just about to head home for the day.” My eyes wandered over to the papers I needed to grade. Eh. They can wait another day.
“I came because…” Jane walked over and sat her butt on the edge of my desk. “You and I are going to Seven tonight for dinner.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, no can do. I told Cara I’d come over and watch the Bachelorette finale with her.”
Jane pouted as she crossed her arms. “Do it afterwards. I need to talk to you tonight. Cara can wait. I mean, she kinda owes you.”
I laughed while rolling my eyes. “You’re as bad as she is about that. She doesn’t owe me anything.”
She rebutted. “Cara will understand if you come over an hour later.”
Jane was right. My sister would understand. You know that cliché where big sisters are snobby and hate their little sister? That was never Cara. She never acted that way toward me. Cara was an amazing big sister and an all-around good person. She was the type of person who wanted to impress everyone, and she often did. She was a go-getter—that girl in high school that was good at everything. And what made it worse was that she was completely stunning. She’d do anything for anyone with a beautiful, glowing smile on her face—even for me, her annoying little sister who followed her around everywhere until she left for college.
She never once complained that I was always tagging along, or that I had silly, school-girl crushes on her cool, older boyfriends, or that I wore her clothes even though the boob area was three sizes too big.
The thought of her made my stomach uneasy as grief floated all around me. Cara had everything: perfect career, perfect husband, beautiful baby. But then her kidneys got worse from the Hydronephrosis and everything spiraled out of control. The last few years had been a whirlwind.
My family and I continued to stay positive and thanked God on the daily that I was a match to Cara. She now walked around with that bright smile still plastered to her face and with one of my kidneys inside of her body. She still continued to laugh and have a certain lightness to her, even with the heaviness of our financial problems on her shoulders. I said our because, in my family, everything was one. It was not just Cara’s financial problem, it was ours.
