Page 82 of SALT

"Everett, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think it's better to interrupt this moment than another. I need you to come with me," my brother Garrett says before adding, "Oh hey, Cam. I'll bring him back in a minute."

"One second, there's no way I'm walking away from the first girl I ever said I love you to without a kiss." I quickly press my mouth to hers. I may have spent half of my life married to another woman, but she wasn't the woman I chose because of love, I chose her to save her, and she chose me for protection. We've spoken of love, and if you ask me if I loved Moira, I'd say yes, she is the mother of my son, and we are friends, but never did we share the words I love you, not in the way I just said them now. "I'll be back," I say, before following after my brother.

"Someone better be dying. Otherwise, I might consider killing you as a justifiable cause for pulling me away from that moment."

"Lauren just showed up."

Connor joins us as we head out of the tent and into the gardens. "Did you get the records?"

"Yes, but, Dad, it doesn't add up. She had a baby girl... She didn't leave with one."

I stop in my tracks. "You're sure?" I'm rarely wrong. I was certain I knew precisely who Lauren Rhodes was and why she was back.

"He's sure," Lauren says, stepping around a hedge wall. "It's why I left town."

"Your story didn't end because you left that hospital empty-handed. We both know you walked out of it with secrets. It's why you're here now, prying, getting close, and asking about the past."

"Did I have secrets? Yes, but I'm not the bad guy here. I left with a broken heart, devastated and forever changed." Her voice cracks with the same hurt written all over her face.

But I don't believe her. I'd hoped to have the DNA evidence to prove what I still feel in my gut is true; however, it doesn't change the other two damning pieces of evidence. The first being Damon's dying words as his car sank to the bottom of the river, "You can't let HER take my girl." My conversation with my late friend has replayed on a loop in my mind since the day he died. Never forgotten. I just never knew who he meant by her. After I saw the initials carved into the tree, more pieces started falling into place, and that's when another lost memory resurfaced. The same month Cameron was born, he sold his family's estate in the Central West End. It was worth millions. We assumed it was to cover the cost of moving cross country and having a baby while attending a prestigious law school, but after everything that has come to light over the last few days, I did some digging, knowing right where to look now that I had a name, and I found it. Damon paid Lauren one million dollars. The question is, for what? Damon didn't trust her, which means I don't either.

"You're going to have to excuse me if I don't buy whatever sob story you're trying to sell. I know you had a relationship with Damon Salt. I saw the carving in the yellowwood tree, and if that's not enough, I know he paid you one million dollars, and the second that money hit your account, you left town. I don't for one second believe those two events are unrelated."

"What is it you believe Damon gave me one million dollars for exactly?" she says, with a renewed sense of moxie, before adding, "Because when I left town with one million dollars, it was to start over and never discuss the affair I had with a man I loved."

Are you kidding me right now? She's trying to say she loved him? I pinch the bridge of my nose. "You loved him?" I saw the tree. I know Camie is her, Lauren Camden Rhodes. It was what her friends called her back in school. We were not friends; therefore, it's not a name I've ever used. But things still aren't adding up. How could I not know they were a thing? "Explain it to me, Lauren, because the way I remember it, you and Damon never crossed paths aside from the night we were all at the Busch wedding."

She looks at something on her phone before shoving it in the back pocket of her jeans. "You have one part of that statement right. Damon and I weren't a thing. He hated me just like the rest of you, but one night during the summer before college, we were both drunk at the same party, and that dislike turned into hate sex." She shrugs and takes a seat on the ledge of the fountain. "After that night, we kept meeting up secretly at this lake in the middle of nowhere, knowing we wouldn't be caught. Believe it or not, I didn't like you guys either."

Garret holds up his hand. "You said the summer before college. Damon met Amelia that summer."

Lauren releases a heavy sigh. "I was getting there. It started out as hate fucking. Neither of us was in it for anything more. We were by no means monogamous." She shakes her head from side to side. "At least, not when it started. By the end, we wanted to be. That's why you found those initials in the yellowwood tree. The night he carved that into the tree, we talked about only dating each other and telling our friends, but literally the next day, I saw him and he told me it was over. That he had messed up in a big way, and he couldn't take it back."

"Amelia turned up pregnant," Garrett interjects as he rubs his chin, deep in thought.

"Bingo," she confirms. "Damon was a good man. When he found out she was pregnant, he did right by marrying her. We didn't sneak around behind her back. I had no interest in being the other woman. But fast forward four years to the summer of the Busch wedding, add in lots of alcohol, old feelings that never died, and a wife with a debt to settle…" She trails off before standing up. "We hooked up again, but unlike before, we didn't walk away unscathed."

She starts walking down one of the garden trails, and we follow. "What debt did Amelia have to settle?" I ask. I believe I know exactly what score she was settling for, but I want to hear it all the same.

"His son had a serious reaction to a mix of medicines he was taking after getting sick and became severely anemic. The quick solution was a blood transfusion. Of course, Damon was first to volunteer, and that's when he found out Kelce wasn't his. However, it was how he found out that had him ready to divorce Amelia. He didn't find out via blood test that Kelce wasn't his. Amelia told him point blank he wasn't his father. She had known all along. By the wedding, he wasn't thinking straight, and Amelia was in his ear, telling him to take his pass. She knew he and I had a thing before she turned up pregnant, and she was hoping he'd bite, and he did."

"She set him up, and then she fucking blackmailed him," Connor chimes in. "How could he have been so dumb?"

Lauren shakes her head. "That's one way to look at it, but the other was a man who was conflicted. Kelce may not have been his blood, but for the first few years of Kelce's life, Damon didn't know that. Finding out Kelce wasn't his blood didn't turn off his feelings for the kid he believed was his."

"Okay, that's his story. What's yours? Why did you screw a married man?" I ask curtly. Lauren has done a great job trying to paint Damon in a different light, but what about her? She's not innocent in all of this. She still screwed a married man.

"The list is endless." She holds her fingers up. "Young, dumb, naïve, drunk," she ticks them off one by one. "I foolishly thought maybe he would leave her, maybe we could get our shot, the one she stole. I don't know. It was a long time ago. I made bad choices, and so did he. In the end, we both paid dearly for them."

Garrett is quiet, and I can tell he's assessing her words, tearing them apart the same way I am. The difference is that he's not as close to the facts as I am. He's able to take a more neutral approach. If we were in court, I'd have no choice but to recuse myself. I can't be impartial. Like now, I can't find it within me to feel sorry for her. She walked away, and for money, nonetheless.

"What was the money for?" Garrett asks.

"Before I was discharged from the hospital, money was transferred into my account, and a process server showed up to my room with an NDA to stay quiet about the affair and the subsequent pregnancy that resulted."

I scoff. "So you took the money and gave up your parental rights, and now, what? You want her back? It doesn't work that way. You don't just get to come back."

Her hand clenches in her shirt as her forehead pinches. "That's what you think happened? You think I took money and gave up my baby?"

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