Page 59 of The Ruse

She somehow hadn’t considered how quickly the truth would come out.

I told him about how Ava and I had come across some photos of our mom and Nash’s dad in the yearbook and how that had made me curious about their connection. How I’d thought for a little while that Mr. Hastings could be our dad since he and my mom had been very close, according to one of our teachers who had gone to school with them.

“My mom never really talked about her time at this school, so Ava and I had always assumed it just hadn’t been very memorable.” I grabbed the salt and pepper shakers and seasoned the eggs. “But then, we found out the real reason she didn’t want to talk about it was because of some difficult memories and a huge secret she didn’t want to get out.” I put the salt and pepper back on the counter and looked at Asher through my lashes. “I guess she and Brendon dated before she dated Mr. Hastings back in high school, and though they’d only been friends after high school, when they met up again at their five-year reunion…” I drifted off, not wanting to say the words out loud.

“They slept together,” Asher filled in for me. Apparently, he was not as shy about that subject as I was.

My cheeks heated. “Yeah.”

“But Mack is older than you, right?” Asher said, putting the details together quickly.

I nodded. “By a couple of months.”

“So he cheated on Mack’s mom?” He frowned. “He always seemed like such a family man.”

“They were broken up during that time,” I hurried to say before Asher could get too bad of an impression of Brendon, or my mom for that matter. “He didn’t know Mack’s mom was pregnant, either.” The eggs looked like they were done, so I switched off the stove and moved them to a different burner. “Apparently, they were both drunk and on the rebound, and the spark they’d always had in high school just made for a really perfect tornado and—”

“And a little while later your mom found out she was expecting twins,” Asher finished for me.

“Yeah.”

“But she didn’t tell your dad?”

“She did,” I said. My mom definitely hadn’t set out to raise twin girls by herself. “But he’d gotten back with Mack’s mom by that point and found out she was expecting Mack at the same time she had her first brain tumor. He had a mental breakdown from all the stress of everything.”

“Three babies at once would do that to you, I guess.” Asher handed me a paper plate with a flour tortilla. “I heard he was also drafted to the NBA, or something like that?”

“Yeah, it was insane. He ended up in a mental hospital for a few days because everything was just too much for him to see a way through.” I scooped some of the scrambled eggs onto my tortilla to make it into a breakfast burrito. “So when my mom found that out, she made the split-second decision to tell him that she miscarried.”

“Really?” Asher’s brown eyes widened. “And Mr. Aarden just believed her?”

I shrugged. “He feels really bad about it now. But at the time, it was just one less thing for him to worry about, and so I guess he didn’t question it.”

“And your mom never talked to him again?”

I set the wooden spoon back in the skillet. “Not until a month and a half ago when everything came out in the open.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” I nodded and stepped away from the stove so he could fill up his tortillas. Yes, he was making two breakfast burritos for himself since apparently, it took a lot of food to fuel the kind of muscles that he had.

Why did I just think that?

I pushed the random thought away and tried not to watch the veins in his arm as he picked up the spoon.

“So, he’d just found out about his seventeen-year-old twin daughters, and then his wife died a month later?” He looked over at me as he dished his food up.

“Yep,” I said, feeling so bad for Brendon.

“Talk about everything happening all at once for the guy.” Asher plopped a big glob of the egg mixture onto his first tortilla.

“Yeah.” I lifted a shoulder. “The Universe seems to think that’s how it needs to be for him.”

“The Universe is fun like that.”

He said it like he had personal experience with the Universe’s games.

I wanted to ask if he was referencing what Cambrielle had told me about his dad dying in a car accident at the same time his brother got custody of him, but before I could, he asked, “Are you guys close now?” Asher brought his plate back to the counter and started rolling up his burritos. “I mean, you’re still in the dorms, so it sounds like you’re taking things slow?”

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