Page 113 of Mistaken Intention

“Please, Drew, what?” I growl, and she stills, her bottom lip trembling.

“Don’t be mad.”

“Are you fucking serious? You lied to me.”

“I had no choice.”

Hunter stands beside her. “We had no choice,” he says.

“You lied to me,” I yell. “You kept my own daughter from me.”

Hunter moves forward again, but I push him back, although he keeps his footing this time. “What else were we supposed to do? The doctors told us…”

“Bullshit. I don’t care what the doctors told you. You’ve been pretending my daughter is yours all this time. You’re supposed to be my brother, but you’re playing happy goddamn families with my daughter.”

“That’s not fair, Drew,” Josie says, shaking her head. “Hunter and Livia volunteered to take care of Maisie when there was no-one else to do it. They’re not playing at anything.”

There was no-one else.The words play over and over in my head. “Maisie’s mom, that guy’s daughter… she was in the car with me?” Hunter nods his head, looking miserable, but I ignore him, my eyes fixed on Josie. “How could you? You told me I wasn’t responsible… that I didn’t kill anyone. But Maisie’s mom is dead.”

“Yes. But I didn’t lie. You didn’t kill her. She was driving. It was her car that crashed.”

“She died at the scene,” Hunter says. “There was nothing they could do for her.”

This is too much to take in… and yet I need to know more. I need to know all of it, even if I’m struggling to fit the pieces together.

“What was her name?”

“Lexi Doyle,” Josie says. “We never shared the same name. Her father didn’t adopt me or anything like that.”

Hunter turns to her. “But she was your step-sister?”

“Yes.” She blushes. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

He shakes his head, frowning. “I remember asking you whether Lexi’s sister had been informed about her death. You could have told me then, couldn’t you?”

“Not really. I’d already lied to the doctors about the connection between us.”

“Why?” he asks. “Why did you do that?”

“I was scared they wouldn’t let me stay with Drew if I told them the truth. I’d have had no way of knowing how he was, either. By the time you asked me, we were on the verge of leaving the hospital, and I thought you might not let me come here and help him.”

I feel like we’re getting side-tracked. “Can I just confirm something?” They both turn to me. “Are you saying I had a relationship with your sister? Because according to my brother, I didn’t used to do relationships. Or was that a lie, too?”

Hunter shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t a lie. You didn’t have a relationship with Lexi.”

Josie sighs. “But you did sleep with her. And she was my step-sister, not my sister. We weren’t that close.”

“Was there a reason for that?” I ask, my head spinning.

“We liked different things, and we were very different people. When we were growing up, we had nothing in common, and then I got sick and, like I just said, her dad resented my mom having to spend so much time with me at the hospital.”

“And he had an affair with her best friend?”

“Yes. Her name was Hannah. I’d known her all my life. She and Mom had been friends since high school, and Hannah had helped mom through her pregnancy, when her boyfriend walked out on her. She’d been there throughout those first three years until Mom met Lexi’s dad and moved to New York. They stayed in touch, though, and when I got sick Hannah came to stay, to help out. Mom spent a lot of time with me at the hospital, but she went home one afternoon to take a shower and get a change of clothes and found Hannah and my step-father in bed together. She didn’t breathe a word about it to me… not then. She knew how sick I was, and she kept it to herself, but when I came out of the hospital, we didn’t go home. We went to a hotel, and then after a few weeks, when I was a little better, we moved back to Boston… and we never saw Hannah again.”

“And your step-father?” Hunter asks.

“I never saw him again, either. Mom divorced him.”

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