Page 20 of Never Say Yes To Your Fake Husband

The street is endless, with rows of condo complexes, apartment buildings, and houses. Cars are parked all down both sides of the street. It might be early enough in the morning, but it’s still busy enough. We’re the only ones out walking so far. I guess we're not that early, and all the morning dog walkers are probably already at work.

“You teach guitar?” I ask.

Weland blinks. “That’s right.”

“When do you give lessons? I don’t want to mess that up for you.”

“Monday to Friday in the evenings and then in the afternoons on weekends. I just took last weekend off because of the stagette. I moved the lessons. I thought I’d be more…uh…well, busier.”

“Did your friends contact you?”

She tries really hard not to let her face fall, but I can see the disappointment in her eyes. “No, none of them did. I texted Kate because I didn’t want her to think I just left and bailed on them, but I haven’t even heard back from her yet, and it’s been days. She’s busy, though. Planning a wedding and all that.”

I scoff. “Ignoring someone who is supposed to be her best friend and all that.”

Weland winces, and even though I’m trying to defend her, I feel like the bottom end of a jackass, and I think that’s all ass to begin with.

Waving a hand, I quickly add, “Sorry. Ignore me. I don’t know anything about it. I’ll tell you about me instead.”

“How bad is it?” She wraps the leash around her hand one more time like she’s preparing for Beans to tug her off her feet, but really, I think she’s trying to ground herself so she doesn’t get knocked off her feet by what I’m about to say.

“Oh, just regular bad. You’ll be okay.”

Her brows shoot up, and she gives me a wild look. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

No, she wouldn’t be. I don’t think she ever worries about herself. She’s the least selfish person I’ve ever met. But self-sacrifice can be too far and too much as well. “My mom was a single mom. She was close to her family. She never did tell a soul who my dad was, which became a real issue later, but in the earlier years, they helped her out. She was young. She had me when she was nineteen. When I was three, she started dating again. I don’t remember, but that’s what my grandma always told me when I asked.

“Everyone always described her as being like the sun. Bright, beautiful, but a little bit unreachable and untamable. Granted, that was always coming from her own mother with a hell of a lot of hindsight behind it, so I’m not sure I can count that as accurate. I think there might have been a lot of jealousy involved too, even for my grandma. I think my mom lived life to the fullest every day and in every way. I’m not sure anyone really understood her. She dated a series of guys, as my grandma liked to put it, and one of them kind of stuck. They’d been dating for a few months, but she never brought him home. My grandmawould see his bike pull into the driveway to pick my mom up and then back again at the end of the night. She didn’t know much more about him than that. Later, she knew his name because it was in the papers. She knew it from his obituary. He was a few years older than my mom but still way, way too young. Driving a bike late at night in the rain, they were hit by a truck. Neither of them survived.”

Weland makes a gargling noise in the back of her throat, and when I glance over, I see unshed tears glistening, and they turn her eyes a dark shade of blue, somewhere near cobalt or sapphire. As much as I try to feel anything about my past, all I feel is regret about what could have been and what wasn’t. I don’t feel grief. I was three, so I don’t remember any of it. But I do feel longing. Longing to know the woman who gave me life, who loved me, and who was taken from me before I could even properly recall anything about her. All my life, I wished that night never happened. I wished I had a real mother instead of a grandma and an aunt and cousins.

“I lived with my grandma for a few years after that. She was heartbroken, though, and losing my mom was hard on her. I didn’t understand it as a little kid, but as an adult, it was clear. When I was eight, she passed away. She wasn’t overly old, but I don’t think heart attacks pick and choose.”

“Good god, Sterling,” Weland gasps. “You said it wasn’t that bad.”

“That’s all the grief and losing people in my story. It’s done there. My mom’s dad died super young, when she was a teenager. Maybe that had something to do with her wild streak or why she tried to live life and love life to the fullest. I’m not sure. I’ll never be able to ask her. There was no one other than my aunt. She was five years older than my mom, and by the time I came into her family, she already had three kids. Two older andone a year younger than me. She didn’t want another, but she made room for me anyway, and she loved me in her own way.

“From what I could gather, she was so different from my mom. Her husband was a banker, and later, when she went back to work, she worked at the same bank. They were both so…proper and upright. Stodgy, I guess. I don’t know what it was, but she also encouraged the worst kind of sibling rivalry, except it was between her kids and me. The three of them against me. That’s the way it always was. Three boys. She called them her Gaggle of Greedy Gretchens. So, full disclosure: I didn’t come up with that myself. They hated that. They hated that she compared me to a saint or an angel all the time because I was quiet and never asked for anything. I never wanted to draw attention to myself, but it never worked out in my favor.

“All our lives, it was me against those three. I knew my aunt and uncle would never be a mother or father to me, and I’d never be one of their kids. They didn’t treat me like that, but it felt like it anyway. I never wanted to ask for anything, and I never wanted to need them for anything. I didn’t want to do a single thing that’ll ever give them a reason to get rid of me, which I understand now is super fucked up logic, but when I was a kid, that was how I thought.”

“Were they mean? Or just like kind of obtuse? I can’t imagine being in a family where you didn’t know you were loved beyond anything. We’re all so close, my mom and dad and brother, even though he’s so much younger.”

Beans stops and lifts his leg against a bush like he’s pissing all over my aunt and uncle’s idea of raising me.

“I think more obtuse. They had four boys to raise. That’s a lot for anyone. Maybe it was too much for them because when I was thirteen, my uncle literally ran off with this young girl from the bank. He left my aunt the house, half their savings, the car, and four boys when he moved to Switzerland to start his life over.And my aunt, to her credit, held us all together. I got a job when I was fourteen, just washing dishes at a restaurant close to the house. I held the job until I was eighteen. I worked my ass off in high school to make sure I could get a scholarship, and I did. I studied business, but music was always my passion. None of us had music lessons. My cousins were more bruisers than they were anything else, and they loved sports above all, but I had a good ear.”

Weland pulls a face. She’s already reading between the lines here. “More like one of those people who can just play anything after hearing something, am I right?”

“Kind of. I don’t know where it comes from. My aunt says my mom wasn’t musical. That she never played anything. But with genetics, it’s impossible to know. Maybe my biological father was the same way.”

“Do you sing?”

I lift a shoulder in a shrug. “Not really.”

“That would be a yes.”

“I have this kind of freaky talent for finding the perfect voice, and by perfect, I mean a voice people are going to love. I also have a really good talent for business, so I turned both of those things into a company and then into a career. I couldn’t have done it without investors, though, and my aunt saw potential in me, I guess. Because she bought most of the shares I was offering when I started my company. I needed an investor, and she had some savings. She was the financial backing, and I was the…well, everything else. My company started off with one person, me. I saw a need and I wanted to fill it. A lot of artists don’t want to work with big labels. They don’t want to lose control of their work. I never wanted to take someone else’s music from them, but I did want to help get them out there, help the world to see what I saw and hear what I heard.”

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