Page 37 of The Ring Thief
“It wasn’t because he was dating you, or that he was the first guy you ever brought home.” He finally looks up, piercing me with an intense look. “It was because of his name.”
“His name,” I repeat, pausing a beat before adding, “His last name. Masters.”
My dad nods jerkily. “I thought—” He curses long and low. “I didn’t know what to think when you brought him home, but he seemed…” he lifts a shoulder, “smitten. So, I gave him a chance. A clean slate where I pretended the past didn’t exist. When you told me about the phone call, my suspicions rose again, but I didn’t want to believe it.” He looks down at the folder. “Until he sent me all that.”
“Declan sent you the evidence?”
“He’s not contesting, Lilypad,” he utters softly. “He’s making sure it goes through, and he’s tearing his whole world down to do it.”
“I don’t understand.” My eyes burn, but I can’t explain why, and my heart thunders in my chest as adrenaline shoots through me. “Can you just…” I lick my lips nervously. “Spit it out.”
He looks away, his skin pale. “Donald Masters and I have a history, one from twenty years ago.”
It’s easy enough to immediately connect the dots to a year when I’d just turned eight and my mother walked out the door one day and never came back.
“Did he…? Did he do something to Mom?”
He shakes his head, shrugs, then shakes his head again. “I don’t think so.” He looks away from me with a frown, his eyes dark and haunted. “Lily, that was a rough year. Financially, I mean. Hi-Tech wasn’t doing as well as it could’ve and I was spending a lot of time at the office.” He grimaces. “More time than usual, anyway. There was a lot going on at home that I missed.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, mouth pressed into a line.
“Mom?” I stare at him. “She had an affair with Donald Masters?”
It’s a shot in the dark, but I don’t actually expect him to jerk hischin down in confirmation. “Except he wasn’t just some guy she had an affair with,” he mutters. “Donald Masters was her stepbrother when they were teenagers until their parents split, which is probably when they started sleeping together, because I’m not positive they ever actually stopped.”
Abruptly, I stand up, unable to stay sitting still. He watches me, eyeing me cautiously as I round the table to pace to the other end of the room and back. After several minutes, I ask, “How did you find out? About the affair?” He sinks lower into his chair, shame and guilt suffusing his face. “Dad?”
He drops his eyes, almost like he can’t bear to look at me. “She told me,” he finally confesses. “She told me because she found out she was pregnant.”
CHAPTER 18
Lily
Sasha sucks back her margarita noisily, eyes fixed on me with avid fascination. “This drink is so good, but I feel like I need popcorn, too. This is like watching a real telenovela, except I’m listening to it. Are radio telenovelas a thing?” She bounces in her chair, uncaring of the looks she’s drawing from the other patrons sitting near us. “What happened next? You’re eight, right? And your mom’s knocked up with her stepbro’s baby. But how did she know it was his?”
We’re at one of our favorite bars, Lolita’s, as I give her the lowdown, but I scrunch my face up at her words.
“Apparently, my parents hadn’t, uh…” Sasha makes a circle with her thumb and middle finger, thrusting her index finger from her other hand through it. “Freaking hell. Yes. That. They hadn’t been doing that.”
“Your dad must’ve been gutted.” Her eyes crease sympathetically, but my well of pity is suspiciously low, finding out that my dad had been keeping such a massive secret from me. He told me that my mother had just walked out on us one day, that she didn’t want to be with us. Withme.
“Not at first. He went into a rage and kicked her out.”
She leans over the table, her eyes wide. “Kicked out the pregnant lady? Shit, that wouldn’t have gone down well.”
“And Donald’s a prominent businessman. A married one with a glowing reputation as a family man.” I roll my eyes at the description because if there was a man who was less of a family man, I’d yet to meet him. It was kind of shocking he hadn’t eaten his offspring as soon as they were born, thinking they’d give him extra powers or something. “Dad thinks she didn’t go to Donald for help because he would’ve turned her away. Their parents weren’t together anymore, but they had been siblings during their formative years, so shit would have hit the fan that they were having an affair.
“So, what happened to her? Where is she now?”
Grief wells inside my chest for a woman I barely knew. My memories of her are fuzzy, slipping through my fingers like water. There’s a brief sound of someone singing, their voice high and delicate, and then a phantom touch of warm fingers trailing over my head.
But it’s hard to know what’s real and what my imagination is filling in. I’d blocked out most of my memories of her long ago, finding it too painful to think about a woman who was supposed to love me and had just walked away, without even looking back.
“No one knows,” I whisper. “By the time Dad came to his senses, several days had passed and he looked for her, but she’d just…vanished. He went to the police, but after he admitted to making her leave, they said unless there was evidence of foul play, she was an adult with free will and the motive to disappear. There was nothing they could do.”
“That’s insane,” Sasha breathes. “And Declan gave all that evidence to your dad? Proof that they conspired to—” she points at me.
I bob my head, grimacing at my empty glass. “I need another drink.”
As if summoned by magic, a server appears at our side with fresh margaritas, her smile bright. “These are from the two sitting at the bar over there.”
