Page 10 of Just Come Over
It was a photo to make you laugh. Why wasn’t he laughing?
“I don’t know this girl,” he said. “No.”
“Did you open the second one?”
Oh. There was another photo. Rhys clicked on it.
He stopped breathing.
It had been taken at school, probably, the kind of thing where the photographer snapped a different kid every minute until he’d herded the whole class through. A girl in a long-sleeved red T-shirt, with some sort of plaid dress over it. Standard issue. Her skin was the color of light honey, and her dark hair was swept straight back off her forehead and pulled up into a high ponytail that revealed her widow’s peak, that vee of hairline dipping down in the center of her forehead. She had her elbow propped up and her chin in her hand, which was probably the pose they’d all done, but she wasn’t smiling. Instead, she looked at the camera as if she were staring it down. The same way the toddler had.
The same way Rhys did.
Her eyes were a clear hazel-green, like a stream in the Scottish Highlands. Relic of Rhys’s great-grandfather on his dad’s dad’s side, his Nan had told him. Angus Fletcher. The fletchers, the arrow-makers, running down a hill in the Highlands and onto the enemy, their kilts swirling around them, a broadsword in one hand and a bow and quiver strapped to their backs.
Warriors on both sides of the bloodline.
They were Rhys’s eyes, and his hairline.
“Right,” he said. “She looks like me. But I still didn’t sleep with her mum. Absolutelynot.”His mouth said the words, even as the rest of him was acknowledging the truth.
“I’ll give you the gist of the statement from the friend,” Colin said. “Elizabeth Hartwell.” He was speaking so deliberately now, his words came down like concrete. “India met you in a pizza place—Pizzeria Uno—two days before the All Blacks game, with a few other men who introduced themselves as New Zealand rugby players. As All Blacks. She was a waitress there, and you ended up exchanging numbers. You were persistent. She was excited. After the game, she met you in a sports bar—I don’t have the name of that—by previous arrangement. You had drinks, and you talked about flying her over to London for the next stop of the Northern Tour. You went home with her, and left her place before dawn, saying you had to get back to the hotel in order to fly out with the team. You promised to email her, but when you did, you said the London trip wouldn’t be possible. She was disappointed. The rest of the email was about...” Colin gave a dry little lawyer-cough. “Intimacies. You definitely gave your name to her, though, as Rhys Fletcher, and you definitely told her—multiple times—that you played for the All Blacks. You wouldn’t let her take your photo.”
“So far,” Rhys said, “it’s nothing.” Except for that school photo, and those eyes.
Colin went on. “When she emailed you a few months later to tell you she was pregnant and was having the baby, you promised to take care of her, but asked her not to contact you again, because you’d got married since the two of you had met. You sent her four hundred dollars a month for three and a half years, deposited directly into her bank account, after which the payments became sporadic, and then stopped altogether. I find that timing significant, given what you’ve just told me. I’m sure you do, too. Her emails went unanswered, and as the United States and New Zealand don’t have a reciprocity agreement for child support, she had no way of collecting. ‘She couldn’t afford to go to a lawyer for nothing,’ were the friend’s exact words. ‘She knew she was stuck.’ If you’re certain it wasn’t you, we have to ask ourselves why she looks so much like you, and why the actual father gave your name.”
What Rhyswantedto say was, “It’s a sad story, but it wasn’t me, too bad. I’m not the only man in the world with hazel eyes. It was some other tattooed fella, feeding a pretty blonde a line to get her between the sheets. ‘I’m an All Black’ isn’t the least-used tactic in the world for a Kiwi abroad, I hear.”
He didn’t say it, because the All Blacks hadn’t been the only team playing that weekend, and because Te Rangi had more than one cousin. The Maori All Blacks had played the night before the marquee event, and Dylan had been selected for the Maori All Blacks that year. Not happy to have been left out of the ABs squad once again, and resenting, as much as happy-go-lucky Dylan had been able to resent anything, his big brother, whohadn’tbeen left out. Also as usual. Borrowing Rhys’s name, and his stature, for a night, and looking enough like him for a girl checking out a photo online to be fooled. A too-young, too-credulous girl, maybe, who believed in Cinderella, in flights to London and a whirlwind future. In being swept off your feet. Rhys’s hand was fisting at the thought.
Dylan had also been married. Another excellent reason to borrow your brother’s identity, if you had a wife and a year-old baby at home. And if that baby had just had surgery for a hole in his heart, and you were a man who thought life hadn’t been quite fair to you, and what was the harm in snatching a little harmless fun when you had the chance? What Zora didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and she barely had time for you, anyway.
Which meant that Dylan wasn’t getting as much sex as he wanted. Rhys hadn’t needed to hear that last bit spelled out. He’d wanted to put his fist through the wall when Dylan had said it, after Rhys had caught him kissing a pretty brunette in the toilet corridor of a Christchurch bar, a couple months before Chicago. Actually, he’d wanted to put his fist through his brother.
He didn’t want to ask the next question, but there was no way around it. He had to know. “What is it, exactly, that I’m meant to do now?”
“The mother died, as I mentioned,” Colin said. “Suddenly, without being able to make plans for her daughter. Hit by an inattentive driver—an uninsured driver, unfortunately—at a pedestrian crossing, on her way to work. Which leaves the other parent as sole guardian. As things stand—you.”
Yeh. A gut punch.
“I’m single,” Rhys said. “Not in a position to take care of a kid.”
“She could have said the same, of course.”
He wished Colin wouldn’t be so bloody reasonable. “There must be somebody else,” he realized with relief. “Somebody more fit. They’re probably frantic now, the grandparents or the auntie or whoever, thinking they’ve got to let her go to En Zed, to a dad she doesn’t even know and who never cared enough to meet her. Who’s she with now? That’s where she should stay, surely.”
He’d pay. He’d have to pay. No getting around it. Those eyes. That hairline. The defiant way she looked at the camera.
Most people ran from fear. Other people made fear do the running. He had a feeling he knew which kind she was.
“Now?” Colin said. “She’s in temporary foster care. She’s been there for... let’s see... six days. That’s how long it took them to track you down and get in contact with me, after finding your name on the birth certificate, the Acknowledgment of Paternity filed with the state, and hearing the details from the friend.”
“No grandparents, then,” Rhys said. “No aunties.” That hollow feeling in his stomach? That was what it felt like to have the lift drop ten stories all at once beneath you.
“No,” Colin said. “Just you. If you want the girl, you call them and tell them so, and she stays in foster care until you come to get her, simple as that. That’s one option. If you don’t want to take her, I tell them, sorry, he denies it absolutely. His signature was forged, and he wasn’t the one making the payments. This is the first he’s heard of her. At that point, she’d become a ward of the state. As I mentioned, New Zealand has no reciprocal agreement with the United States, much less with the state of Illinois. They can’t compel a DNA test, or child support, for that matter, any more than they could six years ago. You can ask for a test, of course. That would probably be simplest, if you’re certain it would absolve you. Anything less than ninety-nine percent probability would be as good as a total miss. ‘Close’ doesn’t count.”
“I just have one question,” Rhys said.
