When I Found You by Brenda Novak
Eighteen
When Natasha woke up, the sun was hitting the sheet she’d tacked over the window, which looked out on an alley below and the dumpsters from the commercial businesses on either side of her, but there was no noise. It was early yet. Although she could’ve used more sleep, she was glad to have a few minutes while Mack was still passed out to enjoy lying on his chest. Last night they’d made love again, much more gently and slowly than they had in the shower. It was particularly memorable because it was somehow different from any of the times before—there was less lust and more of something else. But she was afraid to try to define what that “something else” was for fear she’d imbue it with too much meaning.
Assuming Mack felt more than he did was what had always gotten her in trouble.
Forcing her mind away from the memory of last night, she reminded herself, once again, to take what they were doing in stride. She’d agreed to keep it physical, and she was going to stand by her word. Something was better than nothing, especially now, when she was so broken and lost and lonely. Maybe he’d stick around long enough that she could get back on her feet.
What would he do if it turned out that Lucas belonged to Ace? Would he decide there was no reason to move to LA? Stop visiting? Would even the physical part of their relationship be over? Six hours was a long time to drive for sex when he could so easily find a woman in Whiskey Creek or nearby Sacramento. It wasn’t as if he’d ever had any trouble getting laid.
“Did I miss the alarm?” he mumbled, one arm curving to hold her more tightly against him.
Fear of what this day would hold made her so nervous she wouldn’t be able to eat, not until the butterflies in her stomach settled down. Maybe Mack had been able to feel her fear and dread, and that was what woke him, because she’d been so careful not to move. “No. It hasn’t gone off yet.”
He scrubbed his free hand over his face. “Then what are you doing up?”
“Thinking.”
“About...”
“Bella.”
He covered a yawn. “Who’s Bella?”
“That woman you brought home one night—just before I left for college.”
She felt him tense. “I don’t remember her,” he said. Then, more gruffly, “Why are you thinking about her, anyway?”
Because it was a good reminder, a way to keep what was happening between them now in perspective. “I feel sort of bad for what I did to you both back then, and I don’t think I’ve ever apologized.”
He hesitated as if he didn’t really want to go down this path but wound up saying, “What you did to us?”
“You probably never realized it, but I sat outside your bedroom door for probably an hour, listening to every sigh and moan, and cried.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I had no business invading your privacy like that. I’m embarrassed about it now. Here I was, this girl who wouldn’t even have had a home without you, thinking you owed me some kind of fidelity.”
“You never had the kind of love you needed.”
“You offered me love. I just wanted a different kind.” After all, he was the one who’d helped her with her homework, taught her how to play chess when the catty girls at school were excluding her, tried to teach her how to cook, even though he was much better at grilling, and drove her to dance lessons for the whole of one year. He was also the one who’d given her his computer for college and helped pay for her flight when she left. Her life would’ve gone so differently without him. She certainly would never have become a doctor. “Anyway, poor Bella. The next morning, she tried to shake my hand when you both came up for breakfast, and I told her, ‘I’m your worst nightmare. You touch me, you’ll draw back a stub.’ Remember that?”
She thought he’d laugh with her, but he didn’t. “I remember how bad your language was. That’s what I remember.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t care. I was aching to flip off the world.”
“You were angry. We were all familiar with that feeling.”
“That’s no excuse,” she said. “Because of me, Bella stormed out. I’m sorry if I messed that up for you.”
He grimaced. “I didn’t even know her. I was drunk when I brought her home.”
“And you were making a statement, trying to get me to back off. I just...wouldn’t let go.” She hadn’t been able to figure out how to let go. But she was older and wiser now. She knew that marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be—just a long series of compromises and struggles as two people attempted to get along, to get by, to overlook, to forgive and to ignore pet peeves and other irritations. She was much better off on her own. By keeping it light and easy, enjoying each other when they were both interested and moving on when that was no longer the case, she’d never have to worry about going through another divorce. And she’d be less likely to expect anything from Mack that could result in disappointment—whether he was Lucas’s father or not.
“We have a lot of history together,” he said.
“I can’t believe you put up with me. She might’ve been ‘the one’ if I hadn’t screwed it up for you. I did so many crazy things. Maybe you won’t remember this, either, but not too long before that, I showed up in your bedroom late one night. You tried to tell me to leave, but—”
“You whipped off the T-shirt you typically wore to bed—one of my T-shirts—and stood there, almost completely naked.”
“I thought I could tempt you beyond your ability to resist, I guess.” She smacked her forehead. “So dumb! Instead of being tempted, you scrambled out of bed to pick up that shirt and make me put it back on.” She made a sound of disgust. “God, I was an idiot.”
“Do we have to talk about these things?” he asked.
“You don’t want to?”
“No. I feel terrible that I hurt you. I just... I couldn’t have felt good about myself if I’d taken what you were offering. I hope you know that. You were the first of any of us to get the grades you got and have the kind of opportunities that would afford. I knew you could be anything, and I wanted you to have the chance to go out and experience life, see the world.”
“And yet...here I am, divorced, bankrupt and without my practice.”
“Through no fault of your own. Everyone faces setbacks. What you’re going through now—it’s just temporary.”
“I hope so.” The alarm went off, and she leaned across him to turn it off. “I’d better get up. New Horizons has that new student coming in today.” She’d told him about Aiyana’s call last night.
“Troy Mason?”
“Yeah. I’m anxious to meet him and to make sure his injuries have healed.”
She started to slip away from him, but he caught her arm. “Would you mind if I took Lucas with me today?”
“To LA?”
“Yeah. He really doesn’t want to go to day care.”
“It’s not easy to work with a six-year-old in tow, Mack.”
“I won’t be working, just driving around to see various potential locations for the new shop. I can manage.”
Shoving her tangled hair out of her face, she drew a deep breath. “Should we check the lab website?”
“My phone’s in the other room,” he said immediately. “I’ll do it later.”
“We can use my phone.” She gestured at the box that doubled as a nightstand, but he didn’t reach for it.
“Can we wait until after we get home tonight?”
He was nervous, too. She could tell.
Maybe he was right. Maybe it would be smarter not to look until they had more time to deal with the results, just in case. She didn’t want to start the day off with bad news any more than he did. She was still trying to get used to her new job—and the fact that she was now sleeping with Mack on a regular basis, at least for however long he’d be around. “Okay.”
“So you don’t mind if I take Luke with me today?” he asked as she got up and put on her robe so that she could go into the bathroom and get showered.
She wouldn’t let her own mother take Luke, but she trusted Mack much more than she did Anya. “He’d love that.”
As if on cue, Lucas opened the door. “I’m ready to go, Mack,” he said and had his school backpack on even though he was still in his pajamas.
After Natasha left for work, Mack sat down with Lucas, who was still finishing his breakfast.
“Aren’t you going to eat, Mack?” Luke asked, eyeing his plate.
Mack had made egg burritos while Natasha got ready so that she’d have something besides coffee for breakfast, but his own burrito sat untouched. He was too uptight to be hungry.
“In a minute.” His pulse raced as he got out his phone and navigated to the lab’s website. He’d told Natasha they’d check the results later. He’d meant it at the time and felt guilty for going ahead without her, but he couldn’t wait. He had to find out before she did so that he’d have a chance to react to the news—whatever it was—on his own.
“What are you doing, Mack?” Lucas asked, disappointed that he couldn’t get more of Mack’s attention. “Are you playing a game?”
Mack reached over to wipe the refried beans from Lucas’s chin. I’m trying to find out if I’m your father, he thought. But all he said was “No, I’m not playing a game. I’m checking something. Give me a minute, okay?”
Once the website came up, Mack looked over at Lucas, who stared right back at him, for several seconds. Then he took a deep breath and logged in.
The results were there, along with a rather lengthy explanation on how to interpret them.
Mack skimmed the fine print. If what he saw wasn’t clear, he could go back and read all that. For now, he couldn’t wait to get to the bottom line, which he found on a locus/allele sizes chart that had “Child” at the top of one column, “Mother” at the top of a second column and “alleged FATHER” at the top of a third. There were a lot of numbers under each heading that didn’t mean anything to him. But below all that, it said “Interpretation” and listed the combined paternity index as zero.
He blinked. Zero? As in there was zero chance that he wasn’t Luke’s father? Or zero chance that he was?
He didn’t have to search very far for clarification. The conclusion was right below the paternity index, and six words immediately jumped out at him: “...is excluded as the biological father.”
Excluded.He let his phone drop to the table with a clunk and rocked back.
“You dropped your phone,” Lucas said.
Mack couldn’t even respond.
“Is something wrong?” the boy asked.
“No,” he managed to say. But that wasn’t true. Everything was wrong.
Lucas belonged to Ace.
Natasha had come into the break room to get some more coffee but left her empty cup sitting on the counter while she stared at her phone. She was contemplating logging into the lab’s website. She’d told Mack she’d wait to get the results with him tonight, and she wanted to keep her word. It had been a busy morning, which made it easier to put the paternity test out of her mind. But the afternoon had been much slower, and she was getting tired of waiting and wondering and worrying.
If she peeked, would there be something to indicate that someone had already logged onto the website? And even if there wasn’t, would she be able to act sufficiently surprised later on?
“Hello, how are you today?”
She turned to see Aiyana walk into the room. “I’m doing good. You?”
“Better now that Troy Mason is here, safe and in good hands. How’d his exam go?”
“I did a few X-rays on the arm he said was injured by his stepfather. It looks as though his most recent break was a scaphoid here.” She indicated the bone in her wrist that she was talking about. “It’s a break that rarely heals without surgery. But it looks as though he got lucky. His wrist healed fine. And I couldn’t find any other broken bones or injuries—not recent ones that need to be treated.”
“That’s a relief.” Aiyana washed her hands in the sink. “Thanks for checking him out.”
“No problem.” Natasha filled her cup and added a splash of cream. “I was worried about him, too. A broken bone that doesn’t receive the proper treatment can result in an infection or even permanent deformity, so I was anxious to get a peek at it.”
Aiyana checked the doorway as though she wanted to be sure they weren’t about to be interrupted. “I’ve been thinking about you all weekend. How’d the DNA test turn out?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“The wait must be nerve-racking.”
Natasha glanced at the clock. It was nearly two. “It shouldn’t be much longer.”
Aiyana gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “Don’t look so worried. It’ll be okay.”
Natasha feigned a smile. “Of course,” she said, as though she believed that to be true, and was about to follow Aiyana out of the room when her phone went off.
It was Ace. No doubt he wanted to know what they’d found.
In an attempt to be as pleasant as possible, in hopes that she could get them back on the right track of at least treating each other more civilly, she decided to answer. “Hello?”
“Is he mine?” he asked without preamble.
A teacher came into the break room. Hoping for more privacy, she lowered her voice and went back to her office. “I don’t know yet.”
“From everything I’ve read on the internet, it doesn’t take that long to get the results, Tasha.”
Relieved to find that she didn’t have any students waiting for her, she closed the door after she went inside. “They might be posted,” she admitted. “I’ve just... I’ve been too busy to check.”
“Well, I’m tired of waiting. Can’t you at least do me the courtesy of taking five seconds to pull up the website?”
This meant a lot to him, too. For more than six years, he’d believed Lucas was his. She felt bad for what he must be going through and agreed that it wasn’t fair to draw it out any longer. “I’ll log in and call you right back.”
He hung up without so much as a thank-you, but she ignored that and called Mack. “Hey.”
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Good. Troy Mason is going to be fine. I gave him a thorough examination this morning, and he has no permanent injuries.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
“Did you and Lucas find a location for the shop?”
“Not yet. The Realtor had a conflict and had to reschedule.”
“So what have you been doing?”
“We’ve been painting. Luke’s room is done. Looks great.”
“That’s nice. But I feel bad that I wasn’t there to help.”
“Don’t. It was easy. When will you get off?”
“In an hour and a half. But...Ace just called.” She was afraid if she didn’t hurry and get to the point they’d be interrupted.
“He’s looking for the results,” Mack guessed.
“Do you think we should go ahead and see if they’ve been posted?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Mack?”
“I already did, Tash,” he said. “This morning.”
“But...you made it sound as though we’d do it together.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I did that because...well, because I needed you to hold off and give me the chance to look first—to react to the news on my own.”
She supposed she could understand that. She was used to the idea of having a child. This was new to him, could change his life drastically. But... “Why didn’t you call me once you knew?”
“I figured we’d talk about it tonight.”
If it had been what they were hoping for, Mack would’ve let her know. Why would he have had to wait to tell her that Luke was his? “He belongs to Ace,” she guessed.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “But that’s not bad news, you know? It’ll create less confusion for him. It’ll get your in-laws to calm down and continue to be loving grandparents. It’ll mean that the visitation schedule you just set up in your divorce won’t have to be redone. It...it’s probably the best way this thing could’ve worked out.”
She sank into her seat. He didn’t sound convinced, but she could tell he was trying hard to convince her. She hoped the results would at least be easier on Lucas, as Mack had said, because she believed he’d missed out on having a much better father. Ace was so selfish, so caught up in his gaming addiction. And now he was on the hunt for another woman. This wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear, but DNA didn’t lie. She had to accept what was. “Okay,” she said once she’d summoned the energy necessary to respond. “I’ll let him know.”
“Tash?”
She gripped the phone tighter. “What?”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t love him, too.”
No, but it meant Mack probably wouldn’t—not any more than his other brothers loved Lucas, anyway. Mack had said that he hadn’t gone out with the real estate agent today, that she’d had a conflict. But Natasha couldn’t help wondering if this was the real reason. Was it that he no longer had sufficient motivation to take the risk of moving and starting his own location? “Of course it doesn’t,” she said, pumping so much false cheer into her voice she was afraid she’d gone overboard. “I’m sorry, but...I have to go. Someone just came into my office.”
It was a lie. She was still alone. But she was afraid if they kept talking she’d end up revealing just how disappointed she was. If Mack was Lucas’s father, she had no doubt he would’ve stayed in much closer touch.
Now her situation was unlikely to change.
She’d still have to cope with visitation with Ace and his family.
She’d still have to stand strong and rebuild her life on her own.
And, on top of that, she’d have to let go of Mack much sooner than she’d anticipated.
But that was okay, she told herself. She wouldn’t crumble. She’d let him go with a smile and walk away with her head held high.
When Natasha got home, Mack’s bag was packed and sitting in the drive by his car. Now that they knew what they knew, she’d expected him to leave soon, but that he wasn’t even going to stay for dinner hit her hard.
Drawing a bolstering breath, she summoned what emotional fortitude she could muster after the very difficult conversation she’d had with Ace on the drive home and got out of the car. “All packed up?” she said, as though it wasn’t a surprise at all, or even an unwelcome event.
He lifted Lucas into his arms and gave him a hug. “Yeah. I’m sorry to rush out of here, but something’s come up at home.”
“The shop is always so busy. I’m sure Dylan needs you back.”
He seemed surprised she’d agree with him so readily. “He does, actually. There’s a problem and...and my father can’t work. Dyl can’t get by without both of us for long.”
“What’s going on? Don’t tell me J.T.’s on another bender.”
When she’d been living with the Amoses, there were weeks when J.T. would disappear and no one would know where he went. He wouldn’t go to work. He wouldn’t come home. Even her mother had no idea where to find him. Then the cops would pick him up. Or he’d eventually show up under his own power, looking unkempt and smelling like alcohol.
“I’m not sure exactly,” he said.
Because she was struggling to hold herself together, and she believed she already knew why he was leaving, she didn’t feel much concern for his father. But it would’ve seemed strange if she didn’t at least pretend to be worried. So she pulled Lucas into her own arms, taking what small consolation she could get from his brief hug before he started wiggling to get down. “What else could it be?” she asked.
“Let me get home and figure it out. I’ll give you a call as soon as I understand what happened.”
So it was like the situation with Kellan. She was to be excluded. “Okay,” she said. “I hope he isn’t hurt.”
Mack didn’t address that comment. “I made some spaghetti. It was a little early to feed Lucas dinner, but I thought I might as well make something so you wouldn’t have to.”
Head high, she reminded herself. Smile bright. “That’s very nice of you. Thank you. I’m sorry if I held you up.”
“I didn’t have to wait long.” After throwing his duffel bag into his truck, he fished out his keys. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
Lucas started to cry. “I don’t want Mack to leave,” he said. “He’s my best friend.”
It probably felt like he was his only friend. It sort of felt that way for Natasha, too, but she kept telling herself it was because they were new here. Things would improve. She had to believe that.
Mack ruffled his hair. “I’ll be back. You be good, okay?”
“No,” Lucas said, his bottom lip sticking out in an angry pout. “I won’t be good.”
Mack laughed. “I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d still think he was mine.”
“We’ll get through this,” Natasha whispered in her son’s ear under the guise of kissing his cheek. Then she tried to distract herself by thinking of some useful aphorisms and other encouraging thoughts. When the going gets tough, the tough get going... What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us... I knew this was coming eventually. Better to get it over with and be done with it.
Mack caught her chin and brushed his lips over hers. “Don’t worry about anything, okay?”
She couldn’t force any words past the lump in her throat, so she nodded and wished he’d just leave so that she wouldn’t have the added burden of trying to pretend.
Something must’ve betrayed her, however, because he hesitated for a moment and stared into her eyes before he said, “I love you. You know that, right?”
She swallowed hard so she could speak. “Oh, I know. I love you and your brothers right back. Be safe.”
He gave her a funny look, as though he found that to be a strange response. Maybe it was a strange response for someone she’d been sleeping with. But he fell in both categories, and if he could switch between them so blithely, so could she.
With a final wave, he got in his truck and took off, and it wasn’t too long after that Ace and his parents arrived. They banged on her door and insisted they should get to take Lucas home for a week, since she “blew their weekend” and caused them so much pain and suffering.
Natasha was hanging on by such a thin thread she didn’t even argue. She figured she did owe them a week. Maybe more. Nothing she did seemed to be right.
She packed her son’s clothes like some kind of automaton, handed his small suitcase over to her ex-mother-in-law and let Ace transfer the car seat from her car into his parents’ Mercedes sedan.
“I used to think the world of you,” his mother said. “But now that I know what you’re really like, I feel sorry for my son—and Lucas, too.”
“What you did is unforgivable,” Ace added.
Again, she didn’t respond. She just bent to kiss her son on the head. Then she sank onto the porch steps and watched as Ace led him away.
