“Just wait a minute,” Layton says with worry, but I’m already jerking my hand out of his and running for the front gate. “Lola, wait! You can’t just…” He trails off as he rounds the side of the house, just steps behind me.
I’ve stopped dead in my tracks. My mother is laying in the driveway, my father holding her lifeless body in his arms. I race over to them without thinking, tears already pouring out of my eyes.
“What happened?” I ask my father, the gasps in my voice alarming, unfamiliar. There’s no blood, no wounds on her. Her eyes are open and vacant while her lips are slightly parted and tinted blue.
He’s rocking her as he cradles her head in his arms. “She’s dead… I think she had a heart attack.”
“Call the ambulance then!” I cry, sinking to my knees. “Dad…” Oh, God, it hurts so much. I can’t breathe. The pain… I’ve never felt anything like it.
“Lola, it’s too late,” my father says with watery eyes as he nuzzles his cheek against the top of her head. "She's dead.”
I want to shout at him for giving up on her so soon. For not holding on. For letting whatever happened to her happen.
“I’ll call 911,” Layton says from behind me before I can start yelling at my father.
More tears pour from my eyes and I feel like I’m drowning in them. “Don’t give up on her, Dad. Don’t let her go.” I know that’s not what he meant when they’d been arguing this morning, but still, he needs to try harder. “Fucking hold onto her!” I scream.
His face drains of color as his eyes widen. His lips part to say something, but then he presses them together and starts to cry. Strangely, his eyes remain tearless, though.
I remain kneeling on the driveway in front of the house, confused, hurting, the pain crushing me, and I feel as though my world is shattering around me. I can barely see anything through the tears, but I do notice when Frankie Catherlson comes walking out of my house with his men. He doesn’t say a word to my father, just heads for his SUV parked amongst a line of similar ones. As he’s getting inside the passenger seat, he glances over his shoulder at me and gives me this look. It’s not quite a smile, yet it seems like he wants to, and then… he f**king winks at me.
My blood burns. My temper simmers. I start to rise to my feet to… Well, I’m not sure just yet. However, as I start to walk over there, Layton’s arms wrap around me. “Stay here, Lola.”
“I want to punch that grin off his face,” I growl, glaring at the back of the SUV. “He had something to do with this… I want to rip his throat out, Layton.” I’m shocked at my words, so venomous and full of hatred. So unlike me.
“Lola, calm down. It’s going to be okay. I promise. Just calm down, please, and let me take care of you.” He kisses the back of my head as I tremble from head to toe. Layton continues to hold me, saying things I can’t hear through the strange, strangled noise my father is making. I want to sit down by him, yet I can’t bring myself to take my eyes off Frankie’s SUV. I’m not sure what happened, but something tells me he had a hand in it.
After minutes go by, my legs grow weak against the shock settling in my body. I’m about to collapse into Layton’s arms when his father and mother come hurrying out of my house.
“Layton, get over here,” his father, Mr. Everett, barks at him, snapping his fingers. His father has never been a nice man, but he and my father have a decent relationship. Although, as he dismisses my father and dead mother in the driveway, all I see is an enemy.
“I promise I’ll be back in just a second,” Layton whispers in my ear, then his arms leave me and he heads over to his father.
I feel incredibly cold, incredibly weak, incredibly unstable, and I have no choice except to sink to the ground and watch in horror, anger—many different emotions—as Layton’s father orders him to get in the car with Frankie and then climbs in himself. As Layton gives me one last look as he gets in the back, his expression is filled with terror, sorrow, and remorse.
Then the door shuts, and moments later, the SUVs are pulling away. One by one, they leave me in the driveway with my father and dead mother, the sounds of screeching tires and ambulance sirens filling the air.
Chapter 1
Seven years later…
My day has been mellow for the most part, a rare but welcomed occasion. Ever since my mother died, good days were far and few between. But today seemed so good it left me hoping.
I’d woken up with no hangover, even after partying way too hard the night before while managing to avoid my bodyguards, which was going to get me into trouble when I got home. I had been in desperate need of some alone time to clear my head, though.
I’d headed to the cemetery to put flowers on my mama’s grave and a nice, long, one-sided conversation with the engraved stone. It was something I had been meaning to do for a few weeks, ever since I found the letter.
That goddamn letter that had flipped my already chaotic life upside down even more than it already was. I’d found it hidden in one of my mother’s jacket pockets while I was cleaning out her closet, something that should have been done a long time ago, but I had been holding on to the stuff that belonged to her.
It was written by my mama to a man named Everson Milantes, divulging to him that she thinks I might be his daughter, not the man I thought was my father and who had raised me for the last twenty-one years. The letter had never been sent, probably because my mama passed away before she ever got the chance. It was strangely dated the night before she died—the night before I found my father holding her lifeless body in the driveway from what the paramedics declared a heart attack.
The letter changed everything in an instant—myself, my life, my father, my mother—which is exactly what I decide to tell the gravestone.
“I just don’t understand,” I say as I kneel down in the dirt, grasping a bouquet of sunflowers in my hand—my mother’s favorite flower. “Why did you never tell me… I thought you told me everything.” Which always seemed true when I was younger. To me, we’d always had more of a sisterly relationship than a mother/daughter one. It was so open, without secrets, or at least, that’s what I had thought. But now, well, the letter unfortunately was just a number on an ever-growing list of secrets that I’d been discovering since my mother left this world, her death something that still haunts me to this day.