“Cami, don’t be—”
“Dad!” I snap. It gets his attention. Not only do I rarely ever take a tone with him, I never call him “Dad.” “Just tell me. The truth. All of it.”
He leans back in his chair and tents his fingers against his mouth, watching me over top of them. I know he’s debating on how much to tell me, what to leave out, wondering how much I know.
“If you don’t tell me everything, I’ll just have to believe whatever else I find out. If you won’t tell me, someone else will.”
After a long pause, he speaks.
“Yes, I knew Brad Henley. We were business partners a long time ago.”
Well, at least it’s a start.
“What happened?”
He sighs angrily. “Cami—”
“Tell me. I deserve to hear the truth from you, my father. Not from someone else.”
“Cami, it was a long time ago. Neither your mother nor I wanted to burden you with something like that. And, as you can imagine, it took us a while to work through it. It’s not a time I like reliving.”
A stab of guilt. Maybe that’s why my father has changed so much since I was little. He’s had a lot of disappointment to live with.
“I don’t doubt that it’s painful, Daddy, but it’s something I would’ve liked to hear from you. I’m a part of this family, too, ya know.”
He hangs his head and I feel even worse. But I have to know.
“I know. And I’ll tell you about Brad. And about the horses, but the rest you need to hear from your mother. It’s not my story to tell.”
I listen quietly as my father validates everything Trick told me, everything I’d accused him of lying about, and obliterates the perfect childhood I’d always thought I’d had.
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX - Trick
I can’t drive far enough or fast enough to escape the hurt and the anger and the disgust I saw in Cami’s eyes. Since I’ve known her, I’ve watched them go from curious to interested to passionate to what I believe was loving. But there was no sign of that this morning. And it’s that marked absence that’s killing me now.
I question myself over and over again. Did I really need to tell her? Would she ever have found out if I hadn’t? Was it worth hurting her and losing her to tell her the truth? Could she have gone her whole life and been fine not knowing?
I feel like I could’ve. Gone the rest of my life without knowing, that is, which makes me suspect she could’ve, too. And that makes it even harder to swallow. How could I be so stupid?
But then, as they have a thousand times, Mom’s words go through my mind. Looking at Cami is painful for her. It brings back too many bad memories. Cami looks almost exactly like her mother, only younger. More like what Cherlynn must’ve looked like when she tore my mother’s world apart.
I push back the bitterness. It has no place in my present. It won’t change anything. It will only taint what happiness there could be in my future. And it’s not worth it. It’s not worth what I feel like it’s already cost me—Cami.
I force my thoughts back to the things I can control, the things I must control—my family and my responsibility to them. I feel it now more than ever. I’ll be damned if I’ll be the second man to betray them in life. There’s no way in hell.
And, just like that, the decision is made. I know exactly what I have to do. Turning left at the next stop sign, I head North. Toward Rusty’s.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Cami
I feel like a zombie after talking to my father. I’m almost halfway to the club before I realize that I can’t approach my mother about something so sensitive there. I pull over and park in an empty space in a McDonald’s lot and I dial her number on my cell phone. When she answers, I cut to the chase.
“Mom, I need to talk to you. And it can’t wait. It’s about Brad. Can I come pick you up?”
There is a long pause on the other end of the line. She’s so quiet, I wonder if the connection got dropped. I pull the phone away from my ear to see if the seconds are still ticking by. And they are. She’s just silent.
Finally she answers. “Of course. I’ll be waiting out front. How long will you be?”
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
Thirteen minutes later, I’m slowing to a stop in front of my mother, who’s waiting patiently and demurely beneath the grand front entrance of the country club. I unlock the door and she gets in. She looks at me and smiles a small, sad smile. My lips are frozen. I’ve got no return smile for her. In a way, I feel like I don’t even know her.
Looking away, I shift into gear and focus on the road.
“Where are we going?”
“I thought we could grab some coffee and talk.”
“Okay,” she says slowly. “Do you want to ask me anything now?”
She’s impatient. She’s feeling the uncomfortable prickle of the situation and, being the non-confrontational type person she is, she wants to get it over with and move on. She hates drama.
But today, she’s going to get it anyway.
“No. I’ll wait.”
Let her squirm.
I don’t rush. Perversely, I want to make her suffer a little. It seems like she’s gotten off the hook with barely a scratch, meanwhile practically everyone around her has suffered. Or is suffering. Or will suffer.
The more I think about it, the angrier I get, so much so that torturing her with a wait doesn’t seem as important as the answers.
“How? How could you do that to Daddy? To us? Did we mean so little to you?”
I glance at her, more to make sure my barbs hit their mark than anything else. I see tears in her eyes. Some small part of me feels satisfied that I’ve been able to hurt her just a little bit.
“I swear to you, Cami, I didn’t plan it. I never meant to hurt anyone, especially you. You’ve always been my world.”
This is news to me.
“I fell in love. I didn’t mean to. It just happened. I tried to ignore it and deny it, but…” She turns in her seat to face me, her expression a pleading one. “Surely you can understand. I saw you with Trick. What if you’d been married to Brent when you met him? Can you just put yourself in that position long enough to see that sometimes the heart has terrible timing?”
“But I’m not married, Mom. You were. And you had me. Whatever happened to ‘just say no’?”
“I did. For almost two years. But it only got harder with time. I tried to stay away from him, to forget him, but the more I tried, the worse it got. I loved him, Cami. You have to understand that only the most powerful emotions in life could’ve made me betray your father.”