31. Mason
31
MASON
A few hours earlier
I strode into the coffee house and took off my sunglasses. I surveyed the room, looking for one of the two young women who’d texted me non-stop this week. Finally, I spotted Alyssa at a table by the corner.
She rose when I approached and I touched her arm. Was I supposed to hug her? I wasn’t too up to date on the protocols for half-siblings who weren’t very close. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” she snapped, sitting back down.
Huh. That wasn’t her usual greeting.
I ignored it. “Do you want something to drink?”
“I got something,” she said. And in spite of the fact that she looked pissed, she nodded toward another cup. “There’s a coffee for you.”
“Thanks.” I sat down across from her. “I don’t have long.”
“So you said on the phone.”
Shit, didn’t I get any points for being here during this hectic week? At least I got a coffee.
“You’re breaking Kylie’s heart,” Alyssa said abruptly.
My heart made an uncomfortable flip-flop at her words, but that didn’t mean they were true. “Why? We didn’t break up with her.”
Alyssa didn’t blink over my use of the word we , so clearly she knew the score about Kylie’s relationship with the three of us.
“You’re ignoring her just when she needs you the most.” Alyssa’s expression looked like it was carved in steel. Normally, she was so meek and calm.
“We’re not ignoring her, we’re just busy. That’s not a surprising thing at the end of the semester. You know that.”
“Yet, I’m not ignoring her.”
“She’s staying with you. If she were staying with us, then she wouldn’t feel ignored.” I took a sip of the coffee, which was black like I liked it, but a tad warm. “Thank you, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For letting her stay with you.”
“She’s my friend,” Alyssa said, trying to remain stern, but it was like something had softened in her eyes. Shit, had I never expressed any gratitude to her before? Possibly not. “How’s she doing?” I’d heard she tracked down Parker yesterday in the business building.
“She’s miserable.”
“So are we. We never meant for her to get kicked out.”
“Tell her that,” Alyssa said.
My frown at her words deepened after taking another gulp of the tepid coffee. “She knows that.”
“No, what she knows is that she spent every day with you, and now she hasn’t seen you, and you three barely bother to text.”
That pissed me off. Kylie hadn’t left my mind for a single second this week. “She knows how I feel about her,” I said, dropping the plural. Jude and Parker could speak for themselves.
Alyssa’s gaze morphed from steel to fire. “See, that’s the thing. When someone you care about doesn’t keep in contact with you, it’s really hard to believe they care, too. Or maybe it doesn’t matter if they care. It’s like that cat in a box thing. If a person cuts themselves off from you, it really doesn’t matter if they care or not. Either way, you’re on your own and you feel like crap.”
“Cat in a box?”
“That Schrodinger’s cat thing,” she said, sounding irritated.
“Whatever. I’m doing the best I can to help Kylie out.”
“She doesn’t see it that way.”
“She will when all of this is through.”
Alyssa clutched her cup of tea so tightly, the lid popped off. “Great, so you’ve got some kind of plan. Did it ever occur to you to loop her in? I thought the four of you were supposed to be on the same side.”
“We are.”
“But you and Jude and Parker are doing one thing and she’s completely in the dark. Completely cut off from you. And completely fucking miserable.”
Wow, had I ever heard Alyssa use the F word? Never, as far as I could recall. “She just needs to give us a little more time. And to have a little faith.”
My half-sister still looked enraged. I honestly hadn’t thought she had it in her to stand up to me like this. In a weird way, it made me kind of proud. “If you’d just talk with her, tell her whatever it is you’ve got going on, then maybe she would have faith. But not when you leave her in the dark. Not when she thinks you’ve abandoned her.”
“We’d never do that.”
“How noble,” Alyssa said. “But it doesn't actually matter as long as Kylie thinks you have. She’s in pain. She’s hurting. And she wouldn’t be if you’d just talk to her.”
As if on cue, my phone chimed. It was a text from Kylie: Where the hell are you and why the hell did you move out of the suite?
Shit. She sounded upset. And somehow, she’d figured out we’d moved out of Henderson. Suddenly, what Alyssa had said made more sense. Everything we’d done this week was for Kylie, but maybe we’d gone about it the wrong way. Maybe instead of springing into action, we should’ve made sure she was okay first.
Fuck.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “And you’re right, I’ll talk to Kylie.”
Alyssa looked wary but nodded. “Good.”
“Want me to pay you back for the coffee?” It was ingrained in me that the man was supposed to pay, even among siblings.
Alyssa rolled her eyes. “You’re worried about doing the right thing for a cup of coffee, yet you were willing to let Kylie hang for days.”
“I told you, I’ll talk to her.” I stood up, feeling a strange urge to give Alyssa a quick kiss on the cheek. But we’d never done that kind of thing. Instead, I ended up sounding rather gruff. “Thanks for telling me all this.”
I left the warm cup of coffee and strode out. Alyssa really had impressed me. Maybe, if she was willing to stand up for a friend like that, she’d be more assertive and confident in her interviews. She had another one coming up next week—at least, I thought she did. Kylie tended to keep me up to date about those kinds of things, but as Alyssa pointed out—repeatedly—she and I hadn’t been in touch much this week.
Maybe what Alyssa said was true about how if you didn’t keep in touch with people, they didn’t think you cared. It was stupid, because of course you could care about someone without talking to them all the time. But maybe she had a point.
Fuck.
I came to a stop just as I reached my Jeep in the parking lot. Alyssa had said all that stuff in terms of Kylie being hurt and doubting my feelings for her… but maybe what Alyssa said applied to herself as well.
I’d spent years avoiding going home, but that was because of my father, not her. Except, she lived with my father. I cared a hell of a lot more about Alyssa than my dad, but they’d both received the same treatment from me—estrangement. And only one of them deserved it.
Shit.
Alyssa was still at her table when I sat back down. Her eyebrows rose almost to her hairline when she looked up and saw me.
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. To buy some time, I took a sip of the coffee, forgetting how bad it tasted. Strangely enough, it didn’t help things.
Maybe this was a bad idea.
But Alyssa didn’t say anything, she just waited.
Finally, I started, figuring if I couldn’t say the right thing, then I’d at least say something. “Did you know I don’t have a single picture of my mother?”
Now, Alyssa’s eyebrows drew together. “What? How is that possible? Weren’t you ten when she passed?”
“Nine. Before she died, there were portraits of her around the house and in photo albums, but they were gone a few days after her funeral.”
“Dad got rid of them all?”
“Every single one.” I had found a few pictures of her in newspapers, like a wedding announcement and her obituary, but those grainy black and white photos hadn’t captured her spirit at all. Instead, they were depressing as hell.
“I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”
“When Dad married your mother just months later, that seemed like the final step in erasing my mom off the face of the Earth. From Dad’s point of view, it was probably just simple expediency. His first wife had died, but hey, luckily for him, he’d already started another family with another woman. So no skin off his nose.”
“That’s awful.” Alyssa’s face paled and she looked truly upset. “I knew they married pretty quickly, but I didn’t know it was that soon. Is that why you stayed at your boarding school so much? Because you hated me and Mom?”
I looked away as I thought it over. Unfortunately, there was no way to sugarcoat it. “Yes. But it was the idea of you two that I hated. Not you as a person.” Alyssa started to respond but I held up my hand to stop her. “But I heard what you said earlier. About how it doesn’t really matter why a person has abandoned you—it just matters that they have.”
“I thought you hated me.”
“I did, for a long time.” I felt like shit admitting it, but it was true. “But again, it wasn’t you. It was what you represented.”
“Part of Dad’s attempt to erase your mother’s existence?”
“Yes. Then later, when I’d go to my grandfather’s during school break, it wasn’t to avoid you or your mother.”
“It was to avoid Dad.” She didn’t phrase it as a question.
“Yes. But I see now that the effect was the same for you, and I’m sorry for that.”
This time, it was Alyssa who looked away, her bottom lip trembling. She blinked rapidly and then composed herself. “I wanted to know you better.”
“I wished I’d been there for you. I think you have a better relationship with Dad than I do, but he’s not an easy man to live with.”
“No, he’s not. I used to daydream that one summer you’d show up and ask me to spend a few weeks with you and your grandfather. I met him once, remember? He seemed like a nice man.”
Okay, then I felt like a total shit. If I’d been that damn clueless with Alyssa, no wonder I hadn’t realized how much we’d hurt Kylie this week. “I wish I’d done that. Back in those days, I was pretty much only thinking about myself.”
She had the grace to reach out and put her hand on mine. “I understand that better now. How much it hurt you when Dad moved on so quickly. And I never dreamed he’d literally erased all memories of her. That’s awful about not having any pictures.”
I turned my hand around and squeezed hers for a moment. “Tell me how the interviews are going.”
She looked surprised. “I thought you had to go.”
“I’ve got a little while. Didn’t one of the companies fly you out somewhere?”
She nodded. “Yes, to a beautiful little town outside of New Orleans.”
“Wow, that’s far away.”
“Yeah, but the position has a lot going for it. A strong mentorship program and a lot of opportunities entry-level engineers don’t usually get. But the one I’m having a second interview with next week has potential, too, and they’re only interviewing me and two others.”
I squeezed her hand once more and then let it go. “Let me get some more coffee, and then you can tell me all about them. We can make a list of pros and cons for each if you want.”
Her smile was lovely. “I’d like that a lot.”
“Me too.”