Chapter Fifteen Fitz
Fitz stood and walked past her into the bathroom. “How much did you hear?” she said behind him.
“Enough.” He ran water over his toothbrush and jabbed it into his cheek, brushing vigorously. “I was right, wasn’t I? No one has any idea where you are.”
She grabbed her own toothbrush. “I told you yesterday, this is none of your business.”
“Who goes off on a twenty-three-hundred-mile road trip without telling anyone?”
“Does anyone know where you are?” she fired back, and, yeah, she had him there. Other than telling Mary and confirming with the HR team at Fellows, Wing, and Greenleaf, he’d left town without making much noise.
“It’s different,” he told her.
“How?”
“I’m a guy, for one.”
Her eyes went wide. “Oho, well in that case, you big, invincible—”
“I don’t mean it like that,” he cut in, bending to spit and rinse. “I mean, there are fifty podcasts a week about missing women that start just like this.”
“I’m not missing, Fitz. I’m with you,” she said, searching his face. “And I know you well enough already to know you’re not going to let anything happen to me.”
He threw down the hand towel he’d used to wipe his face. “I don’t want that responsibility. Don’t you get it? I don’t want to be responsible for your well-being, I never asked for that.”
“Then just give me a ride and stop worrying about it!”
“How can I do that?” he asked, seething. “I don’t even know what your plans are once we get to Nashville.”
“I’m taking a bus to Atlanta.”
Fitz went lightheaded with disbelief. “What? What are you doing in Atlanta?”
“It. Is. Not. Your. Business.”
“But you’re planning to go back to school eventually, aren’t you?”
“Of course!”
“Of cour—?” He cut off, incredulous. “Sweden, nothing about your plan is obvious.”
She threw up her hands. “It doesn’t need to be!”
Fitz erupted. “I don’t want to be the last person who saw you alive if you don’t show up at school again!”
This last sentence reverberated off the bathroom tile, and they found themselves in a staring match. Ren’s jaw ticked, nostrils flaring, and the baser part of him liked seeing her worked up, the intense emotions behind her happy Golden Girl image. Tearing his eyes away, he sent a frustrated hand into his hair. “Tell me what’s got you running across the country with no money and no safety net or I’m not driving you one more mile.”
She exhaled a long, hard breath. “Fine,” she said, at last. “But I need food first. I can’t do drama on an empty stomach.”
They dressed and packed up in tense silence, then trudged across the blustery parking lot to a brick building labeled only MARKET. Inside, a long line was visible through the foggy glass windows, but what they could smell just from the sidewalk promised it’d be worth the wait. Fitz held the door for Ren, who ducked inside with her shabby backpack, and he couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy. Ren was beautiful and brilliant, with her hair up in two braided buns and lips as naturally red as the raspberries leaking from the jelly doughnuts behind the glass, but anyone looking would see poverty and innocence all over her. It stuck to her like gum on a shoe.
Poverty he got. He couldn’t fault her for being poor when he’d had to scrape for every penny, too. It was the innocence that got under his skin. How on earth did she think she could cross the country without someone conning her, robbing her, exploiting her—or worse? If she wanted to get out in the world so badly, the street rat in him thought she should have to face it head-on, without his help. But even as he thought it, he used his body to shelter hers, shifting their positions so she was next to the pastry case and wasn’t being jostled by customers coming in and out of the front door. Ugh, Ren was right. He wasn’t going to let anything happen to her, which meant he had to find a way to ensure she got back to Spokane.
At the counter, she ordered a giant pink doughnut and a cup for water—refusing money when he offered to pay. He got two breakfast sandwiches and a cup of black coffee before gesturing that she lead them to an empty table in the back.
It took no time for him to shovel down his breakfast, but when he came up for air, he realized Ren had only taken a few bites of hers. After wiping his hands on a napkin, he dropped it to his empty plate. “Was the doughnut stale or something?”
“No, it’s really good. I just have no appetite.” She pushed the plate toward him. “Want some?”
Fitz had never said no to free food in his life and took down half the doughnut in a single bite. “All right,” he said. He’d let her put this off long enough. “Let’s hear it.”
She exhaled and looked past him, eyes unfocused, out the window. “Do you remember that DNA test Audran had us do?”
He answered around another bite. “Uh, yeah. That was only like a week ago.”
“When we got our result printouts,” she said, cupping her hands around her water, “mine indicated a paternal match.”
“Yeah?” he asked, popping the last bite into his mouth. Lucky you, he thought.
She turned her eyes back to him. “Yeah.”
He could tell she was waiting for something to click, but he shrugged. “What?”
“My parents live on a homestead,” she said, slowly. “We don’t have a telephone. We use a pump for our water. My mother and father think that the outside world is poison. That technology is poison.” She pointed to her now-empty plate, a few rainbow sprinkles the only remains. “That food we don’t make or grow ourselves is tainted.”
“But are they wrong?” he asked, wiping his mouth. “It was delicious, but that pink frosting alone probably had fifteen things in it that could kill me.”
This made Ren laugh, but sadly. “I think you’re missing the point.”
“Then explain it to me like I’m a toddler.”
“My dad—or whoever Steve is—would never give his DNA to a company. He would never, not in a million years, spit into a vial and mail it off like that. There’s no way he’s the paternal match on my printout.”
Fitz sat back in his chair like he’d been shoved. He’d been so wrapped up in his own family problems, so determined to push forward with his own plan, that he hadn’t stopped to consider someone else might get a bombshell from that DNA assignment. “You think he’s not your real dad?”
“I don’t know.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out a piece of paper she’d carefully folded. When she spread it on the table between them, he glanced down. It was a photo of a man, printed on computer paper. He had light hair, big, friendly light eyes, and the smile of an optimist. He looked polished and—Fitz was familiar with the type—rich.
And he looked exactly like Ren.
“Oh,” he said on an exhale. “I’m guessing that isn’t the guy back at your homestead.”
Ren shook her head. “That’s the guy in Atlanta. I think he might be my dad.”
“You think?” Fitz reached up, pinching the bridge of his nose while he thought this through. “Did you contact him before leaving town yesterday?”
She frowned. “Of course not.”
“So you’re going to drive all the way to Atlanta and just—what? Stand outside his door and wait for him to come out so you can ask him if he had a daughter twenty-two years ago?”
“What? No.”
Bracing his elbows on the table, Fitz leaned in. “I’m asking what your plan is, Sunshine.”
For a beat, he froze. He wasn’t sure where the new nickname came from. But if she noticed it—or the gentle tone—she didn’t react. “I’m going to talk to him,” she said. “I just—haven’t figured out what I’m going to say yet.”
“Okay. Listen.” He held his hands out in front of him. “Call me insane, but driving all the way to Atlanta to meet someone who may or may not be your father seems like a lot of trouble when you could just ask your mom about him instead.”
“You don’t understand,” Ren said, and she began tearing her napkin into small pieces. “My parents—well, Steve and Gloria—they barely let me go away to college. They have strict rules about what I can and can’t do while I’m away. They want me home every weekend. They don’t want to hear about school. They don’t want to talk about it. They’re just looking for a reason to tell me I can’t go back in the fall. If, after only a few weeks at college, I came home and started grilling Gloria about the possibility of a secret biological father being out there somewhere, they’d lock me down so fast I’d be on the homestead forever.”
“You’re an adult. They can’t keep you there against your will.”
“I know. And I shouldn’t say it like that. I mean, I do plan to return to the homestead. I want to, after college. But with all of this…it’s hard to not wonder, what else did they keep from me? Or keep me from?” She dropped her head into her hands, groaning. “But, no, I love them. I mean, whatever their reason is for keeping this from me—if this is even true—I’m sure it’s a good one.”
“How can you say that?” he asked, as heat seeped under his skin. What she was experiencing—the emergence of blood relatives from this technology? That was his dream. She had no idea. He wanted nothing more from that assay than to find family. “If this is true, your mom kept you from your dad.”
“Maybe he’s a criminal.”
He pointed at the photo. “This guy? He looks about as dangerous as a guide dog.” Fitz leaned back, gusting out a breath as understanding hit him. “That’s why you broke into the lab.”
“I was making sure my results hadn’t been mixed up with someone else’s.”
“Why don’t you just call him?” he asked. “Or—I don’t know—email?”
“I need to see him for myself. And yes, okay, it was impulsive of me to leave, but I was upset and confused.”
“You have sixty dollars in that coin purse of yours and nine states to cross,” he said as gently as his lingering annoyance would allow. “It wasn’t just impulsive, it was stupid.”
“Actually, I have fifty-five dollars and seventy-two cents. Doughnuts are expensive.”
“Still enough money for a bus ticket back to Spokane. If you left now, you could get back to your dorm room and be on the phone with this”—he sat up again, squinting down at the name in the lower corner—“this Chris Koning within a few hours.”
Ren nodded, and then kept nodding. For a minute, he was elated, thinking she agreed.
But then she said, “I know you’re trying to get rid of me—”
“Of course I am.”
“—but you have secrets, too, Fitz. And not just that I caught you cheating.” She leaned in. “Your turn. Tell me what’s in Nashville.”
He laughed and sat back. “Nope. I don’t do backstory.” She stared at him and her eyes softened, as if she was trying to be appealing. Honestly, it worked, but not enough. “Don’t bother trying to charm it out of me. It’s not happening.”
Ren frowned. “Why? I just told you all this stuff about me.”
“This isn’t a quid pro quo moment. Am I taking you to the bus station or not?”
“Not.”
“You’re really going ahead with this?”
“I have to get to Christopher Koning and find out the truth.”
“You might not like the answer,” he told her.
“I have to try, right?”
Standing, he collected their plates. “That’s what everyone says before they do something really stupid.” She was so naive; she didn’t even know what she didn’t know.
And it was precisely that realization that made him think he had a shot at convincing her to give up on this wild-goose chase.