20. All The Poor Bastards （Ethan） #2
“It was a mistake, a stupid—” She stops and drags in a deep breath. “Sit down, Ethan. Let me explain. Please.”
“No. I want answers, damn you.”
Dad goes to her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, muttering something softly in her ear.
My chest heaves like it’s ready to explode.
“It’s okay, Elvira. Take your time,” he murmurs, softer with her than he’s ever been with us.
She grips his hand, squeezing it before looking back up at me.
“Your grandfather was a strict man growing up. He had certain ideas about how our family should be, and he never approved of Scott,” she whispers, her eyes flashing with a lifetime of anger.
“Your father was an artist, you know. Leonidas always thought I could do better. He refused to understand we were in love. That miserable creature, he—”
“Shh,” Dad murmurs.
I stare at them, a united front.
I think I always vaguely knew Dad never really got along with Gramps either, despite my mother’s feelings. He never stepped in to broker peace and kept his distance. I thought he was always deferring to Mom, though.
Apparently not.
I toss the rest of my drink back, letting it burn the back of my throat.
“When Scott proposed, of course I said yes,” Mom continues, sinking into the sofa.
She waves away Dad’s glass when he offers it to her.
“We got engaged, but Leonidas was angry. He went off, said I was throwing away my life, the family legacy. He insisted Scott could never provide for me the way I deserved.”
“We fought like mad. We both said a lot of hurtful things. But with Mom gone, I had no one else to step in, let alone offer any advice. And the pressure he applied was so crushing. That’s when I messed up.
I started thinking maybe he was right. I let his doubts poison me.
Scott and I argued, and I—I cracked. I ran back to Maine, planning to break things off. ”
A gnawing sensation in my gut tells me I know where this story is going, but I have to listen, even as it carves away my soul.
Mom’s face crumples. She turns away from Dad, pressing her fingers into her eyes.
“I’m not proud of what happened,” she whispers, her voice so low I can barely hear it. “It was the worst mistake of my life, hands down.”
Even though I know what she’s saying, and why, the words sting.
Whatever else happened, the outcome was me.
I’m her biggest regret incarnate, the bastard made flesh.
“I was drunk, Ethan,” she continues. “Drunk and angry and lonely. I thought Scott was done with me, driven beyond the limit of any man. I thought we’d broken up, so I…”
“You don’t need to explain,” Dad whispers, still in that weirdly tender voice. But I see the hurt carved on his face.
Damn.
I drop my face into my hands.
“Who?” I ask hoarsely. “Who did you—”
“I don’t know,” she says, her voice thick. “A random sailor staying somewhere in Kittery. I can’t even remember his name. It was only two nights and I never saw him again. When I realized I was—when I knew, I tried looking for him. I found out he was married with a family.”
The hits just keep coming.
“And Dad took you back?” I snarl, though the answer seems obvious.
My father’s a kind man at heart, even if a lifetime of money has made him selectively generous.
Infinitely better than the cheating stranger fuck who knocked up my mother.
Then again, how the hell do I know for certain when he’s a ghost?
“Your father blamed your granddad’s interference—and he was right,” she says bitterly.
“There’s plenty of blame to go around, but without that old man meddling, making me doubt Scott…
” Her nostrils flare and she swallows a sob.
“God, it was my fault, but it was his too. And he knew that. Your father understood what a terrible mistake I’d made. He… he knew how much I regretted it.”
“It was rough,” Dad adds with a nod. “But your poor mother was under tremendous strain. Simply awful.”
Ridiculous understatement.
I watch them slowly, trying to process this insanity, every muscle in my body rebelling with stiffness.
“So she slept with someone else and you raised the bastard like a cuck?” I go off.
But it isn’t him I’m angry at.
I can’t hate a man who brought me up when I wasn’t his.
I hate the bastard.
And that bastard is me, the boy whose father Mom will never know.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this livid, this torn up.
Only, I do—the morning after Taylor.
Dad sucks in a rough breath, his eyes narrowing and his shoulders tense.
“Would you rather I hadn’t, Ethan? I knew full well what happened. I made my choice because I love Elvira, and that’s what you do when you love. You work it out. You forgive. You find a way back home.”
I may be glaring, but it’s hard as hell to argue with any of that sentimental shit.
The thought of Hattie sleeping with another man trips my murder instinct, but that’s different.
She doesn’t have a high-class father, blustering and telling her to run away from me.
I chased her away on my own just fine.
We never agreed to a relationship.
Never committed to being exclusive.
If she wanted, she could choose another cock tomorrow, and I’d have no right to get territorial.
With the big revelation, the thought makes me physically sick. But this isn’t about Hattie right now.
This is about how secret, disloyal, and fucked up this family really is.
Plus, the soul-crushing fact that I’m not who I thought I was.
Everybody knew—everyone I loved—and they smiled to my face like it never happened.
Nausea reaches up from my gut, choking me.
“What did Gramps think?” I ask gruffly. “He knew.”
He knew and he never fucking told me.
The man I trusted more than God.
“When your father took me—and you—back, he realized he’d gone too far.
But it was too late for me. That man did damage that could never be repaired,” Mom says, shaking her head.
“You don’t heal from something like that.
Not completely. I don’t think he ever forgave me for leaving, no matter what he said in that letter you found.
I read it once and sent it right back. Why he was stumbling around on the beach and stuffed it away, who knows.
He always loved his little puzzles. That was his favorite thing to do with Mom.
But he had no right—absolutely no right to treat people’s lives like a game. ”
I see it now.
Hell, the few times Gramps ever mentioned Mom was when we sat around by the fire or on the deck of his ship, working these grand thousand-piece puzzles of pretty pictures. And he always carried around this regret that they didn’t have a better relationship. He never pushed for anything.
And whenever my parents asked for money, he never hesitated, as far as I know.
As a kid, I hated him for it a little.
I didn’t want Mom and Dad having all this effortless comfort and money they could throw around on designer condos in cities they only visited twice a year and African safaris and my father’s high-end gallery shows for his highly mediocre paintings.
I wanted a normal family, dammit.
Now, I see why I was robbed.
And my whole childhood with Margot starts making a terrible kind of sense.
Gramps kept the easy money coming out of guilt. He tried to buy his way back into our lives—or he bribed my mother to at least let him spend time with his grandchildren.
Goddamn.
The full horror stabs me then, the whirling black void in this family where love was devoured decades ago.
It mixes with the anger until I don’t know what I’m feeling.
All I know is it’s building with a dangerous pressure.
“…that’s not fair, Elvira,” Dad says quietly.
“No, he should know everything!” She looks at me again. “That’s why he took you and Margot every summer, Ethan. Payback. If he couldn’t have me, he needed you kids for himself, like some stand-in son and daughter. Then he sent you off to the military like some cruel joke—”
“Enough!” I’m roaring, the world red and blurring. “That’s fucking enough .”
“Ethan,” Mom pleads, but I barely hear her as I stagger out of the room, desperate for air.
Margot waits down the hall, curled up against the wall, pretending to stare at her phone as she makes herself as small as she can.
She reaches out for me with both hands, shaking her head.
“I didn’t know,” she says weakly.
Tell me something I don’t know.
No one knew except our parents and Gramps, and none of them bothered telling me until they had no choice.
I’m a grown man and I only found out the wretched truth by accident.
If I hadn’t found that letter, would they have ever come clean?
“Ethan, it doesn’t change anything,” Margot says. Her face is still smudged with tears. It doesn’t look like she’s stopped crying since leaving the room. “You’re still my brother.”
“Half brother,” I correct sharply.
“What? No, it doesn’t matter!”
“It matters a lot,” I say, disentangling myself from her.
I’m not kind, not gentle—I don’t have it in me now.
Right now, I don’t know what to be.
All I know is I need to get away, to think this shit through before I get blackout drunk.
My entire existence is a lie.
That’s not something you just shrug at and go on your merry way.
Out of my parents, Dad was always more invested. The one who occasionally asks me to have a drink with him as I update him about my life.
Mom checked out a long time ago. Hell, I wonder if she completely dissociated the day I was born, even if she went through the very basic emotional motions when I was a kid.
Playing the perfect parent is just acting.
Is it all a lie?
She can say she loves me, but I know she regrets ever conceiving me. Dad, he accepted me.
And Gramps—
Where to begin?
He felt like the most grounded, most present, most honest and real family I had. Now, I find out that was a lie.
He wanted to be a part of my life.
And that should be a good thing, but now it’s tinged with the accusations Mom threw at him. Dad said they were unfair, but were they?
Gramps always had a special connection with me.
The girls were perfectly welcome, my sister and Cleo, but they’d rather have story time or go to the beach than fish or hike through the woods.
Margot never cared to learn how to prep fish and raw lobster on the beach, and Cleo was too little. They were more interested in sunbathing on the yacht than swimming. And my sister had Hattie by her side for company.
At the time, I thought it was only logical Gramps would default to keeping me company, seeing as I had no one else.
But now, looking back, everything feels like a house of mirrors.
Distorted and ugly.
Margot, she was left to her own devices, hanging out with Hattie so often because Gramps was more interested in hanging out with me.
But that wasn’t just because I was his grandson.
I was his own personal apology.
His penance.
His personal crusade.
If I kept going like the moody, rudderless fucking punk I was, the disaster Gramps created would be total, and he couldn’t have that.
Christ.
And even when I was a teenage asshole—getting into trouble, smoking, screwing off when I could with girls even when Gramps warned me not to and put Holden on my ass, Gramps never punished me.
Not really.
He handed out advice and let me find my own path.
The opposite of how he was with Mom.
I’d always thought he wasn’t trying to be a parent, but now I know better.
He was just trying to be a better father than he’d been with Mom. He was trying to make it up to this family and the universe by making sure I didn’t detonate my life.
It’s fucking twisted.
And all that time, he lied to my face.
He couldn’t tell me who and what I was.
I don’t know what to do with this information now. All I know is I can’t be in my parents’ house anymore. I need to go.
I need to get away and never look back.