17. Cara
Chapter seventeen
Cara
People groaned and complained when I pushed through the crowd to get to Riley. I didn’t care. All I cared and running away from Ellis as fast as possible. I thought I heard him call out my name, but my pulse was thundering so loud in my ears that I couldn’t be sure.
It had happened. I knew I shouldn’t have brought Riley to this date. I should’ve canceled when my babysitter got sick, but I was too eager to see Ellis again. It was all my fault. I had danced too close to the edge, and Ellis had found out about Riley. What would happen next? I was too panicked to think about it further.
Riley looked at me surprised and confused when I reached him. “Mom, are you okay? Where is Ellis?”
“He had to leave. Come on, now. Say goodbye to Parker. We need to go.”
“What? Why? Ellis is right over there.”
I looked over my shoulder and saw Ellis approaching. He didn’t look angry, but his sight scared me, nevertheless. I couldn’t even really put in words why. All I knew was that what I’d feared for thirteen years had happened, and now my whole world was flipped upside down, and I needed to get Riley and me to a safe place.
My erratic behavior had alerted Parker’s mother Tiffany.
She looked at me with concern. “Cara, do you need help?” Stepping closer, she lowered her voice. “Are you in trouble? Should I call the police?”
For a second, I considered it, but Ellis had done nothing wrong, let alone illegal, so I shook my head. “Riley and I just really need to go home now.”
I tried to take Riley’s hand, but he moved away from me.
“But I don’t want to go home yet,” he whined.
“For God’s sake, Riley, stop being a brat, and come with me.”
Riley looked stunned for a moment, before hurt showed on his face. Deep down, I knew calling him a brat was unfair, but my anxiety overrode that part of my brain.
Tiffany put a hand on his shoulder. “I really think you should go with your mom now, Riley. Parker will call you tomorrow.”
Another adult stepping in did the trick. Riley was still pouting, but he reluctantly followed me.
I turned around and mouthed a silent thank you to Tiffany. She gave me a sad smile and whispered, “Call me if you need anything” before we were out of earshot.
Only when we were safely in my car, doors locked, did I allow myself to pause for a moment.
Riley was in the front seat, arms crossed. “What the hell, Mom?”
Leaning back in my seat, I started the engine. “Don’t start a fight. I’m not in the mood.”
I drove onto the road, but I could still feel him looking at me from the side.
“Can you at least try to explain?” he finally asked. He no longer sounded angry, just worried. “Did anything happen while I was with Parker? I thought you liked Ellis.”
I sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s really not. Either you like someone or you don’t.”
“Sometimes, you like someone, but it’s still not good for you to have them in your life,” I said, driving along the main street.
“But Ellis is cool. Why can’t he be in our lives?”
I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “It’s complicated.”
“You always say that,” he mumbled. “But I’m not a little kid anymore, Mom. I understand things. You can tell me things.”
Riley was mature for his age, but some things I couldn’t even share with him. “Maybe when you’re a little older,” I deflected.
He rolled his eyes and huffed. “You always say that too.”
I took a deep breath. Since I’d put a safe distance between Ellis and us, my thoughts were slowing down. As I drove past the houses decorated with string lights and garlands, I let myself imagine a different kind of life, a life with Ellis, but that quickly became too painful, so I forced myself to stop.
We reached the Sunset Apartments, and I pulled into our usual spot.
When Riley reached over to unbuckle his seatbelt, I stopped his hand.
“Do you miss having a father?”
His expression became thoughtful. “Yeah, sometimes. Not as much as I did when I was little, but…” He exhaled deeply. “It would be cool to have a dad.”
He leaned back in his seat and went quiet again. Somehow, both of us knew the conversation wasn’t over yet. For a while, we stared into the darkness surrounding us in silence. I could see Riley swallow hard before he continued to speak.
“Why do you never talk about him?” he asked. “Was he such a bad guy?”
“No! No, he wasn’t a bad guy at all. It’s just… It’s difficult for me to talk about him. Painful.”
“I get it, Mom, and it’s not even like I want to meet him or something. It would just be cool to know some stuff about him.”
Riley tried to sound casual, but I could hear the pain in his voice, and it broke my heart. I knew he missed having a father or at least some kind of father figure, and I so wished that was something I could give him.
During brief moments since Ellis had returned to my life, that had almost felt within reach, and the thought of coming clean and starting over as a family hadn’t sounded so crazy. I could tell Ellis would be a good father. That very evening had shown so much promise of how things could be for us.
If only it weren’t for Carlisle Benton . I doubted the fact that Ellis had somehow found out about Riley had changed Carlisle’s stance. He would still expect me and my son to stay away from his precious heir. And he was still powerful and unscrupulous enough to make me stay away if I didn’t do so on my own accord. And even if he would allow Riley and me to become an official part of his family, was that really the kind of family I wanted to be part of? As much as I still cared for Ellis, I wanted to stay as far away as possible from Carlisle. He was a cruel, evil man and who knew what kind of bad influence he would have on Riley?
It wasn’t worth the risk. Maybe we weren’t the picture-perfect family, but Riley was safe and happy. I understood that Riley wanted to know where he came from and where his roots were, but it was not the right time to reveal that. He was too young and too vulnerable.
“One day, I will tell you all about your father, I promise.”
“When? Don’t say when I’m older. I want to know when.”
I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, and pondered the situation. “When you are eighteen?”
He would be an adult then, and Carlisle could no longer do anything to take him away from me.
“That’s so far away,” Riley said. “But you promise? You promise you’ll tell me about him then?”
“I promise.”
He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Good enough for me. Let’s get inside. I’m hungry.”
I laughed. “How are you always hungry?”
“Puberty,” he said with a shrug before climbing out of the car.
With a smile on my lips, I followed him, but when we approached our apartment door, I noticed Leah on the walkway above us.
“Hey, Cara!” she called out. “Hold on a second.”
Confused, I waited for Leah to come down the stairs.
“Is everything alright?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “There was a man here earlier. Pretty short, dark hair. Does that sound familiar?”
“No, not at all. Riley? Do you know any short, dark-haired men?”
He shook his head. “No, why?”
Leah looked concerned. “He hung around here for a pretty long time, and he asked around for you.”
“What?”
“I saw him talking to my grandmother through my window, but I assumed he was just looking for a place to rent. But then he also approached Callum when he returned from his hike, and when I went out to throw away my trash, he asked me about you.”
“He asked about me? What did he want?” I asked with a frown.
“He didn’t say. He just wanted to know if you lived here.”
My palms were getting sweaty. A strange man was trying to find out where I lived just when Ellis had figured out he was my son’s father. Maybe I was getting paranoid, but that seemed a very strange coincidence.
“You didn’t tell him anything, did you?” I said, trying to hide the worry in my voice for Riley’s sake.
“Of course not. And I don’t think my grandma or Callum did either, but you might want to keep an eye out for that guy. He gave me the creeps.”
“I will.”
Leah looked at Riley for a moment, as if she was unsure if it was okay to keep talking in front of him. “Cara, are you in trouble? Do you need help?”
“No, it’s fine. I have a handle on things.”
Was it a bad sign that people kept asking me if I needed help?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Riley frown, and Leah didn’t look very convinced either.
“Cara, we’ve known each other for eight years. You know you can trust me, right?”
Oh, how I wished I could ask for help or at least a shoulder to cry on about this whole messed-up situation. But I didn’t dare talk about it, even with my closest friends. Every person who knew just heightened the risk of something getting back to Carlisle. Not that I didn’t trust Leah, but people made mistakes and misjudgments every day without malicious intent. Keeping everything on a need-to-know basis was better, and right then, Leah didn’t need to know that this stranger might have been sent by Riley’s biological grandfather to intimidate me.
“Of course, but there’s nothing to tell you. Everything is fine. That guy was probably just some kind of insurance salesman or something. But thanks for looking out for me.”