Chapter 34
All I can focus on are the two people sitting in the fourth row. —Noah Hardaway
“Leaf dancers, could you please get into line? We’ve got like four minutes before you need to go onstage.”
Scout’s voice is laced with exasperation, but as sorry as I feel for him right now, I can’t help but smile. Because in about four minutes, we start the talent show that will raise more dollars for the Devon Falls Community Center.
And I’m here to see it. I’m back in Devon Falls, with Gabe and Scout and Bear and Colin and Tom and everyone else. The group hug I got when Milo and I pulled up to the opera house today was pretty epic.
Unfortunately, we left Albany on a cliffhanger.
Yesterday, Uncle Stan postponed his campaign announcement after Lilah told him she had some pressing information to share with him before he made any big decisions.
They planned to meet today, and Milo and I were going to wait in Albany to see what happened.
But Milo promised Tom he’d tap dance tonight. I wanted to watch Milo tap dance. And when Milo told Ma what was happening in Devon Falls tonight, she shooed us out to our cars with Scout.
“Go. You two have both had your parents’ careers interrupt enough of your lives. I’ll call you as soon as I have an update to share.”
So here we are, preparing to watch leaves dance.
There are only three fundraisers left now before the actual leaf festival.
The talent show is tonight, and next weekend is the gondola opening.
Then, on the night the festival opens, the community center will be hosting a fancy fundraising dinner with a silent auction on the leaf festival’s grounds.
Everyone’s nervous about the event, but Gabe seems hopeful we’ll hit our funding goal.
And even more important than all of that? The man I can’t stop staring at is wearing tap shoes and rehearsing his number in front of me.
“My ball change feels off,” he mutters as he steps back and forth easily in shoes I never even saw him wear until a few days ago. Only Dr. Milo Warner could pull out a tap dance routine on command like this. “Noah, what do you think?”
“I think ball change sounds dirty,” I tell him.
He laughs as he stops his rehearsal and scoops me up into a hug. “Wait until you hear some other tap dance terminology.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Shuffle ball change,” he murmurs in my ear as he moves his hands suggestively across my ass.
I laugh out loud. “Shh!” I hiss. There are tiny leaves dancing nearby, after all.
“Cramp roll,” he adds.
I slap his chest and push him away from me. “That one just sounds painful.”
“Milo!” Scout whispers from the other side of the dressing area. “You’re on deck!”
“Wish me luck.” Milo bows for me. “Cheer me on from the wings with abandon. Omega,” he adds in a whisper as he rushes across the room toward Scout.
“Damn,” I tell my cock, which is now chubbing up inside my pants. “You can’t keep reacting that way every time he uses the word omega with us. You’re going to get us into trouble in polite company.”
My dick doesn’t answer.
I find a bottle of water and head out to the backstage area where friends and family of the performers are watching the show. But I only get halfway there before someone tugs my arm and pulls me away toward them. “Gabe? What’s going on?” I ask.
“Hey. Sorry to spook you like that, but I thought I should warn you before you laid eyes on the audience.”
“Warn me about what?”
He blows out a breath. “Milo’s mother is in the audience. And your father’s sitting next to her.”
I’m told Milo kills his routine, but I barely see it. All I can focus on are the two people sitting in the fourth row, stage left.
Lilah Warner is wearing a collared shirt with a sweater and dress pants. Uncle Stan is wearing jeans and a Buffalo Bills jersey I know Ezra hates. Is his outfit a good sign? I want to believe it is, but I’m trying not to hold out too much hope.
Ezra is nowhere in sight.
“What do you think happened?” I whisper to Milo as we pretend to watch an elementary school quartet of flautists play off-key. Both of us have barely taken our eyes off our family members.
“Well, I don’t think they came all the way to Devon Falls to hear Sabrina Carpenter songs played in the style of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’,” he tells me. He squeezes my hand a little tighter. “I think we’re just going to have to wait and see, Chucks.”
“Wait and see” has never been my strong suit.
My heart’s beating so fast by the time Tom leads the performers in their curtain call that I’m afraid I might pass out.
Then Milo and I stand near the exit, half blending with the audience as they wait to congratulate their favorite thespians and musicians and dancers—oh, and one magician.
I clutch Milo’s hand, and he grips mine in a tight reminder that he’s not going anywhere.
I see Lilah first. She steps out from behind one of the flautists and smiles. “Hello there, Noah. Son.” She and Milo hug.
“Well?” He asks her in a murmur. “How did the conversation go?”
That’s when Uncle Stan appears behind her. His eyes are red-rimmed, and he looks back and forth between me and Milo a few times before he wrings his hands together. “Kiddo,” he says. “I am so, so sorry.”
We’re surrounded by people, all of whom are shuffling into me as they talk and laugh, but everything around me seems to freeze as I look at Uncle Stan.
My father. The man who lifted me out of that firefighter’s arms and held onto me during the worst moments of my life.
The man who taught me to ride a bike and throw a baseball and make snowflake art for our windows at the holidays.
The man who believed in me before anyone else did.
The man who forgot how to believe in me when I needed him the most.
“Noah,” he says. “Can we talk? Alone?”
We end up sitting on one of the benches next to the poop emoji statue.
Bear’s joined us, and she’s sniffing at the leaves around our feet as I swing my legs in the chilled air and Uncle Stan burrows into his jersey.
“See?” he says. “Football jerseys are practical. I could never make Ezra believe that.”
I scowl. “Where is he?”
Uncle Stan’s face darkens. “Hopefully in a holding cell.”
“What?” I sit up on the bench. “You had him arrested?”
“Damn straight I did. He hurt you, Noah. He hurt us. He hurt Milo. He hurt a hell of a lot of people.”
“Some of that was illegal?” I’m racking my brain, but I can’t come up with anything in Ezra’s history of lies that he could actually be arrested for. Morality and legality, I learned early in life, aren’t always one and the same.
Uncle Stan scoffs. “Likely not, though it should be. But once Lilah showed me what he’d been up to, I got suspicious about some other things he’d been working on behind closed doors.
Things he said I didn’t need to worry about.
It only took me and Lilah about five minutes of looking through some records to see that my chief of staff was likely involved in bribery as well as blackmail.
We got the officials involved fast after that. ”
He shakes his head.
“Shit, Noah. I just keep thinking about our last conversations and the things I said to you. I could have destroyed our entire relationship, all because I let that guy feed some weird vision of power into my head.” He groans.
“You know, I’ve never doubted that I got into politics for the right reasons.
But today? I really started to doubt that I’ve stayed in it for the right reasons. ”
“You want to help people,” I remind him. “You always have. That’s all you’ve ever wanted to do.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “When men in suits came to take Ezra away for questioning, guess what he kept saying?”
I don’t have to guess. “That he did it all to help people. People like my mother,” I mumble.
“Yup.” Uncle Stan drops his head into his hands.
“Really puts things into perspective, you know? I always used to think politics was all just BS, just people in empty suits waxing hot air. Then your mom passed, and I ran for those council seats—and I saw how inseparable political choices really are from people’s lives.
I saw real, positive change happen for people who needed it. Right in front of me.”
I nod. “I know. I remember. And those are the same reasons why Gabe wanted to start the center. Devon Falls is pretty good at taking care of its own, but upstate Vermont has a lot of the same problems as Pottsville.”
“Yeah.” Uncle Stan sits back on the bench and crosses his arms. “But I’ll admit, when Ezra started talking about the governor’s seat, the opportunities there…
I think I lost some of that perspective.
People talk to you enough about winning, and winning starts to become what everything’s about.
Well, not for everyone, I guess.” He smiles.
“Lilah seems immune to all that nonsense. I thought I was too, until Ezra started spinning lies about you, and I let myself believe them.”
He turns to face me, and he takes my hands in his.
“I don’t deserve your forgiveness, Noah,” he tells me.
“And I’ll never forgive myself for not putting you first, or for letting Ezra throw you to the wolves the way he did.
You’re the most important person in my world, Noah.
I need you to know that’s never changing.
Even if you can’t forgive me, I’ll never stop loving you. Ever.”
Something lodges in my throat as I study Uncle Stan, my father, watching my perspective of him shift slightly on its axis.
Inch by inch by inch. “You’ve always been my hero,” I tell him.
“The only person I could ever count on. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell you about the way Ezra treated me when you weren’t looking. ”
“Lilah told me I’ve missed more than a few steps these past years,” Uncle Stan says. “Kiddo, I owe you so many apologies.”
“Maybe. But some of this is on me too.” Uncle Stan raises his eyebrows. “Really,” I tell him. “I was so afraid of losing you that I wasn’t honest when I needed to be. We both let Ezra come between us, you know?”
Uncle Stan shakes his head. “I still need to take the responsibility here. I let power get to my head, and I didn’t see what was right in front of me.” He hesitates as he bites his lip. “I hope someday you can forgive me, Noah.”
“I know I can,” I tell him. And I’m not surprised by just how much I mean those words.
If Devon Falls has taught me anything, it’s that second chances are what keep the world moving forward.
Mistakes are how we grow, right? And right now, I’m thinking of something Lilah said yesterday in that hotel room in Albany, when she asked for my permission to talk to Stan.
“We have to take responsibility for our choices. We stopped really talking to each other, really communicating, and we need to fix that. But neither of us should hold responsibility for anything Ezra did.”
Uncle Stan’s eyes are watering now. “I love you so much, kiddo,” he whispers.
I wrap my arms around his neck then, relishing one of the warm, hearty hugs my father has always been so good at giving.
“I promise I’ll do better at communicating.
At really listening and seeing you,” he adds as we break apart.
“I’m going to announce that this will be my last term in the New York Senate. ”
“What? You’re retiring? But people need you!”
“There are some great candidates who are ready to step up to the plate,” Uncle Stan tells me.
He smiles as he looks around us, at the golden lights shining down on the town square.
“I was thinking maybe I’d spend some time here, if you’re up for that?
The feed store basically runs itself these days, and I’m getting closer to thinking about retiring fully anyway.
Maybe I could spend some time helping out at this community center of yours? ”
“I’m dating Milo,” I blurt out, because if Uncle Stan and I are making a fresh start at things here, there’s no way I want to hold onto that secret one second longer.
He raises an eyebrow. “You think I didn’t figure that out the second I saw you watching him during his tap routine? You look at that man the way you used to look at boxed macaroni and cheese.”
We burst out laughing, and we end up laughing so hard that pretty soon I’m clutching at my stomach and leaning on my father’s shoulder while we both pull in gasping breaths of air.
I study the poop emoji statue, which is casting interestingly shaped shadows on the ground a few feet away from us. “Can you believe,” I finally say, “that Ezra Morehouse is my brother? And that he hated me so much he never even told me?”
Uncle Stan wraps his arm around my shoulder. “I had some time to think about that little revelation on the drive here,” he says. “You want to know my take?”
“Definitely.”
“I think Ezra had more jealousy than hatred toward you. I was thinking about the timing of things: he loses his parents, he learns he had a mom he never knew, then he finds out he’s got a brother who did have that mother in his life.
” He clears his throat. “He’s still got this idealized vision of his mother, but his brother… ”
“I remembered her differently than he wanted to see her.” I see where Uncle Stan’s going with this line of thinking now.
“Yup. Then he gets heavily involved in working for me, and we get close. I become like a second father to him, but guess who’s the one person in my life he can never seem to eclipse, no matter how hard he tries?”
I wince.
“Yup. So he resorts to some shady kinds of shit for all kinds of shady reasons. Don’t think I’m making excuses for him,” he adds quickly.
“I’m just trying to, you know, understand someone who can maybe never be understood.
” He squeezes my shoulder. “He’s not your family, Noah.
Not unless you want him to be someday. I’m your family, if you’ll still have me.
And I’m gathering that you’ve built quite a family here, for yourself.
In Devon Falls. I’d like to meet all the people here who’ve made my son so happy since he left home. ”
Then we hug, of course. I have a feeling I’ll never, ever be ready to forgive Ezra for everything he did—to me, to Milo, to others. But Uncle Stan?
He’s the guy who lived on boxed macaroni and cheese for me. And honestly, I can’t wait for my father to finally meet the world of Devon Falls.