Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Mia watched Ellie—Gabriella, she reminded herself—read her messages and knew something was wrong. And judging from the way Gabriella looked up from her phone with something like panic in her eyes, Mia got a weird suspicion it somehow involved her.
After her time in foster homes and all those years living with an addict mother, she had a sixth sense for predicting when the shit was going to hit the fan.
That instinct went bananas now…screaming a warning.
She shoved aside the rest of the strawberry cupcake she’d been eating, knowing the day had been too good to be true.
Free clothes, no school and a meal in a nice restaurant?
Ha! That had never been her life. She should have known the universe would make sure she wasn’t that lucky.
“What’s the matter?” She must’ve knotted the napkin on her lap before she realized she was doing it because suddenly it was all balled up. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” Gabriella didn’t have a face for lies, her blue eyes sincere and kind. But then again, she’d never told Mia about her real name. And right now the woman bit her lip like her foster sister Nicole used to when she was worried about something.
“Then what’s going on?” she prompted, hating the sick feeling of not knowing.
“It’s your father.” Gabriella’s voice scratched with something like regret. “He’s being taken to the hospital.”
The floor seemed to open up, swallowing her whole. Mia had to grab the edge of the table for balance, her stomach in sudden revolt.
“Is he—?” She couldn’t say it, even though she’d asked herself the question a hundred times as she tiptoed past his bed while he lay very still.
“Will he…?” Shaking her head, she gave up asking the question yet again.
She stood, the knotted napkin falling off her lap while she reached for her windbreaker. “I have to go.”
“Please.” Gabriella threw some bills on the table and stood, too. “Let me drive you. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“That’s fine, but can we hurry?” Mia was already heading for the door, not caring that heads were turning in the fancy restaurant.
She knew that it wouldn’t make Pete live longer if she got to the hospital faster.
But then again…what if knowing she was there made the old man fight harder to live another day?
She needed him more than he knew.
Vaguely, Mia heard the hostess call after her—or maybe she just said goodbye. But she was already shoving open the main entrance and heading into the downpour that hadn’t let up.
“I’m parked over here!” Gabriella shouted from nearby, hitting the key fob to make the brake lights flash on a white sedan.
Mia ran to Gabriella’s car, her heart thundering harder than the rumble of the storm. The door was unlocked when she reached it and she let herself in a moment ahead of Gabriella.
Pete was taken to the hospital. She’d been having a fun day while her father might already be dead.
She hated to think about him that way—his death was on her mind as often as anything else about him.
But from the moment they’d met, she’d known his days were numbered.
She had been surprised he’d gotten custody of her when his health was so obviously bad, but Pete said it didn’t matter since they were blood relatives and he had a right to spend time with his daughter.
Now, as Gabriella started up the car and backed out of her parking spot, Mia willed her racing thoughts to quiet so she could figure out what to do next.
How soon would the foster system know Pete died and demand she enter a new home?
How fast would child protective services show up at her door to take her away?
Her skin crawled with a clamminess that didn’t have anything to do with the weather. How could she find out more about his condition?
“I wonder if I should call the hospital.” Mia dried her hands on her shirt under the hoodie before she retrieved her phone and started searching for the number to the local emergency room. “Who called you? Was it the home health care worker who found him?”
As soon as she asked the question, Mia realized it didn’t make any sense. Glancing at Gabriella, she noticed her friend’s forehead was scrunched with worry.
Again.
“Wait a minute.” Mia set down the phone. She swiped away a rivulet of water running down her cheek. “Why would anyone call you and not me?”
“I dropped off a friend at your father’s house on my way over to see you today,” Gabriella rushed to explain, her eyes trained on the road. “I had no idea of his connection to you since I hadn’t seen Clayton Travers since I was your age.”
“I don’t know anyone named Clayton.” Mia hoped that sixth sense of hers was mistaken. That Gabriella was every bit as cool of a friend as she had thought. “I have no ties to him, and Pete never mentioned him, either.”
How did this Clayton guy know her father? And why hadn’t Gabriella mentioned that she’d just been over at Pete’s house? One more factoid that her so-called friend had hidden from her.
Gabriella drove through a deep puddle, spraying dirty water up one side of the windows. Everyone was driving slowly, their taillights glowing red in front of Gabriella’s car. The day had gone dark earlier than normal due to the weather. Mia’s mood was turning darker by the second, too.
“Did you know Pete has several other grown children?” Gabriella asked, fingers gripping the steering wheel like her life depended on her driving.
“Several? I know about one. Some lady who was supposedly his daughter stopped by once asking him to sign papers that would change his will or something.” Mia struggled to remember that day, but she’d been knee-deep in her own drama since it was soon after she had moved into the house.
“Pete almost laughed himself into a stroke when he introduced us to each other as sisters. I wasn’t even sure if he was serious. ”
The woman stormed out in a huff that day, and Mia had gone back to deleting all the nastygrams her former foster brother, Connor, had sent her when he somehow found out her new phone number. Pete had let her change it twice since then.
“Pete has at least eight kids besides you,” Gabriella announced, flipping on the blinker to get around a slow-moving tractor trailer. “My friend Clayton Travers is one of them.”
Mia blinked. Processed the information.
Her brain worked to find the takeaway, churning through news that she did not welcome.
“I have eight half siblings.” She said it aloud to try and get her head around it.
“And you happen to be good friends with one of them. But you never mentioned this to me.” She examined her feelings about this and discovered she didn’t like it one bit.
“You also never told me you were using an alias the whole time I’ve known you. ”
That last fact seemed to tip the scales away from Gabriella completely. Had Mia ever known this woman at all?
“Mia, I haven’t seen Clayton in years. We only met again yesterday and—”
“You were at my father’s house right before you met me at the Peachtree.
” Mia ticked through everything she knew, ignoring whatever Gabriella rattled on about now since she had the important facts already in front of her.
“You dropped off my half brother at my father’s but you never told me you know my father, let alone some half brother. ”
Anger fired fast and hot, and Mia was only too glad to let it burn away the fear for her dad. For herself.
“Mia—” Gabriella tried to interrupt.
Mia would have none of it.
“You, of all people, should understand I have trust issues. I basically poured out my whole freaking life story to you over the past year and a half.”
“Ellie” had been her rock. The one person she could call who wouldn’t judge her. But it turned out “Ellie” had been lying the whole time. “Yet you lied to me the same way everyone else does, not giving a rat’s ass about anyone but yourself.”
Cold fury iced her insides. She retreated to her side of the car and yanked her hood over her head, not wanting to hear another word from the most false friend and so-called support group leader ever.
“I couldn’t have told you until today, and I was hoping maybe after we met—”
“You found out yesterday,” Mia reminded her, never lowering the hood as she stared out at the fat drops of water dancing in the hard wind just outside the window.
“I called you last night. You could have told me then instead of letting me rattle on for half an hour about grabbing Davis Reed’s penis by mistake. ”
“I should have,” Gabriella admitted, her voice a raw whisper. “You’re right, but I—”
“You know what, Ellie?” She used the fake name on purpose, pissed off and not caring how much it showed.
She would get out of the car right now except that would only delay her getting to the hospital.
“Give me the Davis Reeds of the world any day. At least he was honest about what he wanted from me. With you? I don’t have a flipping clue.
And I’ve gotta tell you I have no use for people who lie to me. ”
Clayton waited.
The industrial clock on the wall sounded in need of repair as it ticked off the seconds with slow, sustained clicks. Or maybe Clayton simply felt time dragging, each tick a reminder of all he’d left unfinished with his father. His half sister.
And Gabriella.
Holding his head in his hands, he propped his elbows on sprawled knees where he sat on a crappy vinyl padded bench against the wall covered in pencil sketches of Tennessee wildflowers.
He’d already cataloged all of them, as well as the benign seascapes on the wall opposite in his dove-gray painted hell outside the CT scan rooms.
The quiet was worse than the noise of the ER when they’d first rushed inside the Franklin medical facility, where Pete’s records alerted the staff to the seriousness of his case, and he’d been admitted right away.