Chapter 37
Wait, hold on. What?
I stared at Jay in shock, my eyes wide and my mouth slightly agape, utterly speechless.
My favorite author was his mother? How could this man, my boss, a dentist, be the son of a literary genius?
What did a brain aneurysm feel like? Because I was pretty sure I was having one.
Jay shifted uneasily where he stood, awaiting my reaction.
Finally, I managed to find my voice, though it came out in a breathless whisper. “Lindy Parker… is your mother?” It wasn’t adding up. I had mentioned Lindy a few times. Jay had even seen me reading her books. Why hadn’t he said something?
“I thought you said your last name was Alarcón?”
He gave a bitter laugh, and something akin to a grimace passed over his features. “My mother used her maiden name on all her books. My father’s last name is Alarcón.”
I shook my head slightly as if trying to clear it. “I can’t believe this. Lindy Parker is my favorite author. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
He sighed and set the book back in my hands before pacing a few steps, putting some distance between us. “I don’t know. It just never felt like the right moment.”
“I’ve read all her works,” I said. My whole body was humming almost uncontrollably as a rush of excitement and admiration flooded through me. “She’s brilliant!”
Jay let out another sharp laugh. “Yes, so everyone likes to remind me.”
My smile faltered, and the reality of the situation crashed down.
Lindy Parker had taken her own life. The headlines hadn’t revealed much about what had happened—only that she’d been struggling with her mental health.
I had read Lindy’s author’s note many times in the back of her novels.
It always mentioned a son, but I had never honestly stopped to consider who that child was.
“I’m so sorry, Jay,” I said quietly, the excitement draining from me all at once. I struggled to find the right words. For years, I’d felt like I knew Lindy in some weird way through the stories she’d created. I’d been a devoted reader, obsessed with her art. I would consider myself a super fan.
But standing here now, I realized how little I actually knew about Lindy. All the things I did know came from five hundred carefully chosen words in the “About the Author” section and a few online Google searches.
“Were you two close?” I asked softly, the question slipping out before I could stop it.
Jay looked away. His fingers fidgeted briefly on the edge of one of the tables, his shoulders slumping just a little.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that.”
I didn’t want to pry, but it felt like retreating now would be worse. If the rumors were true, if Lindy Parker’s life had ended the way people said, then this wasn’t a story I could tiptoe around forever.
“Is it true,” I asked quietly, “that she—”
“Took her own life?” Jay finished for me. His jaw tightened, and he nodded once. “Yes.” He stared at the table between us, tracing his finger along the grain of the dark mahogany. “She had bipolar disorder. For a long time, it wasn’t properly treated.”
I stood very still, barely breathing.
“She was intense with her writing,” he continued. “Sometimes she’d lock herself away for days to write. Sometimes longer. She wouldn’t eat or sleep. Wouldn’t answer when I knocked.”
His voice stayed even and unemotional as he recalled the events, but his eyes drifted somewhere far away.
“I’d find her pacing,” he said quietly. “Talking to herself. Writing entire conversations out loud like the characters were in the room with her. I’d have to beg her to come back. To ground herself. To be my mom again.”
There was a long silence.
“She tried to get help, and sometimes she did. But stability never seemed to last. The cycles always came back.”
“How old were you?” I asked quietly.
“I was nineteen when she took her own life,” he said, with that same emotionlessness in his voice. My heart clenched, trying and failing to imagine precisely what it must have been like for him.
“And was your father here too?”
“They separated when I was sixteen, and then he moved back to Spain.”
I sucked in a breath.
“You don’t have any family here then?”
“No siblings. My mother’s parents aren’t alive anymore. She has a sister, but she lives in New York and doesn’t come around much. My father is an only child, and my grandmother is the last living relative, and she’s also in Spain.”
“Did your father visit you? And did he come back after…” I felt a lump form in my throat.
“He tried to contact me a few times after he chose to leave us, but I was so angry that I basically cut off all contact. And then after my mother passed, he didn’t show at the funeral.
” His expression was still hard as stone.
“I was an adult at that point. Everything in my mother’s will had been given to me, and they’d been officially divorced for a few years at that point.
So there was no need for him to come back. ”
No need. There was every need.
He’d been all alone.
“I can’t imagine facing that by yourself,” I whispered.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and the room felt suffocating in the thick silence.
“I feel it’s only fair, if I’m answering all these very personal questions, that you answer a few for me.
” He looked up and gave me a weak smile.
This was heavy. So incredibly heavy, and I felt obligated to give him some answers if it would offer any relief from the weight of this conversation.
So I held back my plethora of questions and walked over to him. I leaned against the desk next to him.
“What do you want to know?” I whispered.
“Tell me what happened with your father.”
“It’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through, Jay.”
He shook his head. “Talk to me, Hope. Pain doesn’t have to be equal to be shared.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. “Okay.”
I paused, unsure if I could really lay this all out for him. But with everything he’d just shared with me, I felt like I had no choice but to give him a piece of myself.
In the quiet space of his library between the fortress-like shelves, I felt safe. I felt like I could confess here.
“It’s not exactly what he did; it’s more what he didn’t do.
” I shifted, folding my arms over my chest. “As you may know, my father made a name for himself throughout San Diego. He used to work at the dental college on the military base, and he was very popular. He developed his own implant techniques and taught many dentists around the world for a time. And he made lots of friends. When he opened his own clinic, he hired one of his best friends that he’d worked with on the naval base. ”
I paused, realizing I had yet to fully tell this story to anyone since it happened.
“After I graduated, I started working at the family clinic, and I was working solely with my father’s best friend.”
I didn’t want to say his name, but I almost needed to. It felt like a dirty word, a sin that had festered in my soul, even though it wasn’t a sin I’d committed.
“Dr. Conrad Pike.”
Jay didn’t say anything; he just looked at me with his dark eyes, his gaze somehow urging me to continue.
“He was a very particular man.” I let out a laugh, but it was a sort of angry laugh. “Any little thing I did wrong, he berated me for.”
My fingers started to tingle as I spoke.
“I’m a perfectionist. I did well in school. I was a great student, and I thought I was a pretty good hygienist. So it was difficult for me to understand why he hated me so much.”
My voice reduced to a whisper. “He hated me. I can truly say that everything I did was never enough. He would pull me into his office and yell at me. The first few times, I told my father. I asked him to move me to work with someone else because Dr. Pike wasn’t the only dentist there.”
Jay’s jaw clenched, as if sensing where the story was headed.
“He didn’t believe me. The idea that his best friend could be berating his daughter at work was just too much for him to handle, I guess.
He’d always explain it away, make it seem like I was overreacting.
” I swallowed. “Soon, I started having nightmares and panic attacks at work. My hands would go numb, sometimes even my face. Then I’d feel like I couldn’t breathe, and I’d have to sit on the ground with my head between my knees to calm down. ”
“Because my father controlled everything, I didn’t feel like I could leave.
I had nowhere to go. There was no support outside of him.
I’d built everything around him—my future, my career.
I once threatened to work for someone else, but he always convinced me to stay.
Said it would make him look bad if I left. ”
I looked down. “I wanted to leave. But there was always some excuse. Or some fear that was making me stay. Then one day, Dr. Pike’s favorite patient came in. She was some radio host he’d been seeing for years, and I could’ve sworn he was infatuated with her or something.”
I could picture it. The day, the time, what I was wearing. It was so vivid that it felt like I was reliving it.
“I treated her like any other patient. She was a nice lady. We chatted. I cleaned her teeth, and then he came in to do an exam. Before I knew it, the appointment was over. And then, when I came back to my room after checking her out at the front desk, Dr. Pike called me into his office.”
I closed my eyes for a second, gathering the courage to finish. I’d come this far; I might as well.
“He proceeded to tell me that he was disappointed in the way I had treated his favorite patient. I asked him what I had done wrong because I thought the appointment had gone wonderfully. He told me I had dismissed her too soon, that I should’ve taken longer to do her cleaning, and that I was lazy and slacking by not taking the full time.
” My teeth ground together. “And guess how early I released her?”
Jay’s somber expression said he already knew where this was headed, but he still shook his head.