Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Dad took away my phone, my computer, and my tablet. If he could’ve found a way to take paper and pens away from me to keep me from writing letters, he would have done that as well. My only saving grace was the secret cell phone tucked away in my school bag, the one Kain had given me six weeks ago.
I shut the door of my bedroom behind me, locking it before I rushed for my backpack. I desperately needed to Google the name Kiana Harris.
Kain had been calling me in ten minute intervals for the past hour and a half. Noting the last time he called, I could expect another call in six minutes. Just enough time to type her name into the internet and search.
Nothing.
I found nothing on the internet. Well, nothing that answered any of my questions.
Kiana Harris was found floating in a canal on the morning of September 5th, 1995.
I did the math and determined that Kain would’ve been a little under two months old around the time of her death.
There was no word on who found her. Nothing on family she was survived by.
No mention of a son.
The phone in my hand began to vibrate, exactly when I expected it would. I tried to find my composure before I did anything. To drown out the sound of my conversation, I turned on my desk fan, setting it at the foot of my closed bedroom door.
“Hellooo, Kain.” In an attempt to seem unaffected by the fact that I was absolutely convinced I’d just uncovered the identity of Kain’s mother, my tone was waxy—fake as hell. I sounded like a damn Wal-Mart greeter. A bizarre cadence to my tone that Kain no doubt picked up on.
“You okay?” He wasn’t expecting that. I made a short hum of confirmation, urging him to move on. “No, seriously. What happened?”
Oh. The question wasn’t just about the way I’d answered the phone. Kain wanted to know how things had gone down with my father. Caught up in the recent bombshell that was Kiana Harris, I’d almost forgotten my world had come crashing down today.
“You were right about this phone,” I gushed. There was an inexplicable impulse in me to not lay my problems at his feet. Even if he didn’t know why, I wanted to comfort him in this moment, not burden him.
Kain had never met his mother; didn’t know anything about her. He’d said himself that he couldn’t miss someone he’d never met. However, when Kain did speak about her, he did so in the present tense.
No one had told him she was dead, just that she was never coming.
Perhaps he believed she’d given birth to him and wanted no parts of the world Silas had created, including him.
It wasn’t difficult to imagine Kain thinking that was an understandable thing to do.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, Kain spoke of his elusive mother as though she’d left him.
Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t seem choked up about it.
After all, the absence of his mother, as far back as he could remember, was a constant for him. So he didn’t mourn her.
If he for one second suspected that leaving him was never her choice at all, would he mourn her then? I didn’t have it in me to explore the curiosity.
To top it all off, I had nothing to go by except for an intense gut feeling, her time of death, and their identical pairs of golden brown eyes. It was enough for me. But that wasn’t nearly enough information to change someone’s life over.
“Lauren.” His voice was serious. So much expressed in just that one-word statement.
He wanted me to open up to him. He expected me to lay my problems at his feet.
He was ready for them, ready to give any solution he was able to offer.
A burst of grief spiked in my chest. Why was I so sad? “Did he lay hands you?”
There was something about the way he said it that seemed to completely disregard the fact that he was talking about my father.
Parents smack their kids around all the time.
My parents had never, but if it had started tonight, who was Kain to be so outraged over what a lot of people would consider normal?
“No,” I sputtered out meekly. “I just…”
“You just…?” Kain took in a deep breath, holding it a while before finally exhaling. He was bracing himself. I’d only just started calling him my boyfriend three hours ago, and he was already expecting a change of heart.
“My father’s really mad at me,” I sighed, rubbing my tired eyes. “I mean, like, really, really mad at me.”
Kain attempted to help me do what he assumed I was trying to do. “Look, it’s fine if—”
“And I don’t care.” He stopped talking. “I didn’t care about his stories, his warnings, his photographs—I don’t care. But…”
“Tell me.”
“Why?” I asked him, the question too vague for him to know what I was referring.
I recalled the absolute conviction behind my father’s warnings about Kain.
He spoke like he didn’t have a doubt in his mind that Kain was just as calculated as Silas Montgomery himself.
I needed answers. “Why am I the exception?”
The sound of his breathing tripped up ever so subtly.
There were things a phone conversation denied me, like his facial expressions.
The momentary blip in his breaths, however, conveyed just enough for me to know I’d said something unexpected.
I’d asked a question he had not yet explored the answer to himself.
Kain thought about his explanation before responding.
“You had no idea who I was.” He paused. “That’s especially hard to come by in this city. At a party in my own house, no less. You didn’t come at me expectin’ me to be that guy. So that’s not what you got.”
This was true. Although, I knew who Silas Montgomery was, I only cared to know because my father was the Miami-Dade state attorney.
In my home, Silas was someone we heard about, hardly ever saw.
Once in a while, Silas would be in the news over some new business venture opening—a legal one—and my eyes would brush pass his likeness.
But I had him saved in my memory the same way I had most of the unimportant faces in my life saved — deep, deep down.
To me, Silas Montgomery was a kingpin who very transparently dressed up his criminal empire with legitimate businesses.
Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing to be honored.
His family was paid dust, just the same.
To everyone else, the whole Montgomery family was a local spectacle.
Years of living under the scrutiny of my parents would’ve never allowed me to be one of the many in Miami who kept up with Montgomery gossip like they were rock stars.
They had admirers. I was never one of them.
The soft sound of Kain’s chuckle preceded his second revelation.
“You with your red dress from eighth grade graduation.” Was the dress really that bad?
“Walked straight up as I was pouring myself a drink.
Talking ‘bout, ‘Hey, I need that.’ Tone all desperate.” He laughed again as he reminisced.
“Snatched the shot glass clear out my hand, and had the nerve to ask for a second.”
“I don’t remember you being annoyed about it…” Honestly? I couldn’t remember much of that night. My smile was so big my cheeks went numb, when he confirmed my statement.
“Because I wasn’t annoyed at all.” He was smiling, too. Even though I couldn’t see him, I just knew.
“Is that why you don’t go to UM? You needed to get out of the city.” The University of Miami had one of the best pre-law programs in the state. As a law school-hopeful it would’ve been the best decision. Florida State was a… meh… pretty decent choice, I guess.
“You mean, aside from the fact that UM’s football team is trash?” I made a sound of disapproval. There he went again, going hard for the FSU Seminoles just because he knew it’d irk me. “But yeah, I needed to get out of Miami.”
“Life’s a lot quieter when you’re not around people who know all about you, huh?”
“No,” Kain replied, his voice gentle with tiredness. It was so late that it was early. Off in the distance, the sun was beginning to creep up, coloring the sky in an orange-blue hue. “Life’s a lot quieter when you’re not around people who think they know all about you.”
“I wanna know all about you,” I admitted, before adding, “But I think I’ve got one thing figured out, though.”
“Yeah?” His response was both an acknowledgement and a question.
“You go to school hundreds of miles away because you hate the Montgomery expectation held over your head. You make it sound like wearing an uncomfortable pair of shoes.” I smiled at the realization, relieved. “It’s easy for you to be that guy, but… you don’t seem to like it.”
Kain made a sound of understanding, but neither confirmed nor denied my assessment.
Instead, he confessed, “I hated the fear in your eyes when you realized who I was. That night, I’d watched you transition from nervous, to slightly more comfortable, to buzzed, talkative, and…
Twice, I saw genuine fear. Once, when I found you upstairs.
And then again, when I told you who I really was. ”
“Doesn’t that happen often, though? People being scared of you.”
“All my damn life, but not like that,” he admitted. “It was the sequence of events that led up to it. I’ve been feared. But… You looked at me the same way you looked at the nigga who tried to rape you. And that… fucked with me. I didn’t like it, and I wanted to change your mind.”
“Me specifically?”
“You specifically.”
“Why me specifically?”
“You went from damn near tellin’ me your life story, to eying me with the same suspicion I’ve gotten all my life.
Up until that point, you clearly trusted me.
Instantly. Shit, I don’t know why — and it was crazy irresponsible.
But it felt like I’d been given something.
And then I watched it get snatched right the fuck back.
” He pushed out a breath, concluding, “So there I was, tryna win back the trust of a girl I barely knew.”