Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
JACK
“Did you get that other thing I asked about?” I didn’t want to say it out loud. I felt like such a creeper for running a background check on Luke Halston, but I wanted to make sure he was good enough for Hannah.
Bumping into her at the theater last week had felt like fate—until Luke had walked up next to her and called her babe . That was like a knife to my heart and a reminder that she was taken and better off. I wanted to make sure Luke wasn’t hiding anything, so I’d had Chloe run a top-notch, CIA-level background check on him.
Chloe nodded and tapped on her phone. Then something pinged in my email.
“I’ll leave you to it,” she said and headed for the door.
We’d just gotten out of a three-hour meeting with Jason over whether or not to sell the company to China. We’d decided against it in the end, but I’d been close to telling Jason to sell my shares. Part of me wanted to just go live in the mountains alone for the rest of my life, and the other part of me was terrified of what I would do left alone with my thoughts and no work to keep me busy. No. I wouldn’t sell yet.
I opened the email and braced myself. If there was even the slightest red flag in here, I would call Hannah, confess what I’d done, and send the report to her.
But as I scanned the paper, I felt my heart grow heavier and heavier.
Luke Halston was a model citizen.
He paid his taxes.
He’d graduated as valedictorian from Texas A&M University.
He was a licensed veterinarian.
He’d volunteered on a missions trip in Mexico when he was a teenager.
He went to church.
He was perfect for Hannah, and that realization felt like the final nail in a coffin I’d put myself in.
I sighed, accepting this fate.
Not many women I’d met had made me think about the future. I had a no-falling-in-love rule for a reason. It was safer that way. But for a moment, I wondered if Hannah would be worth the pain—the pain I’d feel when it eventually didn’t work out. I thought she was. Even an hour with her would have been worth a month of heartache, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t mine. She was Luke’s.
There was a knock on the door, and I looked up and saw Jason. He had changed into a polo shirt and jeans and was holding a to-go coffee.
“Ready?” he asked.
I frowned, glancing at my calendar, because I was most definitely not ready. It was five p.m. and I had been about to go home.
At-Risk Youth Basketball Fundraiser: 6 p.m.
“Oh, crap. I forgot about that.” I stood from the computer, eying the background report one last time before closing it and deciding once and for all to move on from this whole Hannah infatuation.
Jason laughed. “It was your idea! I’d rather throw money at these kids. You’re the one who wanted to play basketball with them.”
I grinned. Jason and I had been best friends since third grade. We both came from humble beginnings and agreed when we hit our first billion to share our wealth with the less fortunate. The only issue was that Jason didn’t really like children. I mean, he liked them from afar, but they were loud and unpredictable, and he didn’t like that. So I tried to get him around them often just to see him squirm.
“It will be fun. You afraid they’ll whoop you?” I questioned as I moved to the cabinet in my office where I kept my workout clothes.
Jason nodded. “Actually, yeah. I’ve never been good at basketball. That was always your sport.”
I changed in the adjoining bathroom next to my office, and when I came out, Jason handed me a coffee too.
“Thanks, man,” I told him. “So, I was thinking. What if, when we get there, we tell the kids that for every shot they make, we’ll donate ten grand to their school?”
Jason grinned. “I like that!”
We were playing a little game with Jason and me, the principal, and some teachers going against the students. At the end, Jason and I were going to present them with a check. This way, it would be more fun, and we’d go easy on them so they could rack up money quickly.
We got into Jason’s Tesla, and then he started driving us to the high school where we would be donating the money.
Chloe called when we were five minutes from the building.
“Don’t worry. I won’t be late,” I told her as I picked up.
“Jack, have Jason pull over,” she said, her voice holding a sadness.
Oh, God.
“Pull over,” I told Jason.
“What happened?” My heart fluttered in my chest. Was someone hurt?
“I’m sorry, but you can’t go to the fundraiser anymore,” she said.
I frowned. “Why can’t we go to the fundraiser?” I put the phone on speaker so Jason could hear.
She sighed. “Jack, the principal just called. He ran routine background checks on you both and…they have a policy about people with felony convictions being around children.”
The words felony conviction hung in the air like a poison until it was choking me. Shame washed over me so hard, and I wanted to disappear. It wasn’t lost on me that I’d just run a background check on Luke to make sure he was safe for Hannah, and meanwhile, I should have been looking in the mirror.
“I understand. Thank you, Chloe,” I told her and hung up.
“Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry.” Jason reached for my shoulder.
But I shrugged him off and opened the door of his car.
“Whoa, hey. What are you doing?” he asked as cars zoomed past us.
I peered down the freeway exit to the gas station. “I’m gonna walk to the gas station and call a ride. You can still make it and do the ten-grand-per-hoop thing. The kids will love it.” I felt the weight of depression trying to draw me under.
“Jack, get in the dang car,” Jason growled.
I went to lift myself out of the seat, feeling emotion clog my throat, but Jason grabbed hold of my elbow, yanking me back down.
I slammed my butt on his seat and glared at him.
“I can drive you to the gas station, you overdramatic fool,” he told me.
I chuckled at that. Jason always had a way with words.
I shut the door, and he got back on the highway, taking the first exit.
“Or I could just write them a check and we could go grab dinner,” he added, peering over at me with pity.
I shook my head. “You don’t break promises to kids, Jason. They are expecting a cool tech billionaire to inspire them and tell them they have a shot at an amazing future. But I guess you will have to do,” I told him.
He chuckled at my joke. “You’re certainly the better half of our business.”
I frowned as he pulled into the gas station. “No, I’m not.”
He put the car in park and faced me. “Yes, you are, Jack. If you weren’t constantly throwing money at good causes, I wouldn’t feel so inclined to do it myself. I’d be hoarding my money on a yacht in Italy, but you have inspired me to make a difference in other people’s lives.”
I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable with the praise. Jason and I normally didn’t go too deep in our conversations, and that’s the way I liked it. If I wanted this, I could get it from Chloe.
“I only do it to try to make amends for what I’ve done.” I told him. He knew that.
Jason grasped my shoulder, his eyes going misty. “That’s not how it works, buddy. At some point, you’re going to have to forgive yourself and move on.”
It felt like he’d shaken up a deeply wounded part of me with those words. I had to bite down on my lip to keep from getting emotional.
“I can assure you that will never happen.” Then I opened the door and stepped out.
After shutting the door, I waved him off and walked into the gas station. Only when I saw the creek to the right and the sign for Evergreen Cemetery did I realize exactly where Jason had dropped me.
Are you kidding me?
I looked up at the clouds, wondering if God Himself was testing me. This was quite the coincidence.
I sighed, standing there frozen in the middle of the gas station parking lot. Either I called my ride or I walked the half mile to the cemetery and saw my mother for the first time in years. I used to go on her birthday and her death anniversary, but the guilt ate me alive and I was in a depression for months afterward, so I just stopped going. Now I wondered if her grave was dirty, if she was in some type of afterlife thinking I had abandoned her.
At the gas station, I purchased a Twix bar and then headed to the cemetery. I would probably regret this, but I might have regretted it more if I stayed away.
With each step I took towards the cemetery, I felt a heavy, foreboding weight come over me. I’d asked all the why questions before. Why her and not me? I never got an answer, yet still I asked them again now.
If God was real, why would He take my beautiful mother from this earth and leave my piece-of-crap soul behind here to pollute this place even further?
Why?
Before I knew it, I had stepped inside and down the aisle my mother rested in. One, two, three…She was the fourth headstone in from the left.
The grave was clean. They all were. Which meant whoever ran this place was hosing them off. I would have to find out who it was and give them some money.
I fell to my knees and traced the deep grooves of my mother’s name as a tidal wave of emotions roared up inside of me.
“I’m so sorry.” I whimpered as the grief reared its ugly head, so fresh and hot it felt like I’d lost her just yesterday.
When you’re a young boy raised by a single mother, an unbreakable bond that forms. She was my everything. The guy who’d gotten her pregnant when she was seventeen told her to get an abortion. She told him no and never spoke to him again. She wanted me even though she was only a junior in high school. She wanted me even when her parents kicked her out of the house for making a mistake. She wanted me even when everyone said I would ruin her life.
She wanted me in a world that told her to erase me.
That was my mother. The most loving woman I’d ever known.
It felt like we’d raised each other at times. When I was ten, she was only twenty-seven. That was the age I was now. I couldn’t imagine having a ten-year-old kid! But she had done it. She worked two, and sometimes three jobs, and went to night school. She became a realtor and slowly made more and more money, giving us the life she had always dreamed of. She shunned men I didn’t get along with and did everything to make sure that I was happy.
And here I was, a successful billionaire of one of the world’s biggest game apps, and she had no idea. The Jack she’d last saw had been teaching himself coding while working out of the garage with Jason and hoping to make it big like Steve Jobs. She never saw my dream realized, and I’d give it all back just to have her sing me to sleep one more time.
I broke into sobs as I grabbed my face in an effort to control my breathing. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could live with this guilt.
“God, if You’re real,” I begged between gasps, “just take me too. I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
And then, unbidden, an image of beautiful Hannah rose in my mind. My own little pocket of sunshine. I pulled out my phone and brought up the picture of her at the orphanage in India with the girls pulling on her blonde hair. A smile graced my face as a small sliver of happiness broke through the heavy depression weighing down on me right now.
I glanced back at my mom’s grave and sighed.
“I want to tell you about a girl named Hannah,” I said. “You would like her. Oh, and her name has two N’s in it, which is very important to the story.” Then I laughed.
I set the Twix bar, my mother’s favorite, on top of the grave and then launched into a twenty-minute conversation about Hannah Phillips. It was the craziest thing. Speaking to my mother like she might still be alive somewhere, like she might be able to hear me. For some reason, talking about Hannah made me smile as I recounted so many things we’d been through in our short time of knowing each other.
“When I bought her the restaurant, she asked me if I was a mob boss!” I told my mother.
Even if Hannah wasn’t mine, she was probably the only positive thing I could talk to my mother about right now. So I did. I told my mother all about Hannah with two N’s, and by the time I left the cemetery and called a ride, I somehow felt…lighter.
Maybe there was hope that, in time, I could heal from this travesty.
My phone buzzed with a text, and I swallowed hard when I saw Hannah’s name.
Hannah with two N’s: It was crazy to see you last week. I wish there had been more time. How are you?
I sighed, deleting the message and pushing it from my mind. Hannah was with Luke, and I wasn’t interested in standing in the friendzone while she fell in love with him.