Page 91

Cali

The door clicked shut behind Lane, and I stood there staring at it with the papers still clutched in my hand. The house felt unnaturally quiet. I looked down at the papers and carried them to the kitchen table, where I dropped them in a scattered heap across the wood. Bills. Accounts. Signatures that looked like mine until I looked closer. I pulled out a chair and sat, picked up the first page again, tracing the signature with my index finger. It looked like mine. Almost. It had the same looping C, the same sharp line through the length of my last name. But I hadn’t signed it.

I moved through the documents one by one, forcing myself to read every page, even when my stomach twisted. Brett had opened accounts I knew nothing about. He had attached my name to bills I had never seen. He had taken information I had trusted him with and scattered it across a life I had never agreed to live. When I reached the adoption papers, I stopped. Jace’s name sat there in black ink, and I pressed my palm against the page as if I could separate it from everything else. I remembered meeting him when he was ten, a guarded little boy who watched everything and trusted almost nothing. I remembered how carefully I had stepped into his life, how long it took before he let me close enough to see the kid underneath all that suspicion. I hadn’t been there for his first steps or his first words. I hadn’t known him his whole life. But I had chosen him when I met him, and he had eventually chosen me back. Brett could forge my signature and manipulate paperwork and rack up thousands of dollars of credit card debt, but he couldn’t rewrite that. He couldn’t take away what Jace and I had built together by turning the beginning of our story into something ugly. In his eyes all I’d ever been was a long con.

I shoved the papers aside and reached for my phone. Lane’s name was still near the top of my recent calls, and for one stupid second, my thumb hovered over it. I could call him and demand an explanation. I could tell him exactly how angry I was, how violated I felt knowing he had hired someone to dig through my life without asking me. I could ask him why he thought he had the right. Instead, I locked the screen and set the phone face down. He had crossed a line, and understanding why he had crossed it didn’t erase the fact that he had. If I was going to take my life back, I couldn’t start by letting someone else make the decisions for me.

I turned the phone over again and opened the text Lane had sent me earlier with the attorney’s information. Even seeing his name attached to the recommendation made something inside me knot, but I stared at the number until I finally pressed call. A man answered after the fourth ring, and when I introduced myself, he confirmed that Lane had mentioned my situation. I almost hung up, but I took a breath and told him everything. I explained the bills, the forged signatures, the accounts I didn’t recognize, and the adoption documents. I told him about Brett and how long this had been happening. Explaining it all to a stranger made the situation sound even more impossible, but he didn’t interrupt or question me. He listened, then asked me to gather every document I had, photograph each page, preserve the originals, and make a list of every account or agency Brett might have accessed.

I grabbed a notebook from the counter and began making a list of every bank, credit reporting agencies, and any other places I hadn’t thought about in years. He gave me instructions, and I wrote until my hand cramped. When the call ended, I stared at the page for a long moment. I still didn’t know what the next week would look like or how much damage Brett had done, but at least I had a place to start. I made the first call, then the second. The third took nearly forty minutes, but when I finally hung up, I had a fraud claim number written across the top of my notebook. It wasn’t justice, and it wasn’t closure, but it was something I had done for myself. No one had made the call for me. No one had decided what I needed. I had.

I spent the rest of the afternoon gathering everything I could find. I pulled old bank statements from a filing cabinet, searched through emails, printed documents, and made folders for anything that connected Brett to my name. The work steadied me. It gave me something to focus on besides the anger twisting beneath my ribs and the memory of Lane standing in my kitchen, admitting what he had done. By the time I carried a stack of papers into the home office to make another copy, I was exhausted enough that I almost missed the prescription bottle sitting near the edge of the counter.

I stopped and stared at it. This bottle wasn’t supposed to be sitting there. I looked toward the hallway and remembered Lane grabbing his duffel bag when he left. He must have left it on the counter after taking it last night. I turned it over in my hand before setting it beside the papers. For a moment, I considered leaving it there and letting him come back for it himself. But I imagined him realizing hours from now that it was missing and searching through his bag again and again. Despite everything, I couldn’t bring myself to make something he needed into a punishment.

I opened our text thread and stared at the blank screen for longer than I should have.

Me: Your medication was on the kitchen counter. I’ll put it in a bag on the porch for you.

I read the message twice before sending it. His name appeared beneath the text, and I watched the screen for a few seconds, half expecting an immediate response. Nothing came. He was probably volunteering at The Hope Center. I tucked it into a grocery bag and headed for the porch, then stopped abruptly halfway there as realization settled in.

Lane wasn’t trying to control me; he was scared, and I could see that now. Fifteen years had taught him what it felt like to lose me, and somewhere along the way, that fear had blurred the line between protecting me and taking control of a situation he couldn’t stand to watch unfold. I understood that. Maybe more than I wanted to.

But understanding him didn’t mean excusing him. He could love me and still hurt me. He could have good intentions and still make the wrong choice. I could believe that he had been trying to protect me while still telling him that he had no right to decide for me. Those truths didn’t cancel each other out.

Deep down, I also had to acknowledge that finding that prescription bottle had triggered me. Brett had taken opioids like candy. Seeing Lane’s medication had stirred up something old and ugly in me. But Lane wasn’t Brett. He had asked for help. Brett never had.

We needed to talk, but that conversation could wait. I had enough to deal with today. I picked up my phone, found the next number on the list, and pressed call. When someone answered, I took a breath and said, “Hi. I need to report fraudulent activity under my name.” My voice shook, but I kept talking. This time, I wasn’t waiting for someone else to fix it. I wasn’t handing my life over to someone who promised to protect me. I was taking it back, one call at a time.

Forty-Four

Lane

Iscrubbed the back of my thumb across my forehead, wiping away the last of the sweat from practice, and pushed through the door of Ronnie’s Diner. Two days after Cali asked me to leave, and I still walked around in the fog. She needed space. Knowing that didn’t make the distance hurt any less.

Ronnie wiped his hands on the apron stretched over his barrel chest and dropped a menu in front of me—the same one I’d been pretending to read since high school, back when I still thought the world would end if I didn’t know what came next.

“Well, what’ll it be?” He flipped a cup onto a saucer and filled it with coffee without me asking.

I glanced down at the menu even though I could’ve recited it from memory. “Cheeseburger, home-cut fries, and a chocolate milkshake.”

Tina, one of Ronnie’s longtime waitresses, bustled through the kitchen doors carrying two plates and balancing a third on her forearm. A burst of laughter cut through the diner noise. I knew that sound before I even turned around.

Cali, Jimmy, and Jace sat in a booth near the back.

Jace looked fresh off the field, his hair damp with sweat. Cali had her head thrown back, laughing at something Jimmy had said. Tina lingered a second beside the table, grinning, before she headed off.

My gaze caught on Cali and stayed there. She laughed with her whole face, eyes crinkling at the corners until the entire booth seemed brighter. I wanted the empty space beside her. Wanted to be the reason she smiled like that. Wanted to belong in the life unfolding ten feet away.

She’d simply nodded, like it wasn’t something that changed how she saw me.

What tore me up was her believing she’d somehow caused it—that she’d been the reason I’d needed the prescription in the first place. She wasn’t, not even close. She had always had a way of making people feel seen. Even now, watching from across the diner, I wanted to be the person she looked for first. Bryant taught me what happened when people needed help and never got it. I wasn’t going to pretend I was above asking for it.

Bryant had left fingerprints all over my life, and sometimes I wondered if I’d ever scrub them clean.

Jace lifted a milkshake piled high with whipped cream and sprinkles and tapped it against Cali’s. Jimmy laughed and raised his own to join them. Something twisted in my chest. My body wanted to move before my courage caught up. What if she didn’t want me there? What if sitting beside her only reminded her why she’d asked me to leave?

The ache was always the same—wondering what it would feel like if she wanted to be there as much as I did. A lump lodged in my throat. Because I desperately wanted Cali Walton.