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“It’s a wonderful reason. I love you too, and a big part of me really wants to live here with you. But I just can’t. Not until I figure a few things out.”
“Can’t we figure them out together?”
“I wish we could.” She massaged the fingers of my right hand. “But there’s still a lot of my life that I haven’t dealt with, Ryan. I need to work through those things before I live with someone.”
I heaved a sigh. “I need to say it, baby. I don’t want you going back to your apartment.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’m booking a hotel room for you in the city.”
“Ryan…”
“No arguments. I’m putting my foot down.”
She opened her mouth, and I expected a hell of an argument, but then she closed it.
“Okay.” She squeezed my hand. “I need to go to work.” She stood and turned, but then turned back almost immediately. “And you need to find out what your mother wants.”
Crap. I’d nearly forgotten that my mother had e-mailed Ruby asking to see me. I quickly texted my foreman and told him I wouldn’t be in the field until this afternoon. “All right. Do you want to go with me?”
“I would if I could, but I need to get to work.”
“All right, but we still need to talk.”
“Ryan, I told you—”
“No, not about you moving in. About that theory you said you had. The one you think I’m not going to like.”
* * *
My mother looked more tired than usual. Still, I saw beauty in her. I wasn’t sure why. I had seen pictures of her when she was young, and she had been quite beautiful. Now, if I looked at her objectively, I saw a sixty-something-year-old woman with brown greasy hair and gray roots. She did have nice eyes though. They were blue, lighter than Ruby’s and not as sparkling, but deep and soulful. When she looked at me, her face lit up, and I could see what my father had seen in her.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, smiling.
“Ruby tells me that you hijacked one of your doctor’s e-mail accounts.”
“I do what I have to do.”
“If you keep this up, and you get caught, they’re going to take away what few privileges you still have.”
“Don’t you worry about me, my darling. I have everything under control.”
“Do you? Because it seems to me that if you had everything under control, you wouldn’t be in here.”
She laughed softly. “My dear, your father never understood how my life worked, and I see you don’t either.”
That was for sure. “Speaking of my father, I have a lot of questions for you.”
“Ask away. I keep no secrets from my son.”
First lie of the day. She had been keeping a secret from me my entire life until recently, but now was not the time to call her on that. “We found a death certificate in my father’s papers. A death certificate in the name of John Cunningham, who just happened to have the same date of death as my father and who happened to have the same physical characteristics. That same certificate is in the Colorado database under my father’s name. Same number and everything. Only the name was changed.”
“Yes?”
“So my father is alive, then?”
“Of course he is. Haven’t I already told you that?”
