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“Right?"
“You never dateanyonethough. And I just wondered maybe if you were worried about telling me something.“
“Trust me, if there was something to tell you, I would. And I wouldn’t be ashamed to be into women or asexual. Sadly, I crave the devil’s eggplant. Just notAndrew'seggplant.“
She howled with laughter. “Eww, Andrew’s eggplant.“
I held up my hands. “For all I know he has a very nice eggplant. I just don’t really want to know.“
“I just don’t like seeing you closed off.“
“I don’t need a relationship to make my life complete,“ I muttered.
“Of course you don’t. But I also don’t want to see youavoidingrelationships like you’re hiding.”
That direct hit made my lips pucker. Sometimes Gemma was an easy friend. And by that I meant she didn’t dig too deep, didn’t try to unearth any scars. But every now and again she saw too clearly, and that made me nervous.
“Not hiding. Just not really focused on that right now.“
“Fine, I'll stop harassing you.” She started riffling for something in her bag. “Where did I put my bloody headphones?“
As she looked, out fell two notebooks, a pencil, and a magazine. I helped her dive for a wayward pen and the magazine that nearly toppled off the cafe table. I froze when I saw it.
Staring back at me was someone I hadn’t seen in five years.
The last person to see my mother alive before she vanished.
Connor Lohman.
KAYA
My home was normally a place of refuge. I loved my flat. It was the first place I ever lived where I was completely in control.
After my mother disappeared five years ago, I had been sent into care. Luckily for me, it had only been a couple of foster homes.
The first one was a disaster. Pure chaos. But not chaos filled with love. Just chaos and fear. The second one was a great family with three other kids. It was safe. I was fed and even cared for. But so much chaos with people and noise. There were still moments these days when I marveled at the silence in my flat.
To keep the place a refuge, I rarely invited people over. And honestly, by ‘people’ I meant Gemma. Even Andrew hadn't seen my flat. What was interesting was that Gemma seemed to understand once she learned a little bit about how I'd grown up.
Granted, she thinks you were always in care.
Another half-truth.
She assumed. I just hadn't corrected her.
But now my refuge had an intruder. Chaos in the form of Connor Lohman, now Phelps.
After I made my excuses to Gemma, I'd gotten the hell off campus and then done something I never did. I called off work. Luckily, another girl owed me for a double shift I'd taken last week. I hated to do it, but there was no way I could focus on the kids today.
Connor Lohman was on the cover of a magazine. But he was going by Connor Phelps now. I stared at my computer screen.
It was him all right. My brain did the work of matching the face to the one of the man driving the car my mother had climbed into five years ago when she disappeared.
The familiar knot of worry and guilt threaded through my gut. My mother was smart. She was capable. For fifteen years she'd kept me alive and hidden. And then one day she’d walked away.
You know full well she would never leave you by choice.
Something had happened to her. And I'd been young without any resources, so I'd done the one thing she always forbade me from doing; I walked into a police station and told them my mother hadn't come home.
