AllFreeNovel
Share Us
August cursed and turned on him, but when their eyes met, Logan knew his father understood his anguish. His dad started toward him, but he just shook his head.
“Finish the story,” Logan said, glancing back at his mom—at Juliette.
“My birth was quicker, and I was in the recovery room,” Juliette said. “I was crying when Bonnie—I mean Cora—came back in. She was crying too. She had anticipated having one child but two was too many for her to handle. She’d gotten a partial scholarship to go back to school and thought she could manage with one child but with two she was going to have to skip college.
“I told her that my marriage would probably be over when my husband learned about the stillborn baby. The pregnancy had brought us back together. But I knew without that baby, your father and I would struggle to stay together.”
“That’s not—”
“Don’t say it’s not the truth, Auggie. We both know that we were barely keeping ourselves together as a couple then. Bonnie said she was going to have to give up one of the babies or maybe it would be better if she gave them both up,” Juliette said.
“So you offered to raise one as our son,” August said.
“I did. I also gave her money to support herself and get some help for the son she kept,” Juliette said. “We swapped the bracelets and Logan became my son. I nursed you, you became my baby at that moment. I never thought of you as anything other than my son.”
“So how did the nurse know?” Logan asked.
“She knew my son was stillborn and had gone away to do the paperwork. Even though Bonnie and I told her that she was mistaken, she knew the truth. I offered her a bribe, which she was reluctant to take but then Bonnie—I mean Cora—said that no one would ever find out, there were only the three of us. This way the boys would both be raised by mothers who could afford them and who wanted them. The doctor had already signed the paperwork and it was simply down to us filling it in. Bonnie took it from her and signed it. I thought that was it.”
“You should have brought this to me,” August said. “I could have—”
“What? What would you have done?” his mom demanded, but Logan could tell that she was angry and sad.
He got that. He felt the same way. But this lie was bigger than her or his father. This lie had, in one moment, stolen everything from him. Leo and Dare were on either side of him. Zac and Mari sat quietly across the room. They were all watching him and he felt like he was going to explode.
Logan stormed from the room. He heard his brothers calling for him to come back, but he just kept on walking and left his gran’s—not his gran’s, not really. He just left and got into his car and drove as far away from the house as he could go. That wasn’t far, considering how Nantucket wasn’t a huge island. But he needed to get away. He pulled into the parking lot for the ferry.
He pounded his fists on the steering wheel, but the angry energy inside him wasn’t abated. He screamed and wanted to kick something. He needed a fight. He needed to figure out who he was because he’d been living a lie for thirty-five years. Everything he believed about himself was false. And he wished there were a way he could unknow that. Wished he could go back to being the man he’d been this morning.
But he’d never put much stock in dreams and he knew he was a man of facts. He had the truth now and he was the only one who could decide what to do with it. He was still a Bisset, thanks to his father’s cheating ways, so he did the one thing he always fell back on: work and doing deals.
Ten
Quinn played a hunch. When she was done filming Adler, she went to the ferry to wait and see if Logan would show up. After about fifteen minutes, she saw his black sports car with the vanity plate Bsset1 pull into the lot. He drove to a corner. She watched him pound his fists on the steering wheel. Her heart broke.
She hated to see him like this.
She had no idea how to help him, if she even could, but she also couldn’t walk away. Couldn’t let him leave like this. The man she’d started to know over the last day and a half was different from the boy she’d known in college. Logan had changed, matured into someone she liked.
She didn’t want to see him do something rash. Make a decision out of anger that he’d regret.
Why did it matter to her? Quinn asked herself. She didn’t bother answering.
It mattered because it was Logan and a part of her had always been vulnerable when it came to his happiness. She knew that she couldn’t make him happy. She knew that as well as she knew he couldn’t make her happy. But she had always tried.
Quinn walked over to the car. If he rejected her, told her to leave, then she would. But she had to try.
He stared at her for a second as she stepped up to the driver’s-side window. She saw the tears in his eyes, and he didn’t bother to wipe them away. He just hit the button to lower the window.
“You know?”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, it is what it is,” he said. His words weren’t rageful or bombastic, as she’d expected after witnessing his outburst with the steering wheel, but they were subdued and almost numb.
“I got the news when I texted you. I didn’t want to type that out. I thought you should hear it in person,” she said.
“Yeah, thanks for that,” he said.
