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She stirs, moaning softly in my neck, before she pulls back and stares at me, then at the notebook that’s still open on the letterM.
All sleep whooshes away from her face as she startles and snatches it from my fingers. She staggers to the other side of the sofa, pulling it close to her chest.
“It means nothing.” She smiles, but it’s with effort and barely-there. This woman can’t fake a smile to save her life and it’s weirdly endearing.
“Do you want to find her?”
“No!” she says too fast, too defensively.
“Hey, this is me, not King. You don’t have to lie or hide to protect his feelings.”
She winces. “Was I that obvious?”
“Kind of.”
“It’s not that I want to find her because I want a relationship with her like Dad thinks. I just want to ask her why, you know? I want to know why I meant so little that she threw me away and didn’t care whether I lived or died.”
“I understand.”
“You do?”
“I’m sure King understands, too, even though he doesn’t want to admit it or admit that he can’t erase her from your life.”
“He wanted that?”
“It’s one of his goals, aside from crushing Susan.”
She gets on her knees and inches closer to me. “Please tell me, Nate. Was he looking for her?”
“He was.” I didn’t think she needed to know this before, but if she’s still this entangled in her mother’s story, then she deserves the truth. Or as much of the truth as I can give her without making her hate her father.
“Why?”
“To keep her away from you so you’d never meet, even by coincidence.”
“Oh.”
“I told you. He takes protecting you to the next level.”
“Did he manage to find her?”
“He was getting close, but I’m not sure if he did.”
“He…did.”
“How do you know that?”
“I…uh…”
“What did you do, Gwyneth?”
“I got his car’s dashcam and watched some footage. I think he was speaking to a PI, but I couldn’t get his number to call him. Anyway, Dad said, ‘She can’t be Gwyneth’s mother. Look again.’ So that must mean he thought he’d found her. And that whole thing happened the day of the accident. Isn’t that too much of a coincidence?”
Jesus. I keep her out of my sight for a second and she goes playing a dangerous detective game. She really has no sense of self-preservation sometimes. “Why the fuck did you even get the footage?”
“Why is that important right now?”
“Answer the question. What pushed you to watch it?”
