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“Don’t get pissed off at me,” I say.
“Uh-oh. Bail money? Help you bury a body? Discreetly pay your doctor to cure something with antibiotics?”
“Dad,” I say, appalled. “No, and please never say that again. Listen, I met up with my mother this morning. I ... I was thinking of going to family therapy with her. She’s all for it.”
“Okay ...” I can hear the skepticism dripping from his voice.
“I know,” I say. “But she actually seems like she’s changed.”
“Does she, now?”
A swell of anger wells up inside me. I want to hold on to this happy feeling, but I also can’t blame him. “I get it,” I offer in response. “The thing is, I am not giving her a cent, and she’s saying that she won’t ask me for a cent.”
“That would be a first.”
“She pre-paid for breakfast,” I say, sounding lame to my own ears. I don’t know why I thought my father would be happy about this. He’s never had a good word to say about her—justifiably so, I’ll have to admit.
“Yes, grifters often do,” he scoffs. “She bought me a drink when I first met her. I was amused and charmed.”
“But that’s just it,” I burst out eagerly. “She was raised by a grifter until she was fifteen. A con woman who dragged her around from one hotel to the next.”
“No, she wasn’t. Where the hell did you get that idea?”
My heart stutters in my chest. “What?”
“Her birth mother died of a drug overdose, and she was adopted as an infant. Her adoptive parents were lovely people, and she made their lives hell with everything from false accusations to stealing to trashing their house and crashing their cars, then ran away for good when she was sixteen. I didn’t know that until after she left us.”
I feel as if a rug has been yanked out from under me. “Are you sure?” The question is asked faintly.
“Mason. Yes, I’m sorry, but I am sure. I hired the best private investigators to find out what I was really dealing with. I even offered to let her parents meet you, but they were just happy to know that you were loved and safe, and other than that, they wanted to forget that long, incredibly painful period of their lives. I mean, she broke their hearts.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you ever tell me that?” I shout at the top of my lungs, as my heart swells with rage and sorrow.
People’s heads snap to me with varying degrees of shock and incredulity, but I ignore them.
“How would it have helped?”
The question is fair. It really wouldn’t have. I would just have known that my mother is an even more horrible person than I ever dreamed.
But I’m so angry right now, and I feel so stupid. “Well, she wouldn’t have been able to make a fucking fool of me,” I snarl, and I hang up the phone in a fury.
My mother is approaching the table, clutching her purse to her chest. She sees the look on my face.
“What is it?” she asks nervously, taking her seat across from me.
“What do you think would happen if I told my father about the story of your sad upbringing, and it turned out he hired private investigators to look up your past after you left?”
Her eyes go saucer-wide. “He ... why would he do that? I have nothing to hide.” Her tone doesn’t hide the lies.
Her phone starts ringing from her side of the table. She looks down and I don’t miss the way her eyes widen fractionally.
The look on her face tells me that she wouldn’t want me to know who’s calling her—so I snap my hand out and grab the phone before she can. It’s the number for Queensby Publicity.
“What the hell?”
I answer, but don’t say anything.
“Traci?” It’s Amanda’s voice. “I got the pictures, very nice. They’ll do the job. If you have any more photos, obviously, we’ll pay for them.”
