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I followed Susan into the kitchen, where her husband, Ray, was enjoying a soda and scratching notes on a pad of paper. They were clearly math notations, much like the ones I'd seen in his office (and the similar pages of notation Brandon occasionally tinkered with from time to time). The table was covered with them.
Not for the first time, I wondered if the man ever stopped working. Like father, like son, I supposed. Which, of course, was why I was here.
"Lunch is almost ready," Susan said as she bustled over to the stove. "I made my famous chicken pot pie. Can I get you a drink while we wait, Skylar? A glass of wine, maybe?"
"Why can she have wine in the middle of the day, and I'm stuck with soda?" Ray piped up, although he didn't lift his head from his work.
"She's not the one on blood pressure medication," Susan rejoined.
"I'm fine, Susan," I said. "Water is great."
She poured glasses of water for all three of us, carried them to the table, and sat down beside me. "Ray, put that away. We have company now."
After Ray grumbled and stowed his work on the cluttered counter behind him, he turned to me curiously.
"So, you didn't die," he said gruffly, looking me over. He eyed the still-red scar over my eyebrow. "Got you good, I see."
I gulped, ignoring the rising panic that shot through my system as I recalled the blows to my face. I'd worked hard to shove it all away for the past few weeks, but it was going to be harder when people I knew commented on it every time I saw them. I reached up and gingerly touched the scar across my eyebrow.
"I'm alive," I said simply.
I closed my eyes, remembering the look on Brandon's face when he busted through the door. The fury. The desperation. Thank God, I thought. Thank God he had found me.
Ray grunted. "This is exactly what I feared," he said to Susan. "And it's just the start. He goes into the public eye, and what happens? We all have bull's eyes drawn on our foreheads."
I opened my mouth, prepared to tell them just why Messina had chosen to target me, but Susan spoke up first.
"We've always been targets, Ray," she said. "Brandon has always attracted the attention of all sorts of people––you know that. Or have you forgotten what it was like when he was a teenager, getting into all that trouble? Or when the Keiths took a liking to him. Stan Keith could see his potential when he was still basically a street thug. Why do you think he was willing to marry his daughter off to a boy he hardly knew?"
"And you don't think this kind of pressure is going to get to him?" Ray retorted.
But Susan just sighed impatiently. "I think it doesn't matter, you idiot. We love him and support him. That's all that matters."
Her words were encouraging, considering what I was there to do. I took a deep breath. I might have been overstepping, but I didn't care. This was more important than whether or not Ray and Susan decided to like me.
"That's good to hear," I said as I pulled a slim file from my bag and set it on the table.
"What's this?" Ray flipped through the papers and darted a suspicious glance at me through his smudged glasses.
"They're adoption papers," I said evenly, ignoring Susan's sharp intake of breath while I maintained eye contact with Ray. He was the one I needed to win over anyway.
"Adoption..." muttered the gruff older man. "Adopt who? Brandon?" He snorted and his white brows furrowed, like two crooked caterpillars. "Why would this even be necessary? He's almost forty, for Pete's sake."
"It's not necessary," I said as they continued to page through the document. "It's a gesture. A way to tell Brandon that, well, you really consider him family. Your son."
At that, Ray flipped his sharp gaze back to me.
"Well, of course he's my son," he snapped. "Why the hell would anyone think otherwise?"
"Probably because we never did anything like this," Susan said wearily. The look on her face made me wonder if this had been a conversation they'd had before.
Ray swiveled to his wife. "What are you talking about? Brandon knows we're his family."
"That's the thing, Ray," I said gently. "I don't think he does."
I proceeded to detail all of the things Brandon had told me about his relationship with the Petersens––his uncertainty regarding Ray's affections, his suspicions that they had allowed him to live permanently with them more because of his mathematical aptitude (and its potential to help Ray's scholarship) and less because of their genuine affection. His constant feeling like all of his considerable accomplishments were never enough for Ray. His guilt over choosing to live with them instead of his abusive, drug-addicted mother, and her subsequent death by overdose soon after.
Then I told them about the kind of stresses he was really under now, or at least what I knew of them. I came clean about everything––the fact that I had only found out about Miranda last spring, and following that had left Brandon, but discovered I was pregnant soon after. The fact that my father, a recovering addict, had brought Messina down on all of us. The fact that I had had an abortion and hid it from Brandon. And the fact that he had found out an hour before announcing his candidacy for mayor.
