“Long story short? My mother worked for an older married man. She had an affair with him. She got pregnant with me. He tried to buy her off with $10,000 and made her move away.”
Callie couldn’t hold back the cry of sympathy that rose from her heart. She knew all about rejection. She’d experienced it nearly every day of the first sixteen years of her life.
“So, yeah, I have some idea of what it’s like to survive. If he’d shown once ounce of respect for her and her feelings, things wouldn’t have been as bad for her as they were.”
“Surely he owed her more than that. Couldn’t she have applied through the courts for support for you?”
“Her pride would never let her. I think she was so hurt when he rejected her that she decided to just disappear off the radar. She changed her surname from Morrisey and adopted her mother’s maiden name and then set out to give me the best childhood she could.”
“So you still got to swim in the rain and go skinny-dipping?” Callie asked with a gentle smile.
“I did—and more. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t know she loved me more than life itself. That’s the kind of gift you take for granted until it’s gone.”
“At least you had that.”
“Yeah, I did. And I promised her that one day I’d make it up to her, but she died before I could give her what she deserved.”
“And your father? He still didn’t help you, even when she died?”
Josh’s bark of laughter lacked humour in any form. “No, I came across his contact details in her things when she died. Up until then I didn’t even know who he was. Mum would never talk about him and whenever I’d bring it up she’d change the subject. Then, later, I’d always hear her crying in her room. It doesn’t take too many times before a kid realises his need to know takes a back seat to his mother’s happiness.”
Josh shifted to one side, letting Callie slide from his lap. He rose and walked over to the bookcase that lined one wall of the room. On one shelf stood a small box, like a miniature pirate’s chest. He lifted it with both hands and turned back to Callie.
“She always kept this at her bedside. Locked, of course, although that didn’t stop me trying to get into it,” he admitted with a rueful smile. “She was good at hiding things, though, and I only found the key after she’d died.”
He dug into his trouser pocket and pulled out his keys and, selecting the smallest, opened the box. From where she sat Callie could see the yellow paper of a stack of envelopes, tied together with a length of faded pink silk ribbon.
“They’re letters, from him. He stopped writing when she got pregnant with me.”
“Have you read them?” Callie asked, feeling as if she was poised at the edge of a precipice. Were these letters the key to what Irene needed?
“Yeah, I made myself read every one of them—even the letter and cheque that were sent to my mother, paying her off and telling her to get out of town.”
“She never cashed the cheque? Why? She must have desperately needed the money.”
“As I said before, her pride wouldn’t let her. I think she felt she’d lost so much already that she wasn’t prepared to lose that, too.”
“I can’t believe you’ve kept them all this time. Wouldn’t it be better to destroy them, to let go?”
“They were my only contact with a father I’d never known. I’ve kept his lies as a reminder of what he owed my mother—what he owed me. And I vowed on my mother’s grave that I’d make him pay one day.”
“Josh, surely you can’t mean that,” Callie protested. “Everyone has to learn to let go eventually.”
She levered herself up and out of the seat and crossed the room to take the box from his hands and place it back on the bookcase next to him. She slid her arms around his waist, desperate to offer him comfort, but he remained rigid in her embrace.
“Oh, yes,” he replied, his voice hard and strangely detached, a total contrast to the warm, loving companion she’d known over the weekend. “I mean every word of it. He’ll regret that he didn’t do what was right. He’ll regret every word of his lies and the world will finally know what a two-faced bastard he really is. And when he’s forced to publicly acknowledge me, he will know that he, and he alone, was the master of his own destruction.”
A finger of dread touched Callie’s heart. She had no doubt that Josh would follow through on his promise, and she would hate to be in the shoes of the man he targeted. If there was anything she was certain of at this moment, it was that Josh was a man driven by his emotions—and given those emotions, what would he do to her when he found out the truth about why she was here?