“Come on, Mike. Condoms leak. Nothing’s perfect.” Sean slapped Mike’s shoulder. “So you gonna marry her or what?”
“No, I’m not marrying her.”
“Why the hell not?” Sean threw both hands high, clearly exasperated. “She’s gonna have your baby and you’re obviously nuts about her.”
“I need more coffee.” Mike walked away from his brother to the glass-topped table at the edge of the patio. There, he poured a cup of coffee from the thermal hot pot his housekeeper had brought out. He took a sip and let the heat slide through him.
“What’s going on?” Sean followed him. “I can’t believe you won’t marry her. This is your kid we’re talking about, Mike. Marrying her is the right thing to do and you know it.”
His head was pounding, brain racing. Sean’s haranguing wasn’t helping with the headache throbbing behind his eyes. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t been able to think clearly in days, and now he’d found out Jenny was in Laughlin—without bothering to tell him.
“What do you think Mom and Dad’ll have to say when they find out?”
“They should understand better than anyone.” Mike’s gaze shot to his brother’s and before he could stop himself, he was blurting out the secret he’d held since he was thirteen. “I’m not marrying anybody, you understand? I won’t risk being lied to, cheated on. You think I want to take a chance on ruining my own kid’s life?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Too late to pull it back now, Mike told his brother about the day his own image of the perfect family had been shattered. “When I was thirteen, I came home from baseball practice and found Mom crying,” he said tightly. “I was worried, thought maybe Dad had been in an accident or something.”
“What was it?”
He could still remember it all so clearly. Sunshine pouring through the kitchen window. His mom sitting at the table, head in her hands, crying. He’d never seen her cry before and it scared him.
Mike set his coffee cup down, crossed his arms over his chest and said, “She grabbed me into a hard hug and she told me that Dad had cheated on her. That she found out he’d been out with some woman.”
“No way.” Sean’s eyes went hard and cool and flat.
Mike knew how he felt. Back then, it had seemed to Mike as though the floor had opened up beneath him. He’d worried about his mom, wondered if his dad would ever come home again. Would they get a divorce? Who would he live with? A thirteen-year-old kid shouldn’t have to think about any of it. Shouldn’t have to learn so suddenly that his parents were flawed. Human.
“She never would have let any of it slip if I hadn’t caught her in a vulnerable moment,” he said, and knew it for truth since his mom had apologized over and over again over the years. “Dad lied. To her. To us. He was a liar and a cheat and ever since that day, I can’t be around him without remembering our mother crying.”
Sean looked away toward the ocean and Mike finished. “I won’t get married, Sean. I won’t put my faith in someone only to be lied to and cheated on. Not gonna happen. I won’t risk my kid being destroyed by lies.”
After a moment or two, Sean turned his head to look at him and Mike read the fury in his brother’s eyes.
“You had no right,” Sean said tightly. “No right to keep this from me. I’m a Ryan, too.”
“Why the hell should you feel as crappy as me?” Mike argued. “You didn’t have to know and a lot of the time I wished to hell I didn’t know.”
“And you make the choice for me, is that it? You decide what I should know, what I should think?”
“That’s not it,” Mike said.
“Sure it is,” Sean snapped. “You don’t even see it, do you? You’ve been mad at Dad for years for lying. Every time you talk about Jenny, you call her a liar, say you can’t trust her. But you’ve been lying to me since we were kids.
“So what’s the difference, Mike? Are you the only one who gets to lie? Do you get to decide which is a good lie and which is bad?”
Mike had never thought about it exactly like that until now and he didn’t know what he could say to the accusation. His father’s lies had destroyed Mike’s image of a happy family. Mike’s own lies of omission were to protect Sean from the same hurt Mike felt.
And yet today, Sean was slapped with not one, but two sets of lies.
“You ought to take a good look at yourself, big brother,” Sean said quietly. “Whatever was between our parents back then? They fixed it. Healed it. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re still together, stronger than ever.”