Black Listed(54)

He shifted her on his lap and leaned his back against the wall. Sadness filled his eyes. “You know my parents died in a car accident. What the press never released was the fact that I had been driving that night.”

Her heart ached for him. He’d only been eighteen at the time, and unlike her, he’d been close to his parents. But she was shocked that his presence during the accident had stayed out of the media. His parents’ deaths had made Sawyer the youngest billionaire in the world. The press had treated him like royalty, following his every move and giving him no time to grieve. “You were there?”

“I wasn’t just there.” He didn’t blink as his throat worked over a swallow. “I killed my parents.”

She took his hand in hers to give him the strength to continue. “Tell me what happened.”

Seemingly lost in the memory, he fixed his gaze on the wall across the room, avoiding eye contact. “We went to dinner to celebrate my graduation from high school. Everything was great. They were so proud of me. We talked about college and what I planned to study. They knew about my interest in computers, but when I told them I’d decided to go to Cal Tech to study computer engineering, rather than business at Yale, you could see the disappointment in my father’s eyes. Three generations had graduated from Yale, and he’d always expected I’d be the fourth.”

“But Cal Tech . . . They must have understood that you wanted to follow your passion.”

He inclined his head. “Mom did. She tried to reason with my father, but he wasn’t having it. When we left the restaurant, he was so angry. So disappointed. I’d shattered his dreams for me, and I was too stupid to care about anyone but myself at that point.”

“Sawyer, there’s nothing unusual about that. Most eighteen-year-olds are incapable of thinking about anything but their own needs. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I wouldn’t let him drive, Annaliese.” He clenched his jaw, rubbing his hand over it. “He’d had a couple of drinks with dinner, and he was so angry, I worried he’d give himself a coronary. I actually said that to him. Joked about him killing us all while he drove us home. So I took the car keys. And I drove us home. Or at least, that was the plan.”

“What happened?” she asked softly.

He blinked a few times in succession, as if fighting back tears. “We were still fighting. Mom was in the passenger seat, Dad in the back yelling at me. He reminded me I was the sole heir to Hayes Industries. He expected me to run the entire company one day. I turned my head to say I’d no intention of ever working at Hayes Industries when an SUV coming from the opposite direction clipped our car. Dad wasn’t wearing a seat belt. He was ejected from the car. Mom’s head hit the dashboard. She died upon impact.”

She laid her hand on his cheek. “How did you survive?”

“Sheer luck,” he huffed. “I fucking walked out of the car on my own two legs. A couple of scratches. A broken arm. But otherwise, unharmed.”

She held him tightly. “Poor baby.”

Pushing her away, he looked at her, horrified. “Poor baby. Poor baby? I killed my parents.”

That’s what he believed? “You didn’t kill them. It was an accident.”

He lifted her off his lap and got to his feet, pulling up his pants and zipping them. “If I hadn’t been driving, Dad would’ve been in the driver’s seat. I would’ve been in the passenger’s. Mom would’ve been in the back with her seat belt on. Don’t you see? The accident wouldn’t have happened, and even if it had, they would’ve lived. I would’ve been the only one to die that night.”

She stood and placed her hand on his shoulder. “You can’t know that. There’s a thousand different scenarios of how that night could’ve played out, and in every one, the outcome might have been the same. We don’t have control over who gets to live or die.”

Sawyer tore away from her and paced the room. “I couldn’t let them die in vain. My family’s lawyers kept my part in the accident out of the press, but it’s there in the official police report. But it didn’t matter. The media became fixated on exposing the youngest billionaire in the world. They followed me everywhere.” He turned to her and ran his fingers through his hair. “I couldn’t escape the guilt. The attorneys suggested I go somewhere and lie low while I learned the business. I’m sure I shocked the hell out of them by joining the Army, rather than staying at my folks’ vacation house in Aruba.”

“Why the Army? Was that something you’d thought about doing before they died?”