“I know, which is why this is hard for me,” I said. “Kade, I’ve thought of you as my dream guy for years now, it just took Rita to point it out to me.”
“You have no idea how indecent I am,” Kade replied with a shiver. “Alix, some of the things I’ve dreamed . . . you’re not able to handle them.”
“Was Rita?” I asked bluntly. “I’m not trying to sound hurt, I’m just curious.”
“Yes and no,” he said. “The physical stuff, yes. But the level of commitment I demand, no. She and I were never more than bedmates. Alix, I want you to think long and hard about this, and don’t give me an answer now. I’m willing to do what it takes, hiding the truth from Dad and Layla, lying to everyone else, all of it publicly needed to make sure my father and your mother are protected. Dad deserves that much, after all the years of busting his ass trying to be a good father after my mother left us. But I won’t do any of it if you’re also not one hundred percent committed as well. If we pursue this and see where it goes, we’ll have to do it privately. If we break it off, I can live with that, but it will never come to light. If it works out, then it’ll still have to be our little secret.”
“Derek I can understand, but why your concern about my mother?”
Kade looked at me and sighed, then looked ahead. “Fuck it, time to break that ground as well. Alix, tell me what you know about your mother and father’s marriage.”
“Mom took me away from Daddy when I was five, and fleeced the hell out of him in the divorce. Lucky she did it in California I guess, with the no-fault clauses and everything. She did everything in her power after that to keep me from seeing him, and when I turned eighteen I learned he was dead, and in fact the rest of his money was sitting in a blind trust for me.”
“Your mother took you away because Paris Nova was a serial abuser,” Kade said softly. “She left when, after breaking her eye socket and her arm for the second time, he said he was going to go after you too. She ran into the night with a broken arm and you in her arms, penniless and hopeless, but she did it to save your life.”
I shook my head, “Kade, that may be what she told you or Derek, but Daddy never laid a hand on me.”
“Of course he didn’t, you were his Princess,” Kade said. “But I saw the photos, Alix. Remember when I told you about the case I argued in law school with a swollen eye? It wasn’t the first case I’d looked into. My first year of law school, just after Layla and Dad got married, I talked with her, asking if I could look into the file. She took me down to the county courthouse herself and signed to let me see the divorce files. I saw the X-rays, the photos the hospital workers took. They wanted Layla to press charges, but she refused, because of you. She didn’t want you being dragged into court and having your image of your father being shattered. She didn’t want the mental trauma on you. Paris was such an uncaring son of a bitch that he agreed to give her full custody if she took a smaller cut of the marriage property and didn’t press charges. She agreed, and since then bore the weight of your anger, because you’ve blamed her the entire time for ruining your relationship with your father.”
“And what about Daddy’s death?” I asked, my voice dry as Kade’s quiet words tore at my heart. There was no deception, no taunting or condemnation. In that quiet, dark hour, as the highway rolled beneath us, a black ribbon lit up by the LEDs of the car’s headlamps, both of us were too tired for anything but the truth. “I couldn’t find anything, and the lawyer that represented the trust wouldn’t tell me anything, not even where he died.”
“Paris Nova died in a prison in Singapore when you were still in elementary school. He turned his fists on a young call girl and crippled her while holding enough coke to get most of the country high as a kite. They didn’t even have time to give him the death penalty. He was shanked in prison two months after his conviction. You were eight when he died.”
I felt the foundation of the world shifting beneath me, like I was in an earthquake. For sixteen years, I’d hated my mother, when in reality I should have been thanking her daily for saving my life. I must have known it inside, thinking back to how I couldn’t refuse Mom when she really needed me or asked something of me. I blinked, tears forming in my eyes, shaking my head. My stomach twisted, and I felt gorge rise in my throat. “Kade, pull over,” I said, holding my arms over my gut.
I staggered out of the car, falling to my knees in the breakdown lane of Interstate 5. All I could do was scream and cry, pounding my fists into the ground.