Trusting Liam(49)

Liam watched me for a few seconds with a soft smile on his face. “Okay, well, my family wasn’t like that. Things were . . . normal—for the most part, I guess. Mornings were spent surfing with my dad, sometimes my friends and his. Grew up in his gym, as you already know. My family is really close. I’ve already told you I have a different relationship with my dad than most sons have. I’ve always seen him more as a best friend. I see him almost every day at the gym even though we spend the mornings at the beach, and I see Mom a couple times a week. Even if my sister didn’t live with them, I know she’d be the same way.”

I felt my brow pinch together. “That doesn’t seem like an abnormal family.”

He laughed hesitantly. “It’s not my family that’s abnormal. It’s the circumstances behind my family that are. I have three sets of grandparents. And I’m extremely close with all of them. I have an uncle and aunt on my dad’s side, and the same on my mom’s side. But the part where it gets confusing . . . is it’s not really my mom’s side. My mom has her real dad and his wife, and they’re great. We all love them. But then she has this other family she considers hers, who we all consider her side of the family, who is my real dad’s family. And that’s where my aunt and uncle come from on that side; and that uncle is Konrad . . . you know him from working at the gym.”

“Wait. What?”

“Exactly.” He sighed.

“So your parents were related before they got married?”

His wide blue eyes met mine before he burst into laughter. “No. Not even close. I meant that my mom’s family is technically not her family but my biological father’s family. His real sister is my aunt Bree, and her husband is Konrad.”

My confusion quickly disappeared, but then I was left feeling surprised. “Brandon isn’t your real dad? I never would have known.”

“No. I mean, he is. He’s my dad, but he’s not my biological father. And this is where it goes from confusing to fucked up. Apparently my dad and mom were together, and my mom cheated on him with his best friend—my biological father. Nine months later, and here I am.”

“Holy shit,” I said before I could stop myself. “And did your dad know?”

“Yeah, he knew. My mom and biological father, Chase, were together for a short time while she was pregnant. According to everyone, she loved him and my dad both. She knew she’d made a mistake, but was trying to make it right by being with Chase. And then halfway through the pregnancy, my biological father died in a car accident.”

My eyes widened and my jaw dropped, but no sound came out.

“Few months later she and my dad got back together, and he’s raised me as his own, but they raised me to know who Chase was. And before Mom and Chase ever got together, Chase’s family had pretty much already adopted her because she was best friends with my aunt Bree and wasn’t talking to her dad or something, I guess. So we have this weird family that consists of my dad’s family, my mom’s dad, and then Chase’s family—who my mom considers her family. It’s confusing as shit, and we’re all close.”

“That is confusing,” I mumbled. “And just . . . just oh my God.”

“Yeah.” He took in a heavy breath, then released it and stared up at the ceiling again. “But you need to know all that to understand the tattoo.”

When he didn’t say anything for a while again, I squeezed his hand. “You don’t have to tell me, Liam.”

“I told you I grew up knowing about Chase,” he began, his eyes still glued to the ceiling. “There wasn’t one morning of surfing with Dad and Uncle Konrad that there weren’t stories of him. Then, of course, whenever we were with my grandparents—Chase’s parents—stories were told. No one wants his memory to fade even after all this time, and I get it to an extent. Kristi and I don’t understand completely because we didn’t know him, but we know how important it is for them. But as I got older, I stopped looking like my mom, and started looking more and more like Chase. Because of that, there were times where my grandparents, Aunt Bree, or Mom would just start crying when they were looking at me. Even my dad sometimes, I’ll catch him staring at me with a distant look, and I know he’s back in college with his best friend.

“The stories—shit, I could tell you stories about Chase like I had been there. But I have no real emotional connection to them, and to have my family randomly crying or accidentally calling me Chase when they saw me started getting on me. On my nineteenth birthday, my mom was trying to get me to do a bunch of things—I don’t even remember. But everyone was there, and she was busy, so she rambled off a list of things really quick that she needed me to do, and I said something to her. Two words. Just two fucking words, and my entire family went dead silent and then all the women started sobbing.”