The Hardest Fall

I stepped inside and panicked for a moment as I wondered where Dylan was.

Mark didn’t waste any time walking past me into the living room. His posture was rigid, his knuckles already white.

“Tell me what this is all about,” he ordered when I was standing close enough.

“What?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself, Zoe. Where did this thing about telling Dylan everything come from?”

He couldn’t be that blind, could he?

“I like him,” I said slowly. “We’re more than just friends.” Just saying it out loud made my stomach tighten in the best way possible. If I hadn’t been staring at Mark’s angry face, I’m sure I would’ve grinned.

“You can’t be this stupid.”

I swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth and chose not to reply.

“He is Chris’s friend, Zoe. He’ll tell him everything.”

“He won’t, but why does it matter? We’re going to tell him after the last game anyway.” He gave me a look filled with hatred, and I tried to keep my expression neutral. “We are going to tell him, right?”

In jerky movements, he ran his hand through his hair and muttered something under his breath as he looked out the window.

I took a step back and the backs of my calves hit the couch, so I sat my ass down.

“Even after the last game, you weren’t going to let me tell him, were you? You’ll never tell him he has a sister.”

Deep down, I’d always known. If not, I was pretty stupid, and I really didn’t want to believe I was that stupid. At any time I could’ve walked up to Chris and struck up a conversation, but I didn’t because I was partly afraid of how he’d react. I didn’t know him, didn’t want to deal with rejection, so I let Mark put it off. Also, I think secretly I wanted to give Mark the benefit of the doubt, wanted him to want to be a part of my life. He was my biological father after all, and loving what came from you was instinctive, wasn’t it? Considering the look on Mark’s face, I doubted that was the case with us.

“Why did you even let me come here? To Los Angeles? You don’t want me near Chris. You don’t want to know me. My freshman year, the way you were with me—was that all a lie? Were you just acting and lying to keep me quiet?”

He turned to face me and smoothed down the edges of his mouth with his fingers. “It’s not that simple. There are things you don’t know.”

“What things?” I asked. Frustrated, I hit the couch cushion with my palm. “Tell me then. I’m so tired of this back and forth between us. We’re getting nowhere. What things do I not know? Mom said you wanted me here. She said you wanted to get to know me, she said you were excited. She told you I wanted to meet him, that’s the whole reason—he is the whole reason I wanted to come here. I didn’t come here on a whim. I could’ve called Chris and gotten it done with, but you said you wanted to see me, meet me. What am I missing here?”

“Your fucking mom lied to you, all right? That’s what you’re missing. She did nothing but lie to everyone in her life. Even in her grave, she is still fucking with me.”

I looked at him in shock. His salt and pepper hair was thick, no signs of thinning, and I remembered feeling so silly for noticing it when I met him. When he met my stunned gaze, I stared back at my own eyes: green mixed in with hazel. What a cruel joke. Before I could even think straight enough to come up with an answer, he kept going.

“Did she tell you we were in love?”

She had, but I didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to need my participation in the conversation anyway. He never did.

He shook his head and kept breaking my heart, disgust written all over his face.

“We fucked,” he snapped, opening his arms in exasperation. “We fucked behind my wife’s back, her best friend. That’s what we did, Zoe. There was no falling in love, just mindless, careless sex because I was having problems with my wife, because we couldn’t have kids, because… It was nothing more than a mistake. After I convinced her to give Chris up, she wanted to go back to the way we were and I didn’t. That’s it. I lied to her so I could get my son. That’s where the story ends. You were just another one of our mistakes. It only happened once or twice after Chris, and then she was pregnant again.”

My frown got deeper, and I stood up. “No, you’re wrong. You didn’t know about me. She didn’t tell you she was pregnant.”

He gave me a long look and shook his head. “I knew about you. I paid her to end the pregnancy. She took the money, told me it was done, and then moved to New York.”

We were standing too close so I took a few steps back and put the couch between us. If I could have, I’d have just walked straight out of L.A. without even a glance back.

“What I didn’t know was that she actually lied to me and kept it—that I only learned when she called to tell me about her health issues. She begged me to come see her. When she realized I wasn’t going to do that, she told me about you. Maybe she thought that would change my mind, or maybe she thought something else. I have no fucking clue what she was thinking lying to me about ending the pregnancy.”

I felt like there was someone sitting on my chest, crushing it. My mom and I had had a lot of issues, and there’d been a lot of anger toward the end because of the things she’d kept from me, but I had come to terms with everything. I’d accepted it. It was her life, after all, and it wasn’t like I could go back in time and hope she didn’t become a cheater the second time around. I couldn’t make her reconsider giving up Chris. I couldn’t tell her Mark was a liar and she would be stupid to believe any word out of his mouth. Even that first night she had sat me down on the edge of her sick bed to tell me about my ‘real father,’ I hadn’t felt as helpless as I did standing there in front of Mark.

“Why did you ask me to come here?”

“She wanted you with me.”

“I already have a dad, her husband. She wouldn’t—”

“You don’t get it, do you? Your mom was just trying to get my attention, threatening me with calling Emily and Chris, and she’d already told you everything. You would have come here to find Chris with or without me. At least this way I got to protect my son. At least this way he can focus on his future and not this nonsense.”

Just like that, I was done with him. Every painful, forced conversation we’d had since I stepped foot in L.A. made much more sense. Was I sad? Yes, but only because I’d been stupid enough to believe he was interested in getting to know me when really he wanted nothing to do with me.

I realized I was holding myself up, hugging my arms. Dropping my hands to my sides, I straightened my spine and nodded. “Now that I’m caught up on everything, I think I want you to leave.”

“This is my apartment.”

“And you can have it all to yourself. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

“You’re going back to Phoenix?”

He could wish that all day every day, but I wasn’t gonna do a single thing to make life easier for him anymore.

I let out a forced laugh, but it came out more like a cough. “I’m sure you’d love that, but no. I have another year and a half of school, and I’m not going anywhere until then. Don’t worry though, you won’t see me anymore. Neither one of us wants to see the other, so at least we have that in common. It should be a relief to you.”