“Well your absence is certainly noticeable,” she says. “Even the dog misses you. She’s been carrying around one of your old t-shirts lately.”
“I’ll come home soon,” I promise. “Tell Daisy I miss her too. I’ll check flights when I get back to the apartment. I’ll book the first reasonably priced one I can find. Who knows, maybe I’ll be home in a couple of days?”
“Everything going well out there?”
“Yeah,” I say, sipping my cooling coffee. “We had a charity skate-a-thon thing last night at the rink. Had a pretty good turn out. I’m meeting with Bryce’s attorney on Monday to go over his last will and testament.”
“Oh, you haven’t done that yet?”
“Nope. Been finishing my book and setting up this hockey foundation. I figure whatever’s in his will is going to add onto my massive to-do list, so I’ve been putting it off.”
“Do you need me to come out there, help you with some things?” she offers.
“I’ll be okay, Mom.”
“You know I will if you need me to.”
“I know.”
She’s silent on the other end for a beat or two, like there’s something she needs to get off her chest.
“You sound sad,” she says, exhaling.
“I’m not sad.”
“Oh, sweetheart, of course you are. You never got to meet your brother. That’s enough to make anyone sad. I know how much he meant to you.”
“He only meant something to me because at the time, I was a geeky thirteen-year-old with braces and frizzy hair and no friends, and the only thing I wanted in the whole entire world was a cool older brother because I was convinced it would solve all my problems.”
“I remember finding all those letters.” She clucks her tongue, her words drifting into silence. “You wrote him hundreds of letters. It was the sweetest thing.”
“Whatever happened to those anyway?”
“I sent them.”
I stop in my tracks, nearly causing the man on the sidewalk behind me to pummel into me. He utters a string of swear words and sidesteps me.
“You sent them ... where?” I ask.
“I mailed them to Bryce.”
“Oh, god. When?”
“Oh, it must have been five, six years ago.” She chuckles.
“Why would you do that?” I swear, I love my mom, but I’ve yet to encounter a single person on this planet as random and ridiculous as she is.
“It was after his father had passed,” she says. “I sent him a letter about you. I gave him all your contact information. Photos. Your name and birthdate. I told him like it or not, he had a sister, and that he was doing himself a huge disservice by leaving you out of his life. And then I included the letters because I felt they chronicled one of the hardest years of your life, and I wanted him to see the effect he had on you.”
These letters were all written after his initial rejection of me. Some of the letters even addressed that rejection. But at the close of each one, I always signed it, “I love you anyway. Your sister, Ayla.”
So this must be how he knew my full name and date of birth, but it still doesn’t explain why he left me his life insurance money.
My eyes mist, and for the first time in my life, I think he might not have hated me as much as I believed he did.
Sadness sinks into me like a heavy weight, and I find it harder and harder to trudge back to Bryce’s apartment knowing what I now know.
I need to get out of town for a while, even if it’s a few days.
“I’ll let you know about the flights, okay, Mom?” I say, my thumb hovering over the red button on my phone screen as I pull it away from my ear. My voice is breaking, and I don’t want her to hear it. I don’t wait for her response. I end the call and I amble back to the apartment, and as soon as I arrive, I book the first trip I can find that isn’t two thousand dollars.
It leaves on Tuesday.
Eighteen
Rhett
* * *
“You have a good weekend?” I call Ayla first thing Monday morning. After everything that happened Friday night, I decided to give her a little bit of space. Hell, I needed it too.
“Yeah.”
“Do anything fun?”
I’m trying here. I’m trying to show an interest, just like she asked, but talking to her this morning is like pulling teeth.
“Not really.” She sighs. “Just worked.”
“You want to let me go? You seem distracted.”
“I’m packing.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Back home.”
“Home?”
“LA,” she clarifies.
I take a seat on the sofa, sinking back. “I thought you lived in the city.”
“I’m just visiting,” she says.
Good to know.
“For how long?” I ask.
“Not sure. Taking care of some things for someone. I could stay until the end of the year. Just depends on when I’m done.”
Now I’m almost regretting the intentional distance I’ve placed between us from the start. Who is this woman? What is she doing? And why the hell is she being so vague all of a sudden?
“You want to come over later?” I ask.
“I’d love to, but I have a meeting this afternoon, and then my flight leaves first thing in the morning,” she says, the sound of a zipper pulling filling the background.
“Then I’ll come to you.”
“No,” she replies almost immediately. “Anyway, I have to go.”
And now I’m intrigued.
Nineteen
Ayla
* * *
“Ayla?” A dark-haired man in a charcoal three-piece suit steps out of an office suite Monday afternoon, extending his right hand. His wrist is adorned with a gold Rolex and his cologne smells like money, but he has kind, emerald eyes that crinkle when he smiles so I decide to stop judging him then and there. “Liam Greenbrier. Nice to meet you. Come on back.”
Liam leads us down a long hallway filled with oil paintings and then through a set of cherry double doors where he points toward his desk and tells me to take a seat. A manila folder rests on top, and he flips it open, revealing a small stack of typed documents.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Liam says, expression growing somber as he pages through the papers. “He was a good client of mine. Got me season tickets every Christmas.”
Interesting. So he was a generous asshole.
“Never said much. Man of few words,” he says. “You probably already know that. Anyway.” Liam reaches across the table, stapled forms in his hand. “These are your copies of your brother’s last will and testament.”
I pour over the first page, everything neatly typed and double-spaced, filled with legal jargon and formalities. It’s a very straightforward will from what I see so far. Two, maybe three pages long including the list of assets on the last sheet.
My eyes scan the pages one last time because I feel like I wasn’t actually reading the words as much as I was going through the motions, and then I stop when I see my name—and the number beside it.