Demon stares at me for a moment, then gives a sharp nod of his head. “We’ll play it your way. For now.”
“The reason why I’m here is that I’ve stayed faithful to my husband, Lizard. I’ve not wanted another man, well, maybe I have needs, but I’ve a son to raise, and my focus has been on him. I’ve tried to do everything right, but Cas is… difficult. My father is dead, I have no brothers, or sisters come to that. No family at all really, since my mother and I fell out. No, I’m not looking for sympathy, but my son needs help. Cas has no male figure in his life, and I think now he needs one.” I hold up my hand and turn around fast as I hear Mace’s intake of breath. “Cas is pushing boundaries. First it was mischief, what all kids do. Sneaking candy without paying for it. But it’s escalated. He’s fourteen years old and last week hotwired a car. I’m doing all I can to keep him out of jail.”
“You do realise you’re in a one-percenter club, darlin’?” I look to my left and notice Beef, their VP, has a twinkle in his eye.
I turn back and address the president, “I’ve been a good mom, or tried to be. Yet the choices facing my son are either juvenile detention or being taken away and put into the system unless I can get him back in line. I’m at the end of my tether. So yes,” I nod at Beef, “I know what you are. But at the very least, if you break the law, you know how to hide it.”
“We don’t break the law,” Demon snarls, his eyes seeming to flare, and he sends a warning look to the man sitting beside me.
“Bit late to come looking for a dad for your son if you hid him all these years,” Mace snarls. I don’t even turn to look at him. “Should have thought of what might happen when you decided to keep that shit from him.”
He’s so far off the mark, I ignore him. Not having finished, I continue now. “I hoped Lizard might have recovered, thought time might have healed him. Thought perhaps now he’d acknowledge he had a son and would step in to help him. Cas needs a man, needs someone he can look up to.”
“Lizard didn’t even recognise you,” Mace remarks, almost spitting the words out. “You say you’re married—”
A knock on the door causes him to stop speaking and step away from it. When he pulls it open, yet another man steps inside, this one so pale he looks like the sun never touches his skin.
Entering, he nods at Demon. “All checks out, Prez.”
“How did we not know this?” Demon’s hand slams down on the desktop, so loudly, it makes me jump.
The pale man shrugs. “Before my time, Prez. Lizard joined what, ten years back when he started prospecting? I was a bit later. Buzz did the background checks before me, and probably didn’t have access to everything I have. He would have checked his service record, but seems he didn’t dig deeper.”
Demon’s eyes burn into me. “Why didn’t Lizard recognise you?”
Three men’s heads turn to face me.
I take a deep breath, having already decided Cas is more important than invading my husband’s privacy and sharing what, obviously to these men, is his secret. “Because he’s got retrograde amnesia.”
There are four audible gasps at my answer.
“Amnesia?” Mace scoffs, being the first to recover. “That man remembers everything. Talked to him enough. Over the years I’ve heard everything about his home life, his training in boot camp, his tours, particularly the first which is the only one he wants to talk about. Of course he can’t remember the incident that got him invalided out of the service, but that’s common enough. He’d remember if he had a wife and a kid.”
Tears fill my eyes, and my voice weakens. “Yes, there was an incident. He was standing next to a truck when it was hit by a rocket grenade and exploded. He had a brain injury, it was severe. He was in a coma, and I… I sat with him. Cas was just two years old. I prayed and prayed he’d come round. He coded a couple of times, but they managed to revive him. For weeks I sat at his bedside, refusing to give up hope. At last, one day, he opened his eyes.” I sob, loudly and then once again continue, “His first words to me were, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
I’m not aware I’m crying now until I get a tissue placed into my hand. I dab my eyes, blow my nose, and then thank the VP.
“Did he get therapy?”
“Yes.” I pull myself together and respond to Demon’s question, asked in such a level tone it helps me to pull myself together. “But it didn’t work. He remembered, as you say, growing up, joining the Marines, even his graduation ceremony. He remembered his first tour, then, blank. Nothing after that until he woke up in the hospital. Me? He didn’t recall. In fact, he was suspicious of me.” A sob makes me shudder, but I try to swallow it down. “When he met Cas, he didn’t believe he was his son.”
“You split up, then?” Beef’s shaking his head. “You gave up on him and left?”
I give him a what do you think I am? look. “No, I did not. I spoke to his therapist who suggested once he was well enough to leave the hospital, that he come home with me. The idea being that back in his home with his familiar possessions it might help his memory. But it didn’t.” I pause, lost in the past for a moment. “He couldn’t remember the house we’d moved into, could only remember living alone on base. He’d been overseas when Cas was born, came home to see him, but we didn’t have any photographs to prove it. I just hadn’t thought to take any. Pictures of Cas and me, but most without him there. I did manage to find a couple, but he couldn’t remember. He… he used to get angry, and he accused me of photoshopping them.”
“He violent toward you?” Beef asks.
I shake my head. “Never raised his hand toward me. He was angrier that he couldn’t remember.” My voice drops to a whisper. “He wasn’t comfortable at home, his memory wasn’t triggered by things familiar. It made him worse, he kept berating himself. Worse, he kept denying that Cas was his.” My eyes close and I draw in a loud breath. “As well as retrograde amnesia, he had short-term memory problems. Each day was a new one for him. Each day he’d wake up unable to remember what had happened the previous one. He was stuck in the past, unable to learn new things. We tried for a year and a half, and then we had an argument. He told me I wasn’t his wife, and Cas wasn’t his son. Cas was four…” My breath hitches. “He pointed at Cas and said that kid is not mine. Cas still has nightmares about the day his dad walked out.”
“Fuck,” Mace says from behind me.
“I think I made it worse. I was, still am, proud of his dad, and I let Cas know that. What happened to Lizard wasn’t his fault. I didn’t want Cas to feel he’d been fathered by a bad man. So I’d tell him stories. But the memory of that day is lodged in his head. He even asked when he was older, if Lizard had been such a good man, why had he left? I think he blames me, and questions himself.”
“You think that’s the reason your boy’s acting up?” Demon asks.
I shrug. “I think it’s linked. Cas can’t understand how Lizard has forgotten, and why he can’t remember.”
“That why he still goes to the VA?” This from Mace.