All I needed was a little hope. Some good news.
“Found it!” Becca ran to the couch and showed me the screen. There was a flight to Columbus out of Atlanta and it left yesterday morning. At ten thirty.
It felt like my heart had just been connected to a defibrillator and given a shock. It was beating again.
“That’s a good sign,” Becca said. “Maybe he really is in Ohio and that man you saw last night was . . . someone else.”
“You really believe that?” I asked her.
She said yes, but the look on her face said otherwise.
“You’re not a very good liar, Becca.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to stay hopeful. Do you know what hotel he’s staying at? We can call and see if he checked in.”
That was a good idea. My dad usually stayed at the United Suites, the hotel company he worked for, but I texted my mom to make sure. When she typed back that same hotel, I looked up the phone number—luckily, there was only one in Columbus—and Becca made the call.
The phone was ringing. My hands were trembling. I couldn’t stop bouncing my foot against the floor.
“Hi,” Becca said. I almost fell off the couch. “I was wondering if you can see if a guest checked in yesterday afternoon? The name is—” She looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“Thomas,” I mouthed.
“Thomas Wells,” she finished. “Yeah, he’s my, uh, dad. He hasn’t been answering his phone and we’re worried.” Becca was nodding along to whatever the receptionist said. I leaned in closer, trying to hear. “It’s Thomas. Yeah, W-E-L-L-S. Sure. I’m on hold,” she whispered. A second later, she said, “Oh. Okay. Thanks anyway. Bye.”
She hung up.
“Well?”
I didn’t like the look on her face.
“She said there was no reservation under that name.”
It felt like the floor had turned to quicksand and I was being sucked under.
“Brett—” She reached for me. I walked away. Down the hall and up the stairs until I was in my parents’ room. I searched through the closet. Checked inside all his jacket pockets. Then the dresser drawers, the nightstands. There was nothing there. No shady restaurant receipts. No perfume that smelled nothing like my mom’s. Jesus Christ. It was dead end after dead end.
I was sitting on the floor when I heard the door creak open. Becca walked in, looking a little uncomfortable. I think I may have been crying, because I was sort of seeing two of her instead of one.
“You know,” she said, kneeling on the floor beside me and sitting down, “when my parents got divorced, I felt like this too. I kept searching for answers like their marriage was some puzzle and all I needed was to find the right pieces. I obsessed over it for years, wondering why my dad left and what moment he realized he didn’t want us anymore. Was it during dinner one night? Was there a fight I don’t know about? Did he just stop loving my mom? There are so many questions and I’m still looking for the answers, Brett. Even now. I mean”—she started laughing—“I show up at his house sometimes and I just stand there like a complete weirdo! Staring and waiting! I even went inside last week and talked to his wife! And the worst part is, I don’t even know what I’m waiting for. I just stand there and hope that the day will come when I won’t have to. When I won’t feel like this anymore.
“And some days are better. Like when we were at the arcade eating jelly bells. Or when I’m at the bakery with my mom and Cassie. In those moments, it’s like the life we used to have with my dad was from another lifetime. And I’m happy with it being just my mom and me. But there are days when it sucks. Days when I obsess over him and overanalyze every little thing until I realize it’s pointless. People leave, Brett. It’s not our fault for not giving them a reason to stay. It’s their fault for not finding one. You know?”
No. I didn’t know. Because up until this moment my life had been contained in this perfect little bubble: perfect house, perfect football career, perfect family—everything was so damn perfect. Too perfect. And now there were dents. Cracks. And I kept thinking back to the way my mom looked during dinner when she dropped that glass of wine. And the night when I found her in her bedroom crying after my dad left for New York. Or the morning he came back and she stood there on the porch, not saying a word. And I felt like a complete idiot for not realizing that being perfect was just a facade. An act. That if you pulled back the curtain, there was a whole lot of shit hiding behind it.
“My dad’s having an affair.” I whispered the words, like maybe if I said it low enough it would make it less true.
“Yeah,” Becca said. Her hand slid across the floor and grabbed on to mine. “He is.”
Becca
WHEN IN DOUBT, RETURN TO the trusty pro-con list.
I made myself at home in Brett’s bedroom. Which is probably one of the weirder places I’ve been this year. Weeks ago, if someone told me I’d be spending my Saturday afternoon sitting on Brett Wells’s bed, I would have laughed in their face.
Once Brett dug out a notebook and pen from his desk drawer, I went to town. I drew a line down the center of the page and wrote PROS on one side and CONS on the other. The list was to decide whether or not it was a good idea to tell his mom about his dad’s affair. Or, on a heavier note, possible multiple affairs.
Brett was sitting at his desk chair, his head still in his hands. It was physically painful for me to see him like this and not know what to do to help him. I of all people should know some magical word to ease the pain at least momentarily. But nope. I had nothing. Nada. His world was falling apart and the only solution my brain could conjure up was a dumb list.
It was quite literally all we had. The pressure was on.
I tapped the pen against my knee, thinking out loud. “A con could be that there’s always the slim chance it wasn’t your dad we saw.” Brett made a noise, almost a snort, and didn’t look up. “Maybe telling your mom will do more harm than good. Like she’d prefer to not know instead of everything changing with the truth. Ignorance is bliss and all that.”
“That would make two of us,” Brett mumbled.
I filled in the CON side of the list with the two bullets.
“Pro would be that you don’t have to keep a secret from your mom and that she deserves to know the truth. I’d want to know if it were me.”
Brett stood up. “This is ridiculous, Becca. We’re seriously using a list to figure out whether we should break my mom’s heart?”
I gripped the notebook a little tighter. “They help me make decisions.”
“But it’s not helping me,” he said, storming out of the room.
I hated this. Feeling like there was nothing I could say or do that would make this easier on him. But there had to be something. This wasn’t some book I was reading, where the future was already planned out. I still had a chance to change Brett’s story. So what was I going to do?
I had an idea. It was there, in the back of my mind. I kept thinking about last night, when Brett said he wanted to be distracted, that it would help him process. And I had the perfect distraction. But it was personal. Like, very personal. And it was one of the things I wrote on my own pro-con list about dating Brett—the one con that scared me the most.