PAIGE
I look at Slade, who’d just learned the truth. I kidnapped my baby brother, stole him from our worthless mother. The house around us is still a mess, a fitting environment for the shit I just laid on him.
“Finn is my baby brother,” I say. “Not my son.”
“I’m so sorry, Paige,” he says, reaching to caress my cheek.
Holding my hand up, I stop him, unable to handle his kindness or sympathy right now. It’s always been easier for me to be kind to others than to let someone be kind to me. When you grow up like I did, you feel like you don’t deserve it. And you don’t trust it. “I withdrew from school, took what little money I had, and caught a bus to Nashville. It was too risky to stay in Memphis. I obviously hadn’t been pregnant, so I skipped town.”
“You didn’t know anyone here?” he asks.
“Not a soul,” I say. “The first thing I did was take Finn to a pediatrician to get him checked out. That took a big chunk of my money.” He tries to wrap his arms around Finn and me, but I resist. “Slade, don’t you understand? I stole him. I don’t want you messed up in that. I can’t have that on me. I’ve hurt you so much already.”
“You haven’t hurt me,” he says.
“I lied to you,” I say, wiping my eyes.
“You did what you thought was right.”
“I couldn’t watch another child grow up like I did. I couldn’t leave him to that.”
“I know,” he says. “And you didn’t trust the system.”
Shaking my head, I say, “I thought about reporting her, but I didn’t think they’d give me custody of Finn. I was barely twenty with no real job, no income, no place of my own.”
“So you took him.”
I nod, rubbing my belly. “I made a promise to him that he’d have a better life, a home.” I look up into Slade’s blue eyes. “I kept that promise. He has you.” His lips softly land on mine, his fingers grazing my belly. For an instant, I let myself fall into his kiss, memorizing what it feels like to have him love me. “I’m going to turn myself in.”
To his credit, he doesn’t look surprised. “Then you should know I plan on stopping you,” he says with a little grin.
“I have to . . .”
“No, you don’t,” he says.
Finn reaches up, playing with the tears quietly falling from my eyes. Goodbyes used to be so easy for me. I was always saying them. To my mother. To foster families. To neighbors. I’ve always been good at them—they always came naturally, like breathing—but my body is fighting this one, my voice refusing to utter the words.
I don’t want Finn to be as good at goodbyes as I used to be. I get to my feet, finally ready to face the truth. “And I want you to keep Finn for me.”
“No, Paige,” he says, taking hold of me. “I’m not going to let you do this.”
“I have to. It’s the only way to protect you, him. And our baby.”
“No,” he says, catching me by the arm. “You’re not the only one who’ll do whatever it takes.”
“What does that mean?”
“Catrine said something to Jon, and he did some digging.”
“On me?” I ask heatedly. “So you knew all this already?”
He holds his hands up in peace. “I found out that your mom was picked up for solicitation in the early stages of her pregnancy. No charges were filed that time, but it was noted that she was pregnant.”
“That’s what made her get in touch with me,” I say. “How long have you known this?”
“Not long,” Slade says. “Things starting clicking into place. Your reluctance to talk about Finn’s father, your pregnancy, why you didn’t have his social security number, why you lied about your first doctor’s appointment.”
Looking down, I say, “I felt like I had to be honest on my medical forms. I didn’t want to lie and possibly affect anything with our baby.”
“I know.” His lips land on mine. “Paige, there’s something else.”
“What?”
He turns over a box for me to sit on, wrapping his arm around my shoulder, and I brace for whatever news he’s preparing to deliver. “Your mother. She died four months ago. Overdose.”
No tears come. There’s nothing. Nothing for the woman who gave birth to me, to Finn. I have nothing left to give her. She took my childhood. She took my innocence. I won’t cry for her. I won’t.
I look up at Slade, confessing another sin to him. “What if that’s my fault? What if she overdosed because I took Finn, and she was so distraught?”
“She didn’t even know you were there that night,” he says.
“Still, I stole her baby. She had to be grief-stricken and . . .”
“And it was just another excuse for her to stick a needle in her arm,” he says coldly. “Finn would have died without you. I will not let you blame yourself for her death. The only thing you get credit for here is saving Finn’s life.”
I lean into his body slightly. It’s hard to explain how much I love this man, and I’ll never know why he loves me.
“Sometimes I wonder if the reason Finn eats so much now is because he was starved the first few days of his life,” I say, guilt hanging over me like a dark shadow. “I’ll never forgive myself for leaving him those few days.”
He runs his hand across Finn’s head, mussing the few strands of hair he has. “I know what it’s like to blame yourself for something,” he says, looking at me with the most understanding blue eyes.
“We’re quite a pair,” I say with a hint of a smile.
“As long as we’re a pair,” he says.
“Slade, no matter the reason, what I did was illegal, and if anyone finds out . . .”
“Your mother is gone. No one can prove you took Finn.” He looks down at me. “One more lie?” he asks. “One more lie and then we never lie again.”
*
Sometimes you have to lie to keep a promise. This is one of those times.
Slade sits down beside me in the lawyer’s office. All the lies, all the secrets, they’ve all just been the warm-up, the rehearsal for this moment. The lie to save me from all the others. The lie that makes Finn mine and Slade’s. The lie that lets me keep my promise.
I tell the lawyer the same story I told Slade. The best lies are mostly truths. That’s what makes them effective. The only detail that changes is that when I returned, my mom asked me to take Finn, knowing she couldn’t take care of and provide for him. Finn will grow up knowing our mother was troubled, but she made the best decision for him. Our lie will give him that little bit of comfort.
At her request, I took Finn, moved to Nashville, and haven’t heard from her since. I just recently found out she was dead, which is true, and realized I didn’t have any documentation giving me custody of Finn. He never even received a birth certificate or social security number.
Of course, I had to prove that I was indeed a blood relative, his half sister. A simple blood test took care of that. We were also required by law to prove we tried in good faith to find his birth father. We took out ads in various personal columns of local Memphis papers, even sent a private investigator to ask neighbors who lived in my mom’s apartment complex. All of this took time, but of course, nothing turned up.