I didn’t tell anyone in my family what happened. I just left. Which was why Mia was now calling me and I had to answer, because I remembered she was supposed to go stay with Kate—Chloe—for a few months.
“Hey,” I answered.
“You sound glum. What’s going on?” The worry in her voice was probably for Kate or the twins.
“Are you calling about staying with Kate?”
“Well, yeah. I’m supposed to be flying out in a little over a week. I also wanted to see if you guys found a place in Ohio and whatnot. I’ve been there. That place sucks.”
I snorted. It really wasn’t that great. “Yeah. It does suck. But I found a place. I’ll be moving in in a few days.” I paused, running a hand through my hair. “Look. You don’t need to stay with her after all.”
“Umm, what?”
“You don’t need to stay with her,” I repeated. It wasn’t like I wasn’t worried about her… or at least the babies. No matter what was going on between Kate and me, I still had to take care of those twins. But she didn’t even want to talk. I constantly wondered how she was getting by, how she was taking care of herself. Those thoughts were driving me mad. To top it all off, there was some ghost cloud of her scent, oranges and jasmine, following me everywhere. I couldn’t get her out of my head.
“Why is that? Did she decide to live with you in Ohio?”
“Uh, no. We kind of broke up, I guess. Or something like that. She’s in Tennessee still. I’m in Ohio.”
“Broke up?” she demanded. “As in you dumped your baby mama? But why would that mean I don’t need to go stay with her? That had nothing to do with you dating her. It has to do with making sure she isn’t alone if she goes into labor early.”
I didn’t want to have this out with her, didn’t want to share with her what I’d found out, but it appeared I would have to. “I found out the truth about her,” I finally said.
“And? You disliked what you found so much so that you broke up with her?”
“It wasn’t like that. I didn't dump her. She wouldn’t even talk to me about it when it all came out. So I left.”
“You’re gonna have to be a little more clear, Kai. Because you’re coming off as a pretty big douchebag.”
“Look up the fucking name Chloe Dumont. Then tell me I’m a douchebag.”
She sighed loudly. I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn’t see it. I was so freaking miserable that I apparently needed to drag everyone into that misery with me.
She must have been doing what I instructed, because it was silent aside from some clicking for a few minutes before she muttered, “Well, shit.”
“Yeah. My exact thoughts.”
There was more clicking in the background. “So she ran away and changed her name. But I don’t understand why that made you break up with her.”
“She’s fucking engaged, Mia. To some guy in Louisiana named Jared. I think that’s a pretty good reason for us to not be together.”
“I think you’ve got this all wrong, Kai.”
“Enlighten me, Mia. Because I would love to understand her better. But she won’t even talk to me about this shit.”
“Of course she won’t,” she deadpanned. With a growl, I ground my teeth together. “When I was screwing over our entire family, I didn’t want to talk about it with anybody. One of the few things I know about Kate… or Chloe is that the one time I talked to her about her family, she said they were so bad to her, they didn’t deserve to know about the twins. If you look at this only picture of her with this dick, Jared, that isn’t her real smile. If you knew her at all, you would have seen the fake smile she wears when she’s extremely uncomfortable. Like when she came to our house to tell Mom and Dad you knocked her up. I bet you a million bucks she hated being with him. If he’s still looking for her, if her parents are looking for her and it gets out that she was seen in Tennessee, they’re going to find her.”
“If it was that bad, she could have talked to me about it.”
“But she couldn’t. Because maybe it was that bad, Kai.”
She was making sense, I hated to admit. But Kate should have talked to me. She had so many chances and never did, which told me she didn’t really care about me.
I had looked at that picture of her with Jared so many times over the last five days. Mia was right, I could see now what I hadn’t seen in my anger. She didn’t look happy with him. That didn’t really mean shit though, because again, she hadn’t found it necessary to talk to me.
“You know, it isn’t really my problem if her family or this guy find her,” I told her. “They were bound to sooner or later. She didn’t even go very far to hide from them.”
“She told me that night I was taken about hiding in plain sight. It looks like that’s what she’s been doing for the last three years.” She huffed out a breath. My skin itched. “It is your problem, Kai, and you know it. Whether you want to be with her or not, those are your twins. If she didn’t want her family knowing about them, there’s probably a good reason for it. You need to get your ass back to Tennessee and be there for her or take her back to Ohio with you.”
“That’s impossible, Mia. I’m back on duty in four days.”
My stomach knotted up. I wanted to stay pissed at Kate, but Mia was right. Again. But there really was nothing I could do. There was no way I could drive all the way back there, get her, and make it back to Ohio in time to get moved into that apartment before I had to be back on duty. Absolutely no way. Besides, she hadn’t called me once, hadn’t even tried talking to me since I left. What good would it do to show up there if she didn’t care enough about me to actually talk about why her family was so terrible that she had run away?
“Whatever, Kai,” Mia snapped, pulling me from my thoughts. That was all I needed was another woman pissed at me. “I’m flying there no matter what’s going on with you two. Those babies are my niece and nephew. And since you’ve been gone, I bet you a million bucks she’s been working her ass off to keep busy and stay on top of her bills or whatever Kate likes to do. I can damn well guarantee she isn’t resting.”
She was right about that as well. If I knew Kate at all, she wouldn’t be resting one bit. She probably even went back to working full-time, since I hadn’t sent her any more money and we hadn’t even gotten those groceries that day. So I was being a giant dick and was still freaking pissed at her.
Mia and I chatted a bit longer, me telling her the whole story of what had happened with Miss Louisiana of 2015. Mia said she looked like a nutjob after googling her, too. Then she looked to see if that picture of me and Kate at the market, the one Rita had taken on her phone, was anywhere. Luckily, she couldn’t find it. Despite looking like a nutjob, maybe she’d decided against doing anything with it. We could only hope.
When we got off the phone, I tried calling Kate once, but she didn’t answer, which didn’t surprise me. She wasn’t going to talk, wasn’t going to confide in me.
My choices weren’t very broad. Getting a hold of her by phone was basically my only option, unless I flew over there and hurried back. In all honesty, I didn’t feel like putting myself out there like that again. Having her shut me down again.