Lost and Found (Twist of Fate #1)(13)

I lifted my head and glanced at him. “You don’t know him, Aid… he has a reason to feel this way.”

“So do you, B.”

I shook my head and turned my attention back to the fire. “It was different for me.”

“Why? Because you were the one with all the advantages? Because you had money and his family didn’t?”

“It was more than that. He never saw me as Bennett Crawford, son and only heir to the Crawford fortune. He didn’t care who my dad was or that people were making all these plans for me from the moment I was born. To him I was just… Benny. It wasn’t until high school that he started to look at me differently,” I murmured. “Not that he didn’t have a reason to.”

“You didn’t have a say in the matter, remember?”

“I never told you about his family and mine, did I?” I asked.

“No.”

“After my parents realized I wasn’t going to stop asking to see him, they began arranging play dates. Sometimes I’d go over to his house, sometimes he’d come to mine. When we were seven or so, our parents finally started hanging out… I guess they figured it just made sense. My parents actually liked Xander’s mom a lot… it took them a little longer to warm up to Mr. Reed because he was pretty quiet… like Xander,” I said with a smile. Xander had definitely inherited his mother’s dirty brown-blond hair and cool blue eyes, but he’d had his father’s quiet nature and stoic attitude… something I’d worked my damnedest to overcome.

“Mr. Reed eventually came out of his shell… we even vacationed together once.”

“Let me guess, Daddy’s yacht, the South of France,” Aiden drawled.

I elbowed him. “Greek islands.”

Aiden rolled his eyes. “So what happened?”

I shook my head. “His mom just up and left one day. Filed for divorce and moved to Europe to become some marketing bigwig. Kicker is, she didn’t even fight for custody of him. I don’t think he ever saw her again… not even after his dad died, not if he went to live with his Aunt Lolly.” I reached down and grabbed a small rock off the ground and began rolling it between my fingers. It was a nervous habit I’d tried to break, especially since it pissed my dad off to no end, but Aiden knew all about my weird quirks.

“He was devastated. Kept asking me what he’d done wrong… why his own mother hadn’t loved him. I didn’t know what to tell him,” I whispered.

I felt Aiden’s hand settle on the back of my neck. It was a testament to how upset I must have seemed, because he rarely touched me when emotions were involved. Aiden didn’t do emotions well— not showing them and most definitely not being on the receiving end of them.

“Xander’s mom leaving was hard on his dad, but for a lot of reasons.” I glanced at Aiden and said, “She was the breadwinner in the family and Mr. Reed stayed home to take care of Xander. I guess he was planning on going back to school, but then Mrs. Reed left… anyway, he didn’t have a job and things were tough. So, my dad offered him a job.”

Aiden nodded. “In his investment firm?”

I shook my head. I’d told Aiden about how close Xander and I had been as kids and that he’d lived in the guest house on my parents’ property, but I’d never gotten into the details of how that had come about or that the guest house had actually been the caretaker’s cottage. “He hired Mr. Reed to be the estate’s caretaker. In exchange, he got a small salary and he and Xander lived in the little cottage on the property.”

“Fuck,” Aiden muttered as he realized what I was saying.

I fell silent as my thoughts drifted to the day Xander had realized what his father working for mine had really meant. At first, all we’d both seen had been the benefits in that we’d be living within minutes of one another. At eight years old, we hadn’t cared about the semantics of it all. As far as we’d been concerned, we were neighbors and that had been the extent of it.

But when Xander and I had witnessed my father berating Mr. Reed for some oversight with how he’d mowed the grass in the wrong direction or something equally ridiculous, there’d been a subtle shift in our friendship that I’d spent years trying to overcome. But I’d managed it. I’d had to fight like hell to prove to Xander that I never saw him as anything other than my best friend, but I’d done it.

Until the day I’d had to walk past him on the first day of high school and pretend he was just some guy.

It had been the beginning of the end.

“And I thought my dad was a prick,” Aiden murmured.

I chuckled. Aiden’s dad was an asshole, but for a whole slew of other reasons.

“I think I told myself Xander was okay after I discovered he was gone because I needed to believe that to make it through each day, you know?” I said softly. I rubbed the smooth stone between my fingers.

“He was your world too, wasn’t he?” Aiden asked gently.

I cursed the tears that threatened to fall. “Yeah, he was,” I said. “I thought if I could just keep us together long enough until we got to college or something…”

I snorted as I realized how ridiculous my lofty dream had been back then. I’d thought that once I’d turned eighteen, I’d somehow find the balls to stand up to my father. It hadn’t even been about wanting a different kind of relationship with Xander at that point, though the seed had been planted for sure the summer just before we’d started high school. No, I’d just wanted to get to that magic age where I was supposedly allowed to say no to my parents. But even at nearly thirty years old, I still hadn’t figured out how to get that word to actually mean anything with them. My father just had me over too many barrels at this point.