Love Irresistibly (FBI/US Attorney #4)(26)

He didn’t know jack squat about being a brother. And, no doubt, he was wholly unprepared to have suddenly acquired one at 3:45 on a Friday afternoon. But he did know one thing.

He would not do to this kid what Noah Garrity had once done to him.

So he nodded. “I’d like that, Zach.”

* * *

AFTER ZACH LEFT, Cade shut his office door and took a seat at his desk. The two of them had agreed to meet for lunch the following weekend at DMK Burger Bar. Cade had only one condition, and it was non-negotiable.

“Noah can’t be there,” he’d said. “I don’t care what you do or don’t tell him about the fact that you came to see me. That’s your business with him. But he is not a part of this.”

Zach had seemed a little surprised by his vehemence, but he’d nodded nevertheless. “Yeah. Sure. No problem.”

Cade didn’t know what it meant that Noah had been crying over his Rose Bowl game, and he didn’t care. He was a lawyer; he dealt with facts. And in this case, there was one irrefutable fact, the only one that mattered: Noah Garrity hadn’t bothered to contact him in twenty-three years. He wasn’t a part of Cade’s life, and never would be.

Cade knew enough of the story, although it had taken him years as a kid to piece it together. Noah Garrity got his mother, Christine Morgan, pregnant during their last semester of high school. Christine’s parents had remained surprisingly levelheaded that their homecoming queen daughter was going to have a baby; Noah, on the other hand, had freaked out. His older brother had flunked out of Illinois State University and decided to move to California with a buddy to open a landscaping business. When they asked Noah to join them, he packed his bags for the sunny west coast, and broke up with Christine by leaving a note in her school locker. Don’t hate me, babe. I’m just not ready to be someone’s father.

Luckily for Cade, Christine realized that—ready or not—the arrival of a baby, one she’d decided to keep, meant that somebody needed to act responsibly. She finished high school and enrolled in the local community college. Cade, never one to cause his mother too much trouble, conveniently arrived during winter break, allowing Christine—with her mother as a babysitter—to resume classes by February. After two years, she received her associate’s degree and transferred, with Cade, to Northern Illinois University where she earned a nursing degree.

When Cade was about five years old, right around the time he and his mother moved back to the Chicago area and she took her first nursing job, he began to ask questions about his father. Quickly, he realized it was a sore subject. His grandparents tried to skirt around the topic as much as possible, and his mother, only twenty-three years old at the time, talked about Noah exclusively in the negative: how he’d dropped out of school, how he’d flaked on them when she’d gotten pregnant, how he’d never tried to contact them once. Eventually, Cade just stopped asking.

Until the day, five years later, when his mother came to him.

He’d been in his room, playing Super Mario Land on his Nintendo Game Boy before bedtime, when she knocked on the door and said they needed to talk.

Cade knew exactly what that meant. Trou-ble. “It was Sean’s idea to put the cricket down Mandy Franklin’s dress during the assembly.”

His mother folded her arms across her chest. “I hadn’t heard anything about the assembly. But now I know what we’ll be talking about next.”

Oops.

She sat down on the bed next to him. “That phone call I just got, the one I took in the bedroom? That was your father.”

Cade pushed the Game Boy aside and sat up. His. . . father? “What did he want? Did he say anything about me?”

“He did. He’s back from California and he asked if he could see you.”

Cade got an excited but nervous feeling in his stomach, like when he was waiting in line for one of the upside-down roller coasters at Six Flags. “What did you say?”

“I told him that it was up to you,” she said.

When she said nothing further, Cade wondered if this was some kind of test.

“Will you be mad if I say yes?” he asked cautiously.

She shook her head. “I won’t be mad, sweetie.” She reached over and brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “This is your decision to make.”

Cade thought that over. “When does he want to see me?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I want to see him.”

His mom nodded, as if she’d expected that answer. “Okay. I’ll let him know.”

“You’re making that weird smile,” Cade told her. “The fake one you make whenever Mrs. Kramer comes over to remind us that our grass is getting a little long.”

“Yes, well, Mrs. Kramer needs to find something better to do with her time than monitor the length of her neighbors’ front lawns.” She suddenly reached over and pulled him in for a hug. “I’ll work on the smile for tomorrow, Cade. For you.”

She’d tucked him in and then lay down on the bed next to him, something she only did when he was sick or on nights like the one when he was positive he’d heard a strange scraping noise in the closet after his friend Sean’s older brother had let them watch A Nightmare on Elm Street. “Is there anything you want to ask me?” she said as they both looked up at the ceiling, her head on the pillow next to his.