Like a Memory(56)

“Because she has some information she felt you should hear. I agree with her.”

My mother wasn’t one to listen to something she didn’t believe. Because of that I remained in the room. What I wanted to do was head for the door and not look back.

“Sit down, Nate,” mom said. Not “do you want to have a seat?” she was telling me I was staying and listening. Which meant I was staying and listening.

I did as I was ordered but I took the seat closest to the escape route. If she began talking about things I didn’t want to discuss I was gone. They both needed to be prepared for that.

“Saylor called me yesterday and asked if she could come speak with you. I told her she could come talk to me first. After listening to her I was ready to call you. I see that your father beat me to it.” She turned to Saylor. “Go ahead.”

Saylor was once a lingerie model. She’d met Octavia’s dad during a photo shoot she was in for his department store. They’d fallen in lust. He began f*cking her and his wife found out. That marriage ended. This one then came a month after. She was still young and beautiful just past the lingerie modeling age. Octavia and Saylor had gotten along. Octavia just didn’t really care who her father was with as long as he gave her money.

“I know what you’ve been told. What you’ve been blamed for. At first I thought the same thing. But then a few things happened that made me question what the letter from Octavia said. Sure she had issues. We all knew that. She was spoiled beyond repair. However, when a psychiatrist came to the funeral and told us how sorry he was for our loss and that he’d tried to help Octavia the past couple of years the best he could her father demanded his records or he’d have him accused of something and his license to practice taken away. So he got the records.

Octavia was molested as a child by a close friend of her father’s. It went on for years until Octavia was old enough to get away from him. Two years ago, she paid a hit man to kill him. The disappearance of Vincent Brooklyn is now solved. He’s been dead for two years and his body is at the bottom of the Mississippi River.”

She paused and I tried to wrap my head around this. I had been to the man’s house before with her father. When he went missing Octavia been truly upset or acted like it. She had called him Uncle Vincent.

“The guilt of his murder was making her depression more severe. She was withdrawing and working on the store as a way to distract herself. She knew she was pregnant for three months. She was considering abortion and saying she didn’t want to be a mother. Months before you broke things off. What she wanted to talk to you about was she needed to confess her crime. She thought that telling you everything would ease her guilt. She never planned to tell you she was pregnant. She wasn’t going to keep the baby. Her abortion date had been scheduled. You are not the reason she hung herself or killed your child. She was never even going to tell you she was pregnant.”

All I could do was sit there. It was once again like I was hearing a horror story that wasn’t real. This time I didn’t have guilt on my shoulders. But the horror was all the same. Octavia had lived a much darker life inside her head than I imagined.

She’d suffered and mentally she wasn’t stable. She never had been. I had missed that. Thinking her indifference and distance was a good thing. She’d been that way to protect her secrets.

It didn’t change the fact I had lost my son. I would have lost him anyway and never even known it. She was never going to let me have him. She didn’t want a child. She’d said that often.

Standing up I walked out. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t ask questions. I just needed to leave. Be alone. My mother didn’t come running after me. She understood.

I climbed back into my truck and drove. I ignored my phone. I’d call them back. I just drove. I drove until the town changed. Until the scenery became something else familiar. Until I was parked outside my grandpop’s bar.

Sitting there I let the facts measure up in my head. I was able to let go of the self-blame. Move on from the guilt. I mourned the lives lost that didn’t have to be. For the sickness that causes people to act in a way that ruins lives and often ends them. I mourned the woman she could have been if she hadn’t been abused. I mourned the life my son could have had.

But I no longer blamed me. I was free of that guilt. My choices didn’t make Octavia take her life and the life of my unborn son. Her choices and emotional damage had. I’d missed that. Yes. I hadn’t realized she was hiding pain but then we’d never been connected. I’d called that easy. When, in reality, it was wrong.

I wanted what my parents had. I wanted that connection. I wanted a life with a woman I loved. That I could share with. The other way no longer felt easy. It was lonely. It was empty.

I wanted Bliss.

Opening my truck door, I got out and headed inside. My Grandpop had been worried about me. Called several times. Mom had told him I needed space not to come. Now I needed to plan. Decide how I would approach Bliss. She hadn’t heard from me in two months. I didn’t know what she was doing or if she was dating. The way we felt . . . the way it had been I didn’t want to think she could move on so quickly. But I owed her more. And I wanted to give it all to her. I was ready to deserve her. Whatever I had to do I was willing to do it.





Bliss York

TODAY HAD BEEN a success. The turn out for the first Teen Day at the library had been bigger than I hoped. One hundred and eleven teens came to meet the author and play the trivia games we had set up for them. I was happily humming to myself as I finished cleaning up the area we had held the event when the Media director, Matthew Goodwin, came walking into the room. He was six foot tall with dark brown hair and pretty green eyes. He had a definite nerdy vibe with his glasses and technical side but he was attractive. He pulled it off.