Wife Number Seven (The Compound, #1)(74)

But he hadn’t expected this.

He didn’t expect that his intense feelings for Brinley would make him curious—curious about his mother, and if she missed him as much as he sometimes missed her. He didn’t expect to find himself standing in front of Samuel at the gates of the compound, bribing him with fifty bucks so Sam would turn a blind eye and allow him to knock on the door of his parents’ home. He’d been bribing Sam for months on Brinley’s behalf, but this time it was for himself. He had to face his past, face his demons, face the parents who no longer acknowledged his existence.

There he stood, trembling as ice-cold raindrops fell from the sky and onto his bare arms. Should he knock? Ring the bell? Or should he accept that his family had moved on without him?

He despised them, but at the same time he ached for them. And he had no idea what to do.

Before he had the chance to make a decision, the porch light turned on and Porter’s entire body stiffened in response. No longer a choice to be made, he had to face whomever would answer the door in just seconds.

It was his younger brother, Matt; they hadn’t seen each other in years. Matt had grown at least three inches taller than Porter and now towered over him in the doorway, a scowl upon his pimply face.

Porter wasn’t at all intimidated by the size of Matt; instead, he stood tall and demanded that Matt get his mother. He needed to speak to her. When Matt refused, Porter yelled past him into the house.

“Mother!”

“She doesn’t want to see you. You no longer exist,” his brother hissed.

“I’m right here, right in front of you, *. Of course I exist.”

“Not to us,” Matt said with a snarl. “Look!”

His brother gestured to a family portrait that hung in the hallway behind him. Dark blue ink was scribbled across Porter’s face, as if he could simply be erased from existence. Porter stood on the porch, his shoulders slumped as he stared at the photo.

Alice Hammond rounded the corner of the hallway and locked eyes with her son. She looked just as he remembered her, with maybe a few unfamiliar wrinkles and a little more gray in her hair. But her face was just as he remembered. The face of someone he trusted with his life.

“Porter,” she whispered before shooing several of his siblings away from the door. When they left begrudgingly, it was just Alice and her son, face-to-face for the first time in years.

“You can’t be here,” Alice said, her head shaking back and forth.

“Was it really this easy?” Porter asked, gesturing to the photograph.

His mother hung her head.

“What? You just pretend I was never here, that you didn’t carry me for nine months? That you didn’t nurse me as a baby?”

“Stop it, please,” Alice begged, her eyes filling with tears.

“No, I need to know!” Porter glowered at the woman who had raised him, the woman he loved more than anyone else in his world. “I need to know how you could throw me out like a piece of f*cking trash!”

“Watch your language!”

“Are you kidding me? You tossed me aside and you’re going to correct my f*cking language?”

Alice winced, then cried out, “Profanity is not allowed in this house!”

“Where’s Dad?”

“My husband isn’t here this evening.”

“Ah, with another wife, I see.” Porter sneered, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “Do you enjoy sharing him, Mother?”

He couldn’t imagine giving his heart to another woman now that Brinley possessed every fiber of his being. He wanted her and only her. Her happiness meant more to him than his own. He had no idea how his father, and the other men on the compound, could dole out their love in that way. In fact, he was pretty certain that they didn’t. They were doing what was expected of them, just like the women of the compound. And for that, he felt sorry for them.

When Alice didn’t answer his crude question, they stood in awkward silence. Porter wanted to believe there was a shred left of the kind woman he knew for the first years of his life. The woman who held him in her arms when he scraped his knee. The woman who baked him his favorite dark chocolate cake on his birthday each year. He had to know if she was still inside the woman before him.

“I had to see you,” Porter whispered. secretly wishing his mother would reach for him, to take his hand or pull him into her embrace. But she didn’t. She stood several feet from him, cold and stiff.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, breaking eye contact and crossing her arms in front of her terry bathrobe, her hair still up in the traditional braid. “But you shouldn’t have come.”

“Mother, don’t you miss me?” he pressed, desperate to know the answer.

“No.” Her eyes bored into his, and he knew. She had no regrets. She stood by her decision to remove him from the Hammond family.

Once again, he was wounded. He was the young boy standing on the street corner, watching his mother drive away from him. Watching her withdraw her love.

“You were supposed to love me,” Porter cried. “More than Father, more than the prophet. I’m your child.”

“You were.” Alice’s words were cold, calculated, rehearsed. “You were my child.”

Her words stung more than anything had in Porter’s life. But before he could even attempt to recover from the pain of her words, she continued. He braced himself as she began to speak.