She has to know how beautiful she is and how loved she is. She has to know I would do anything for her.
“He was probably just playing me from day one.”
“He’s my brother, and the only thing I’m sure of is that you were just a pawn in some game he was playing.”
“Well, it figures I would lose my virginity to a man who would turn out to be the biggest waste of time. You were right about some things.” She looks at the glass in her hands and then looks at me with a broken stare. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” She repeats the words, and my stomach burns.
“Don’t say that,” I snap, and she looks at me. “Don’t say that. You are nothing like your mother.” I try to be as respectful as I can toward her mother, but the bottom line is, that woman is a bitch. She literally kicked her daughter out of her house when she was sixteen. Well, she didn’t kick Savannah out, but she decided she was going to move, leaving Savannah to find somewhere to live. Who does that?
“Needless to say, the joke was on me when two days later he walks into the country club with this blonde debutant on his arm.” Her voice trails off, and she takes another sip. “Yup, his girlfriend was visiting.” She shakes her head. “A girlfriend he never mentioned, and I knew nothing about. If I’d known …” She looks me in the eyes. “If I’d known, I would have never ever gone there with him.”
“I know,” I reassure her.
“He sat in my section with her.” She wipes away the tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. “It was so hard not to throw the glass of water in his face. It also made me feel like I was cheap … God, he …” She takes a gulp. “He got down on one knee in front of me and proposed to her. There in the middle of the country club, he proposed to her.”
“Son of a bitch,” I hiss while she refills her glass. This time, she takes the whole gulp. She must be getting used to it because she swallows without wincing. I wait to hear the rest of the story.
“I found out I was pregnant right away,” she continues. “I don’t know if you want to hear the rest.”
“I want to hear it all,” I say, then lean forward, folding my hands together. My stomach suddenly feels sick because I have a feeling I haven’t even heard the bad parts yet.
“When I found out, I tried to reach out to your brother. I called, but he wouldn’t answer. And then one day, I was stupid enough to seek him out.” I can feel the worst part of the story coming. “I thought he would be at your father’s office since he came home to be an intern.”
She avoids my eyes when she says the next part. “I walked into the house, and your father was just coming into the hallway when he saw me. He looked at me like I was …” She wipes the tears away. “He told me to follow him into the office, and then he closed the door behind me. At that point, I knew I should have left. I knew that nothing good would come from me being in that room. He walked behind the desk and sat down and asked me what I wanted. I stumbled with my words, before saying I was looking for Liam. It was like he knew. He told me that Liam was gone for the weekend with his fiancée, and that I should find someone else to hang around with.” My hands form into fists when I think of what a bastard my father could be. Cold and calculating, he would knock down his own mother to get ahead.
“I told him what I had to discuss with Liam was private.” She looks up now, and I see the broken girl who was there eight years ago. The girl who thought she was nothing and would walk with her head down to avoid eye contact. The girl she’s fought every single day since then not to be. “I can still hear his bitter laughter in my head, and when he guessed I was pregnant, he stood and walked around the desk. I held my breath, not knowing what he was going to do, but then he put his hand in his pocket and took out two hundred dollar bills.” My heart speeds up, and my blood starts to boil. “He threw them at me and told me to take out the trash.” Watching her say the words, I know they cut her deep.
“I’ll fucking kill him.” The words fly out of my mouth, and I don’t know who I’m going to hurt first—my father or my brother.
Chapter Four
Savannah
“I’ll fucking kill him,” he hisses. My heart almost explodes in my chest when he flies off the couch. I sit here in shock as he paces in front of me. “I can’t …” he says and pulls his hair. “I can’t even believe.”
My heart has been in overdrive ever since I started telling my story. I had to take sips of the whiskey in order to continue because thinking back to that time in my life is not something I like to do. It was a dark period when I had no idea what I was doing nor did I realize the consequences of my actions to the people around me.
“Beau.” I say his name softly, wanting to get the rest of the story out so I never have to say it again.
“There can’t be more,” he tells me, and the hurt fills his eyes as the tears fall. “They just wrote off their flesh and blood.” He sits next to me, placing his hand on my knee. I know that it’s just to comfort me, but I didn’t know how much I needed his touch until then.
“I ignored your father and then finally got ahold of your brother.” I swallow now and look at the empty glass and wonder how crazy it would be to pour another one. My head is already starting to spin, and I don’t know how much more I can drink without blurting out everything.
Telling him that I love him isn’t something I want to do on the same night I share my biggest regret. I don’t regret Ethan for one single minute, and I never will. The only thing I regret is who the sperm donor was. I lean forward and put the glass down on the table, hoping he doesn’t remove his hand from my knee. “I found him the week after. He was coming into the country club, and I told him I needed to speak to him.” I close my eyes, ignoring the pain gripping my stomach as I think back to that day. “He looked at me like I was dirt.” I avoid his eyes, not ready for him to see that it still affects me.
For my whole life, I’ve been looked at like I was dirt. Either that or a charity case. Not once has someone or anyone looked at me as just another person. I was always talked about in whispers. “She’s the one who Mary Ellen feels sorry for.” I would hear that one a lot when I walked into school, and some of the other moms would see me. The pointing was always evident. I tried to ignore it and tried not to let it bother me, but I would always go quiet and not make eye contact. “She’s her daughter,” they would say of my mother. God, that one would get me every single time. I would have to blink away the tears so fast that sometimes they would sneak out, and I would suddenly have “allergies.” But my favorite has always been, “She’s the one who ruined everything.” That one has been at the top for the past eight years along with the finger-pointing, the rude stares, and the blatant hatred worn on their face.
“When I finally told him …” My hands start to shake. “He told me it could be anyone’s, and it can’t be his since it was only one time.”
“What a fucking moron,” Beau hisses. Leaning back on the couch, he scratches his face with his hands and then looks at me. I have to stop talking for a second because all I want to do is lean back into his arms. I want him to wrap his arm around my shoulder like he does during scary movies. But instead, I take a deep breath and tell him the rest.