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“We’ve been trying to find you. When we found the adoption agency, they’d changed your last name to protect you from my parents,” Layla said, and I waited for her to explain why I would need protection from people who didn’t want me.
“Layla’s father, Bill, was an evil man who used children to do his bidding around town.” It couldn’t be. “We wanted to give you a better life, one we couldn’t provide at the time. You have to understand, Easton, we’ve been looking for you for years. The adoption agency you came from burned down a year after you were adopted and lost all their paperwork. There was no trace of you ever existing besides that.” Andy nodded toward the birth certificate in my trembling hands.
“Bill Cutco adopted me, and my foster brother, Gray Hughes.” I struggled to avoid crumpling the stupid fucking paper in my hands, the only thing linking me to these people in front of me.
“No,” Layla gasped, her hand wrapping around my forearm, her touch soft and gentle, everything I imagined it would be.
“Guess your father did find me. Sacrificing me and then taking away the life I should have had with two parents didn’t save me from him. He still fucking found me.” Rage slithered through my veins, tensing my muscles. I fought the familiar ache in my chest, and my scars burned almost as if they were fresh at the reminder of that man.
“Why didn’t you find him, Andy?! I begged you to find him.” Layla’s hand tightened around my arm, but her touch did nothing to soothe the hatred. Instead, it intensified.
“I hired every goddamn PI in town to find him; you know that, Layla. I did every fucking thing I could besides knocking on your father’s door,” Andy growled at her. Anger rippled through the air, and I fed off it. I ripped my arm from her touch. I didn’t want to feel her empathy now.
I needed my parents years ago.
I didn’t need these people now.
“I have to go. You can take everything back—the job, the apartment. I don’t need anything from you. I’ve survived without you for twenty-six years. I don’t need your handouts.”
“No, please, no! Don’t go. Give me—us—a chance.” My mother had latched onto me again, her nails biting into my skin.
“Let go of me! I don’t fucking owe you a thing.” Yanking my arm from her again, I turned away from her and Andy and pressed the elevator button repeatedly.
“Easton, son. Please.” Andy’s deep voice penetrated my walls, the one fucking word I’d yearned to be called my whole life, jilting my foundation.
“I am not your son,” I seethed, seeing dark spots invade my vision as rage clouded all my logic.
“Whether you want to admit it or not, you are our fucking son. You have your mother’s eyes and hair, and my goddamn nose and stubborn pride. We aren’t asking you to forgive us. We are asking for a chance to get to know you and the man you’ve become. And until you are ready, the apartment is yours, the car in the parking garage is yours, and the job is yours. We made mistakes, Easton, like all teenagers do, and we are trying to do what is best for you.”
Whirling around, I watched Andy pull his wife into his arms. She cried into his chest, and my heart splintered.
Did Bill beat her, too?
Did she know what her father was capable of?
Did she know what he made me do?
Did they know I was broken?
“You don’t know what is best for me because you don’t fucking know me,” I gritted through clenched teeth.
“Then give us a chance to get to know you, Easton. Let us be there for you however you need.” I didn’t want to see the similarities, but I couldn’t fight that he was right. I couldn’t argue that I didn’t have my mother’s eyes and hair.
I couldn’t fight because it was true.
The people I had been waiting to save me were finally here. But it was too fucking late to be saved.
“I don’t want special treatment. I just need a job, and I will pay you back for the apartment and everything else.”
Layla shook her head and opened her mouth to argue, but Andy stopped her.
“You don’t want special treatment, boy? You want to mop the fucking floors? Do you want us to treat you like a recent inmate, is that it? Will it stroke your fucking ego to be treated like dirt?”
His words were worse than any beating I’d received in the last five years.
I didn’t want to be just an inmate. I wanted to be Easton Diggs, the boy who had dreams before going to jail.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night.” I swallowed the rage burning inside my chest.
