AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes.” Ellie nodded. “Haywood chased them out of New York when he found out. They both took my mother’s maiden name, Hoffman, when they moved out here. It was a horrible time. Mom told me about it often. How people were being hunted on home soil like they had been in Europe, but all in the name of decency. The hypocrisy!” She laughed and shook her head. “God, I sound just like her. I miss her.”
“And Eleanor was her…”
“Lover?” Ellie blinked nonchalantly. “Of course. She came from New York with them, too. She was my birth mother. She died having me. They both loved her dearly and promised to always take care of me. I think there was some fudging of official records, because it’s their names on my birth certificate, not hers. I imagine that was easier to do in those days. They wanted to make sure nobody could take me away. So they became my real parents.”
She said it with the casual familiarity of somebody who had grown up with the story, but for Patrick it took some processing.
“Wow,” he said.
“Yeah. Wow.” Ellie tucked a stray curl behind her ear.
“And the man from the postcards?”
“What about him?”
“Why didn’t he come to LA with them?” he asked.
Eleanor sighed. “That was one of the great unanswered questions of my father’s life,” she said. “Do you want to know what I think?”
Patrick nodded.
She looked him dead in the eye. “He wasn’t brave enough.”
Patrick’s breath grew short, and he thought back to the fantastical tale he had just read, of Penny’s essence being scattered across time and space, the same life playing out again and again. Wasn’t that the whole business of comics, at the end of the day? A story being told over and over again until someone got it right?
“Does it feel strange?” Patrick asked. “Knowing that your family was built on a lie?”
Eleanor laughed. “A lie? Oh, you’re a funny one. My family may not have looked like everybody else’s, and certain pretenses may have been upheld in public for the benefit of a quiet life, but I assure you, Mr. Lake, we never lied to each other. Or ourselves.”
Patrick continued to look down at the postcard in his hands, turning it over and over as if doing so might reveal an as-yet-hidden message.
“You’re a large man, Mr. Lake,” Eleanor continued. “Does it ever get uncomfortable? A little tight across the shoulders?”
Patrick looked up at her, his brows a question mark.
“The constraints you place on yourself, my dear.”
Patrick’s breathing grew even more rapid, his chest tight, and he only knew he had burst into tears when Ellie enveloped him in an embrace, clutching his head to her shoulder, and he saw his tears dampening the fabric of her tunic. She held him like that for several minutes while he wept, like a mother might a child, or a hero saving a helpless damsel, until finally the tears ran dry and he withdrew, wiping his puffy eyes, a cloud of embarrassment already forming.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. I never cry like this.”
“Silly boy,” said Ellie, cupping his cheek with genuine affection. “Maybe you should.”
Chapter 37
“What do you mean, missing?” Will asked.
“He isn’t answering his phone,” said Simone. “He always takes my calls. Always.”
“Even when he’s mad at you?” asked Hector pointedly. Simone cast a searing glare at him, and nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Even when he is mad at me. Because this kind of sulking endangers the work, and the work is what matters. He and I have always been on the same page about that.”
“I think that might have changed, Geppetto,” said Corey. “Your Pinocchio is a real boy now.”
“Patrick is a dreamer,” said Simone. “Somebody has to be the grown-up.”
“Hard disagree,” said Audra. “This is LA!”
