Page 42 of Omega’s Forward

“What was the art?”

“A painting of a moose.”

He laughs so hard he nearly loses his coffee. I don’t tell him the moose is still in the garage. Maybe I’ll show him sometime.

Then it gets quiet again, and I bite the bullet.

“Can I ask you something?”

He looks at me over the rim of the mug. He hesitates, then nods.

“What’s the deal with your dad, anyway. I knew him years.” I turn my mug a slow half circle on my knee. “And I didn’t know he had a son. None of us did. The Gordie I knew would’ve had your picture in his wallet. He’d have shown it to strangers in airports. What the hell happened between the two of you?”

Everett stares at his coffee. I’m not sure if he doesn’t want to tell me or if he doesn’t know how.

“I mean if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine too,” I say, “I just can’t work it out.”

People have different sides to them sometimes. Gordie might have been a different dad to him than the proto-dad that he was to me. I just can’t see it. Gordie was the most open down-to-earth person I ever met.

I check myself. He wasn’t that open. I didn’t know about Everett so Gordie already isn’t the person I knew.

He takes a deep breath. “We used to be close. At least when I was little. Then he was the perfect dad. We used to watch tape of his old games together, the two of us on the study floor. He’d play with me, dress me up in his outfits. Perfect little mini-me. I mean, I was smaller than he was at the same age, but he used to just say to me that as soon as I presented as an alpha, I’d bulk out. There was a shelf in his study for the trophies I hadn’t won yet. You know he played, of course.”

“Yeah.” Everybody knows. There’s a banner with his number hanging in the rafters and a photo in the concourse of Gordie at nineteen, holding a cup over his head, back when he had all his own teeth.

“Then I presented as an omega.” He says it flat. “And everything stopped. He just lost interest. I was twelve. Suddenly, he just wasn’t ever around anymore.”

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing good to put there. I could tell him fathers don’t need a reason to quit on you — mine never even bothered to start — but this isn’t my story, so I keep it.

“My mother took me to London two years later. He didn’t fight her for it.” A sip of coffee. “I saw him sporadically after that. My mother tried to keep us in contact. I’m pretty sure most of it was her suggestion. Then when I was seventeen, he invited me to dinner at his club. He was warm. Charming. You’d have recognized him.”

I’m starting to understand that I don’t want to hear the rest of this. I hold still anyway.

“With dessert, he put a folder on the table. Profiles. Five alphas, lab work he’d paid for privately. All five were hockey players.”

“Everett.”

“He had a theory.” The mug goes down on the nightstand. “His bloodline, plus the right sire, and eventually, the perfect hockey player. He used the word stock. At dinner. To his own son. He was excited. He figured if he couldn’t get the son he wanted, he could at least make sure he got the right grandson.”

“Jesus, Everett.”

“He suggested you, actually.”

I put my coffee down.

“You’d have been twenty-two, twenty-three. The finest young alpha he’d ever drafted, he said.” He snorts. “He’d be loving this, you know. The Bureau finishing his project for him.”

I knew Gordie Rourke for fifteen years, and I’m trying to fit the man I knew around the man in this story. On the one hand, I don’t want to believe it. On the other, I know how much Gordie was obsessed with the game. Maybe unhealthy obsessed.

“That’s why you stayed away,” I say.

“That’s why I stayed away. I kept in contact. When he had the stent put in, I came back to see him, but he was my father, not my dad, if that makes sense.” The words stay even but the orange doesn’t; a thin sour line runs through it and fades. “I’m not a brood mare, Brody. Not his and not the Bureau’s.” A beat. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I say, automatically, which is insane, because how would I even take it.

He watches me a moment longer, and his shoulders come down half an inch.

We sit with it. The coffee’s gone lukewarm in my hands. The heating clicks on over our heads.