Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 86706 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86706 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
She nearly fell over, bringing her hand to her mouth. “What?”
“I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you.”
As she began to cry, I somehow held back my tears. “It happened a little over a year ago. He never told his parents he came to see you. He wrote about it in a journal that was found after he passed. Jacob never had the chance to find me. A friend who read his journals came looking for you, but you weren’t at the address he had for you anymore. So she came to find me instead.”
“Oh my God,” she murmured, holding onto a side table.
As much anger as I felt toward Cheyenne, all I could see was a mother who’d lost her child. There was no place for anger right now. In this moment, she and I were just two broken people who never had a chance to know our son. In my case, never had a chance to meet him.
I felt numb as I went to her kitchen and found a glass in the cupboard, pouring her some water.
With a shaky hand, she took the glass from me and gulped the water down.
I took an article from my backpack. I’d had it printed at the hotel back in Nevada.
“This is a news article about what happened. He was riding in a car with some kids who were racing. He was the only one who died. It was about a year after he’d come to see you.” I swallowed, my throat parched.
“How could I not have known?”
“Bad luck and timing. No one read his diaries until recently.”
She closed her eyes. “I can’t believe I’ll never see him again.”
At least you got to see him once.
It took several minutes for her tears to stop enough that she could talk again. “I know you must be so furious with me. I can’t even begin to—”
“Don’t, Cheyenne. Sure, I’m furious. But that doesn’t matter right now. You need to process this. I’m not gonna force you to explain yourself today. I’m pretty sure I know everything you’re gonna say anyway.” I shook my head and looked down. “Nothing you can say will bring him back.”
The anger in my heart had shifted—at least for the moment—to a mix of sadness and regret. It didn’t feel like I knew Cheyenne anymore, didn’t really want to, and yet here we were, sharing a monumental pain no one else in the world could understand.
I couldn’t breathe. I needed to go, but I didn’t want to just leave her.
“You live with your husband?”
“Yes.” She wiped a teardrop from the corner of her mouth.
“You shouldn’t be alone right now. Have him come home. I’ll wait until he arrives. I can come back before I leave town, if you want to have the other conversation, but I don’t think we should be talking about any of that stuff right now. I just gave you devastating news, and you need to process it.” I found a pen and paper on the desk in her living room. “Here’s my number, if you need to reach me. I’ll be at my mother’s for a couple of days.”
After I handed her the paper, I looked down. I hadn’t noticed until now. “You’re pregnant...”
She nodded.
“Do you have any other children?”
“No. This is the first since...” She stopped short of finishing the sentence. She didn’t need to.
The minutes while we waited for her husband were quiet and painful. When I saw his car pull up, I left without saying another word. I didn’t even look at him when we passed on my way out.
A raw feeling developed inside my chest. Cheyenne was pregnant, starting a life with her new husband. Meanwhile, the son I never knew had grown up without his actual parents. She’d get a second chance to start over, to do things right, and Jacob would never have a second chance at anything.
***
A half hour later, I pulled up at my mother’s house, a brand new, sparse structure on the same plot of land I grew up on. I’d tried to convince my mother to let me buy her a house for years. She’d finally agreed to let me build her one on the property a couple of years ago.
When Mom opened the door, she had a huge smile on her face. All I’d told her was that I was coming to town. “Tristan!” She wrapped her arms around me.
“Mom.” I rubbed her back, feeling awful for what I was about to do.
Her expression darkened when she pulled back and looked at me.
She wrapped her hands around my cheeks. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
In that moment, I finally broke down, crying like a fucking baby in my mother’s arms.
She held me tighter. “Tristan, my God, what happened?”
How was I going to tell her she’d had a grandchild she never knew about who was now dead? I was her only child. My mother had always wished I was the type of man to get married and settle down, but she’d resigned herself to likely never having any grandkids. This was going to devastate her.