Page 15 of Chasing After You
Soon.
Soon, I’d set the bait.
The twins couldn’t watch him every second. All it would take was one. One slip. One crack in their armor. They might be wolves, but wolves were often overconfident. They underestimated what a cornered creature could do. And I’d carved my way through worse before.
Josh was waiting for me. He just didn’t know it yet.
And once I had him again, I wasn’t letting go.
But it wasn’t quite time yet to make my move. I needed to stay patient.
Stay watching.
4
Josh
For two years following theincidentwith Daniel, I’d suffered from sickening nightmares night after night.
I would always be infinitely grateful to the man who had taken me in as a stranger and helped to build me another chance at life.
His name was Paul Antley.
I hadn’t even known of his existence before the night everything had gone to shit. I would later learn from him that he was estranged from both his immediate and extended family, and that he hadn’t had any contact with any of them for years before Victoria had suddenly called him about me.
He had almost hung up on her, but she was quick to bring up a debt he owed to her and suggest that she’d forget all about it if he took me in.
Paul never said much about his own past, but from what I understood, he’d been incarcerated for five years in his early thirties, resulting in his entire family tree disowning him. He’d gone from having generational wealth to absolutely nothing in the blink of an eye.
Victoria was his second cousin.
Maybe she’d somehow known that she would need a favor in the future, or perhaps she used to actually be a decent person. Still, whatever the reason, she’d paid for a good defense attorney who helped dramatically reduce his sentence, and helped him get his coffee shop off the ground when he was released. He understood that he would eventually need to pay her back, but he took the risk because it was either Victoria’s help or a twenty-three-year sentence and zero job opportunities on the outside.
Paul had never had any children, so he had no experience in raising a teenager, let alone a traumatized one who’d accidentally murdered a guy. But damn, living with him made me wish that he’d been the one to adopt me all those years ago.
He wasn’t affectionate in the traditional sense—there were no long, comforting hugs, no “I’m proud of you”s—but he gave me the kind of stability I hadn’t even realized I’d been craving. Quiet mornings with fresh coffee and scrambled eggs. Nights when we’d sit in the living room together, each doing our own thing, occasionally exchanging a thought or two.
Within the first week and a half at Paul’s, he’d helped me with beginning the process of dissolving my adoption, had my last name changed to his, taken me to the DMV to get a license, and looked into getting me signed up for courses at the community college in the town over.
He introduced me to his friends and neighbors as his son. Gave them all some story about not knowing he’d gotten an old girlfriend pregnant and only recently learning of my existence. According to him, he wanted to make up for the years we’d spentapart, which everyone loved. I was fairly certain that several of his dates had occurred because the women had found him admirable for getting involved in my life.
He gave me a job at his shop, Wild Roast, and helped me move into an apartment once I had a steady income coming in.
A few years in, after I’d graduated with a business degree, he made me a co-owner of Wild Roast.
I wasn’t sure where he was currently, but we stayed in touch. He was living life on the road with some buddies from a motorcycle club.
Sometimes I missed him so fiercely it caught me off guard. Especially on the quieter days at the shop, when the light would fall a certain way through the window and I could practically hear his heavy boots coming up behind the counter. I’d turn around out of habit, ready for his joke of the day, only to be greeted by silence.
Paul wasn’t the kind of man people wrote stories about. He didn’t give long speeches or make grand gestures. But he showed up when no one else did and supported me. He gave me a name when mine felt cursed, gave me roots when I’d been nothing but a ghost drifting between disasters.
And now, with the past creeping ever closer, I found myself clinging more and more to what he’d taught me.
Keep your head down.
Keep your hands busy.
Keep your truths close to your chest.
