Page 63 of Trusting Blake
Blake scoffs, like he too thinks our parents are immature and embarrassing. “Yeah, she did. They really hate each other, huh? Mom actually ended up telling me something she hadn’t mentioned before. About your dad.”
“Oh?” I say curiously, dropping my fork on my plate with a clatter.
“Apparently, he tried to apologize to her once. A few years later after he married your mom,” he says, “but she wasn’t ready to forgive him yet, so she didn’t accept his apology. She needed more time or something.”
My features slacken. The day Ruben confronted LeAnne on her porch, he mentioned during the car ride back to the ranch that Dad tried to smooth things over with her, to fix the mess he’d made. Neither Ruben nor I believed that was true, but if LeAnne herself admits he tried. . . then I guess he must have.
“Why does she still hold such a grudge against him then?” I wonder out loud, feeling defensive. Surely Dad isn’t so callous that hewouldn’thave tried to make things right with LeAnne, and I’m angry at myself for thinking he could be. “He tried to apologize.”
Blake takes my empty plate and stacks it on top of his, standing up. “Yeah, but she wanted to forgive him when the time felt right forher.That didn’t really happen until she married my dad and had me. She left your dad a voicemail, asking him to meet her so they could talk things over, because I guess she was tired of the awkwardness or whatever. Kind of hard to keep avoiding each other in a small town like Fairview, you know? But he never showed up, and a week later, she received a letter in the mail.”
I furrow my eyebrows. “A letter?”
“Yeah,” Blake says with an uneasy laugh. “Coward’s way out, right? Believe it or not, she let me read it.”
“Wait. She still has it?” I ask in surprise. Blake is seventeen, which means. . . she’s held onto this letter for seventeen years? “Can I see it?”
Blake carries the plates over to the sink and glances back at me, debating my request. It’s a total invasion of privacy, I know that, but I need to read for myself what my dad wrote in the letter that resulted in LeAnne holding a lifelong grudge against him.
“Yeah,” Blake eventually agrees. “But just pretend you don’t know it exists.”
“I promise.”
He hesitates another moment, perhaps wrong-footed at the odd turn our morning together has taken. “It’s in her office,” he says at last, then gestures for me to follow.
For being the mayor of a major metropolitan area, I’m surprised LeAnne’s home office doesn’t even have a simple lock on it. What if someone broke in, ransacking the mayor’s private home in search of important campaign documents? But then I remember she has her real mayor’s office in Nashville, so I guess the files kept here are of a more personal nature. Like Dad’s letter.
Blake sits down on the luxury leather desk chair, wheeling it around the room from filing cabinet to bookcase, stealing quick peeks into each one as he tries to remember where exactly he saw his mom store the letter. Meanwhile, my heart is pounding in my chest.
“Here!” Blake says at last, slamming a drawer shut and circling around in the chair to present me with a folded piece of paper. “Are you sure you want to see this, Mila? It’s short, but definitely not sweet.”
I nod as I anxiously take the dog-eared letter from him and unfold it, revealing a mere few sentences scrawled in blocky letters. My breath is caught in my throat as I read:
Leanne,
I got your voicemail, but I don’t ever want to see you again. You had your chance to accept my apology, but you didn’t take it. I don’t want you in my life. It’s why I broke free of you in the first place.
Do not contact me ever again.
Everett.
“Pretty harsh, huh?” says Blake, breaking the uncomfortable silence my shock has created.
It’s nasty. My blood runs cold. “Oh my God.”
“I know,” Blake agrees, and I see that he’s angry too. “And then he had the balls to get that Ruben guy to send her a non-disclosure agreement years down the line, even though she’d already tried to make her peace with him! To be honest, she felt that was a total slap in the face, so I can understand why she refused to sign it,” he adds, slipping the letter out of my hands and carefully folding it back up. “You know I rarely ever see eye-to-eye with my mom, and I always thought she was being melodramatic, but your dadisa serious asshole. At least in that respect.”
My throat is like sandpaper, and I can feel my complexion turning pale under my freckles. I swallow and try to put my thoughts in some kind of order. “No, Blake, you don’t understand—”
“What?” he says, his tone defensive. “I know he’s your dad, but don’t try and justify—”
“No,” I whisper. “This isn’t my dad’s handwriting.” I glance up at him with wide eyes. “It’s my mom’s.”
Blake’s lips form an “O”, almost as shocked as I am by my revelation. We stand there, looking at each other, still in our morning-after-the-night-before clothes but with the romance of our morning pancakes draining away.
Then we hear the click of the front door, and we both jump in alarm at the sound of heels working their way down the hall.
“Shit,” Blake mutters, leaping up from the executive chair toward the filing cabinet. He pulls open the drawer to tuck the letter back in its place, but he’s flustered and panicky, nowhere near quick enough.
