“I know why you stayed. You’ve paid a price and that price was years of your life.”
“To protect my father’s creation, his empire.” I swallow hard. “His memory.”
“I told you,” he replies softly. “I know why you stayed and I get it. I stayed for a long time, too. I wanted to be a Kingston but the price for me became too high.”
“Was there a price you paid for leaving?”
“You. I left you behind, but no matter how many regrets I have about that now, that was how it had to be then, Harper. I didn’t know me like I do now. I wasn’t the man I am now.”
I think of my miscarriage, and how that baby wasn’t meant to be, but I wanted it to be. I wanted it badly. I swallow hard and look at another tattoo, a grim reaper with numbers next to it. “This one,” I say, before it hits me that this could be about his mother, but it’s too late. I’ve committed to the question, and he’s told me to ask anything. “What does it mean?” I ask, meeting his stare.
“You would pick that right now, wouldn’t you?” he teases.
“If you don’t want to talk about it—”
“Tuus mors, mea vita,” he says. Latin for ‘your death, my life.’”
His mother.
I was right.
This is about his mother.
I swallow hard, feeling a punch of emotion for the young man who lost a parent and so very brutally. “What does it mean to you, Eric?”
“It’s meant a lot of things to me at different times in my life, but ultimately ‘kill o
r be killed’ is the meaning it’s taken on in my later years. It’s about survival.”
I accept this answer. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t about his mother at all. “Did you get it when you were in the Navy?” I ask.
“No. You can’t tell now, since it’s surrounded by the rest of my ink, but it was one of my first tattoos. I got it after my mother committed suicide.” He glances skyward and seems to struggle with what he is about to say before he fixes me in a turbulent stare. “My mother wrote those words to me in her suicide note. My death. Your life.”
Emotion balls in my throat. “I’m sorry I chose that tattoo.”
“I’m not,” he says, squeezing my hand. “You want to know me, you have to know her and how she affected who I am. Harper, I protect myself but I also protect those I care about, the way she did. She protected me. She made the ultimate sacrifice for me. When another person would have fought for a cure to cancer, for more life, she fought for me. The way I’m fighting for you. You just don’t know it yet and with good reason. I haven’t shown you, but I will. I am. Wait and see.”
The plane shakes and then immediately enters calmer air once more. The plane is steady, the flying smooth, but I’m in knots. His mother died. He has no real family left, but I was carrying his child. I don’t know what that means to him but it meant, it means, so very much to me. It’s time to talk. We have to have this conversation no matter what the outcome. We have to talk about the child we lost.
CHAPTER FOUR
Harper
Suddenly, I’m the one jumping subjects and driving us to the place I didn’t want to go. “I would have called you if I hadn’t miscarried. I swear to you, I would have, but what was the point once—once I lost the baby?” I choke up and try to turn away, but my seat is locked and Eric is holding my legs.
I look down at my lap, at our hands, and Eric cups my face, forcing my eyes to his. “Tell me. Tell me everything. Forget you said anything on my voicemail. I want to hear it from you.”
“What did Isaac tell you?”
“It doesn’t matter what Isaac told me. It matters what you tell me.”
“Because I didn’t tell you when it happened?”
“You told me why. I understand why.”
“Mostly on voicemail, though. I didn’t know if you would believe the baby was yours, and it was. I hadn’t been with anyone else. And I thought you’d think I had some Kingston agenda for telling you when you could do nothing to change what happened.” The plane shudders a moment, as if warning me to stop now.
“I might have,” he admits. “I don’t like to believe that I would have, but I saw you on that stage with the family at the party, and I left believing you were one of them. And that means manipulative and self-serving. In my mind, at that point in my life, I left you before you burned me.”