“I should have met him the moment he was born. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been such a selfish person,” I say, getting angry all over again.
“Selfish?” she questions on a laugh.
“I was trying to protect you. To help you.”
“I never fucking asked for it!” I tell her, getting to my feet and leaving.
On the way to my car, I call my secretary. He picks up on the third ring.
“Sir?”
“I need everything and anything you can find on ADHD in little boys. Research, books, articles. Send me a list and send me some documents,” I tell him.
He’s completely and utterly silent.
“Jason?” I prompt.
“Right, of course, sir. You need files on ADHD to be provided when?” he questions.
“Tomorrow morning,” I tell him.
He says he’ll get right on it and I hang up the phone. Home isn’t a place I would like to go to yet, so I choose to drive around Arcola. As a child, it used to feel like such a big place, but now that I’ve lived in a city like New York, it just feels so damn small.
It’s a picturesque town with good roads and huge houses, but it feels a little claustrophobic. I feel like everyone’s watching me at all times, trying to gauge what I’m going to do. It can get a little hard when everyone looks up to you on some level.
I understand what Christine did. She was trying to protect Noah. Being a Crane isn’t always amazing. We have little to no privacy, both here and in big cities.
Here, the neighbors are constantly gossiping and all up in our business. In the cities, the media’s always trying to get a piece of us. It’s something I’ve been surrounded by since birth, and maybe she was right to keep my son away from that. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that in doing so, she kept him away from his biggest support system. And people who would have done quite literally anything for him.
CHAPTER10
CHRISTINE
“Noah,” I call, opening his door slowly.
He’s mad at me because I made him eat vegetables. He rushed into his room and I gave him ten minutes to calm down before I came to find him. I find him pacing the length of his room, walking from one end to the other. He likes pacing; according to him, it helps him clear his head.
I know he got that trait from his dad. One of my favorite things to do when I was twelve was watch Michael walk aimlessly around a room.
“Mama, I need my medicine,” he tells me, looking up.
“Oh, okay,” I say, moving toward him and lifting him onto my lap. “Is something wrong?”
“My head hurts. And I’ve been having trouble reading my book. I don’t understand anything on it,” he tells me, pointing at the book Tia bought him two weeks ago.
“Okay, how about I read to you? If I give you your medicine now, you’ll get tired and fall asleep. And it’s not your bedtime yet.”
“What time is it?” he questions.
“It’s six-thirty. Remember, we have dinner by six so we can eat with Aunt Tia before she goes home.”
“Has she gone home?”
I nod in reply.
“Do you still want me to read to you?” I ask him and he shakes his head.
“I did better on my test today. And my teacher apologized for scolding me when I failed the first time. She said it was wrong of her and she should have been more patient.”