Page 69 of Take the Blame (Seaside Mergers #3)

Chapter Thirty-Four

AUGUSTUS

If humans had the power to own each other’s perfect moments, all mine would belong to Alta Fernandez.

Ever since she’d agreed to let me get closer to her, I’d flourished in the knowledge that this woman could own my whole world.

I think I’d do anything for her. Her presence brought me safety, her friendship brought me fulfillment.

Her love—or at least I hoped it was that—showed me my future, painted in full color before my eyes with her in the very center of it.

All these years I’d been chasing down dreams and running from nightmares when a brown-eyed angel was the answer to my prayers all along.

But every coin had its opposite side, and it was just my luck that Alta’s had waited until I’d completely and utterly fallen for her to flip.

Hell, my whole life had suddenly flipped. Because looking up from my phone where there was a mysterious text from Alta that made my eyebrows pinch, on the other side of the glass window of the shop front doors, were my parents.

Fuck .

“Do you know her?” my mother asked after describing the woman of the fucking hour.

Her .

The girl who was making my heart ache, along with my head.

When I saw the first familiar face standing outside the shop door, I’d been prepared to let my mom in.

But then I saw my dad and something in my gut told me that whatever was waiting for me behind those grim faces was serious. Serious enough to leave the guys in charge at the shop and direct my parents down the boardwalk in the direction of my home.

It was surreal to be going anywhere with my parents, especially home. Ten years of building walls around my past and the ten minutes it took to drive home from the shop is all it took to send them tumbling down.

Mom entered first. She was more comfortable after having just seen me less than a month ago. Walking right into the entryway, of course the first thing she noticed were the photos. And of course she immediately got misty-eyed.

“These are good pictures,” she said. “I would have chosen the same.”

Of course she would have. I still remembered the days they were taken.

The first was of Mar after she won an award in school for ‘Exemplary Academic Achievement.’ We were so proud of her.

She was proud of herself. She kept telling us how she was going to run the world one day and I kept telling her how I believed it .

The second was of both Mar and I on a surprise visit home during one of my first study abroad trips. She’d been having a tough time with me being gone so I paid a visit to lighten her spirits.

Dad was more hesitant to come inside. Loitering in the doorway and pretending he was checking out the wood paneling of the frame as he stuffed his hands deep into his pockets.

If Mar looked like mom then I looked every bit like my father with his tall broad build, short dark curls and deep brown skin. I didn’t hate looking at him. It wasn’t like looking in a mirror like most people said, because I knew we weren’t the same. Not entirely.

The time had helped to distance myself from the bad parts. Oddly enough, as I looked at him now, waiting for an invitation into his own son’s home, I wasn’t really seeing that much bad at all.

“Come in, Dad,” I said, because without the invitation, it seemed like he might stay out there forever.

“Oh, well,” he started as if he might object. His eyes fell on his wife, already inside and looking at him with pointed blinking eyes and he sighed. “Alright then.”

I didn’t do the grand tour or anything. Just showed them straight to the living room so we could talk.

“We’re selling the company today,” Mom started.

“We were ,” Dad corrected her with a bit of a harumph. “But it might fall through.”

I felt my nails dig into the arms of the chair, my palms heating as I thought about the reason for their visit. If they were selling and they were in Seaside, it could only mean one of two things.

“Selling to who?” I asked, because suddenly it mattered.

“Fernandez and Ferguson,” Dad provided. “Mainly it was Fernandez that showed interest, but apparently the deal was too large for just one side of their merger.”

I nodded, the information spiraling in my brain, determining where it wanted to land.

Clay had asked me on multiple occasions how much I wanted to know about my family, and I’d vehemently told him nothing.

I wondered where this sat on the ‘ tell me anyway, asshole’ spectrum.

And her. Was there any chance that she’d known this was happening and understood that the implications circled back to me?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know yet, because I wasn’t sure what it even meant to me.

“So what happened?” I asked. “You said you were going to sell. Did it not work out?”

Did I want it to work out? Did the stabbing feeling in the middle of my chest mean that I wanted the company that was the background of my childhood to be sold off to people who could never care for the generations of work sown into those walls the way we did?

I think it meant the opposite. Even after all that bolstering with my mom, I think deep down I didn’t expect it to be going so fast, nor was I ready for it, which scared me more.

How could I not be ready to give up something I’d essentially given up a decade ago? How could I still not be ready to say goodbye? Because my sister was tied into those very walls every bit as much as me and saying goodbye to it meant saying goodbye to her.

Mom’s hand fluttered to her collar. She lifted it and smoothed it down titteringly as she spoke. “We were just about to sign when a girl came in and interrupted the meeting. She confiscated the contracts and asked us to leave.”

“A… girl?” The apprehensive feeling Alta’s message had given me finally landed on something concrete. “What girl?”

“Dark hair, mid-height, looked a lot like the Fernandez family,” Dad said.

So, my girl. Great.

“What did she say?” I asked, my voice not my own, my heartbeat pulsating through my entire body.

Dad’s head shook. “Just that we would have to renegotiate. ”

“And are you?” I asked. “Are you still going to sell to them?”

“Well,” Dad started, his voice the auditory version of him stalling at the front door, his eyes surveying me closely. “That’s why we wanted to talk to you.”

I swallowed. “You want to talk to me? About what?”

“About the company, son,” he said. “About your company.”

And there it was, the shameful truth of it all.

I stiffened. “Don’t call it that.”

“Why not? Not saying it doesn’t make it any less true,” he grumbled.

“It does,” I snapped, hating the idea that something so detrimental to our family was mine.

I tried to erase the fact of it with the birth of Ink and Mar among other things.

“I have other businesses now. Better businesses. And I released those rights years ago. So don’t call it that.

Nothing you say is going to bring me anywhere near that thing again.

I’m not like you, I can’t just… I can’t just be there and not think of her. ”

“And you think we can?” Dad’s voice was low and guarded.

My shoulders bowed under the weight of my regret. A year after my sister left, I inherited the family company as I was always supposed to. I became the official owner of the hypothetical vehicle for my sister’s disappearance.

I didn’t take it well. I didn’t take it at all. I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit there and claim something that had claimed my sister in all the wrong ways. That was claiming my family who, months earlier, had been great and was suddenly this shell of despair and forsaken memories.

So I left. My dad seemed all too happy to keep the business under his control for the time being anyway. What difference would it make if I left? If Mar could go, then so could I.

Dad could have the company. I didn’t want it. I never wanted it. I’d wanted to be a part of it because that’s just what we did in this family. But now that it had broken us, the only thing it brought me was shame.

Hypothetically, cutting it out of my life for good should have been freeing. I wanted it to be freeing.

So why did the thought of selling hurt so bad? And why was it made worse to find that Alta was in the middle of it.

Dad’s voice shook in his fight to gain composure.

“It’s been ten years of walking down halls full of ghosts. Ten years of seeing her—you, in every room, around every corner and having to reconcile with the fact that the two of you are gone and aren’t coming back.

“Now, I’ve made my mistakes, Aug. Things that I said, decisions I made are ones I might regret for the rest of my days—but I’ve punished myself enough, and I’m tired of the ghosts. I’m tired of the regrets, and the distance between what’s lost and what can still be salvaged.”

“The business, it’s never been the bargaining chip I hoped it would be when it came to your sister.

And I thought maybe if I got rid of it, your mother and I could finally start to win back what we lost while trying to protect it.

” He paused again. Looked at me in that studying way.

“I guess what I’m asking is… would it make a difference? ”

I recoiled, leaning back and blinking at my parents. “So you’re giving up something you thought would bring Mar back to, what, bring me back instead?”

“Not instead,” Dad said. “Never instead, Augustus. We want you both back. All we’ve ever wanted was a chance to work out what happened all those years ago and start somewhere new, where we could all be happy.”

“That’s not what you said then.” I ground out, agitated, confused, hurt. “None of this is, and hearing this for the first time now sounds like complete bullshit if you ask me. If you cared about her then where was this years ago? Where were you years ago, Dad?”

“I was angry,” he exploded. “I was angry and lashing out at anyone and anything. And I thought I could bring her back my way. All those years I thought something would come of holding onto the one thing she wanted most, even after I started to hate it, but it hasn’t.”

My eyes lowered to slits, my voice lowering to a dejected mumble. “I think she wanted you to believe her more than she wanted anything.”

It was less of an accusation and more of a depressing revelation. It was obvious he felt bad, maybe even heartbroken over it, but there was little to be done about it now. Too little and way too late.

“I think you’re right,” he said, just as dejected.

“Well, I think we’ll never know the truth without hearing it from her ourselves,” Mom interjected. “But we’d love to know you, Auggie. We’d love to know what you do, how you live, who you are after all these years. That’s all we want.”

I looked from my mom’s eyes to my dad’s and I was surprised that all I saw was sincerity in familiar brown irises.

“We thought we lost everything when your sister left. You were still young then Aug, we didn’t want to put all that stress on you, but we were broken. More broken than I ever thought we could be…” He paused, choking up a little, but ultimately met my eye. “And then we lost you too.”

Hissing, my body pulled up straight.

Okay, okay, okay .

I was not ready for this. The last time I spoke to my dad he had been yelling at me about getting Mar back his way or the highway. I’d chosen the highway. I’d chosen my own way, and he’d been a part of that decision. And now he was telling a different story.

But it was too late. Wasn’t it?

I looked at my hands, my head throbbing. “I have no clue what you should do. I still want nothing to do with it… But you’re not wrong. As much as I hate what it’s done to us, the business always meant something to Mar. It might always. I guess it’s one of those things we might never know.”

Quiet stretched over the room before my mom’s voice cut through it gently. “So if you want nothing to do with the business…does that mean you want nothing to do with us too?”

My throat felt like it was on fire as I swallowed and swallowed again. No matter how many times I tried, it refused to soothe.

Lo siento.

That’s what her text said. That’s all it said aside from two additional words I had yet to learn and didn’t have time to translate before my parents arrived.

Te amo.

Sorry for what? Did she know? Did she have any idea that this would hurt coming from her? That she was the one person I trusted to keep me whole and now her actions were causing me to split apart.

I stood abruptly. I couldn’t get through a conversation like this without knowing the answers to my heart first. And only one girl had those.

“I… I have to go handle something now, sorry,” I said.

My parents stood too, their shuffling steps mirroring mine as they rushed to follow me out.

My chest twisted and I paused, stopping dead in my tracks with my hand raising to scratch the back of my neck.

“Uh. You guys can hang out here if you want. I got TV and snacks. All the good stuff. You can, uh, bring your suitcases in too if you’re not already set up somewhere else. I have the space.”

“Oh…” my mother said, surprise written in every inch of her features. She looked at Dad and they both spoke to each other in some silent way before turning to me. “Y-yes, okay.”

I moved to fish the extra key out of one of the junk drawers and placed it in Mom’s palm, promising I wouldn’t be long .

As I retreated, my feet suddenly moved more urgently to carry me across town, my heart eager for answers my mind couldn’t conjure up. My mom’s warm hand snaked its way around my arm and she stopped me before I could leave, her eyes searching my eyes. “That girl, do you know her?”

And why did it feel like my heart was already breaking as I answered, “I thought I did.”