Page 33 of The Sweet Spot (Kodiaks Hockey #3)

Chapter Thirty-Three

Wolseley

W e put Christmas behind us. The next thing I had to look forward to was a week home. Brandon had a ridiculously long road trip that coincided with some kind of curling tournament at Graham Place, so he would be gone twelve days. I took full advantage and booked a flight to see my parents and my brother’s family. I couldn’t wait to see Mom and Dad. We did video calls all the time, but it wasn’t the same.

As with any trip I took abroad, Mom and Dad were there to pick me up at the airport. They hugged me so tightly it was hard to breathe. On the drive home, I told them all about Vancouver, what Tangi and Jill were up to, and, of course, all about Brandon. I left out the part about his parents. I didn’t think Mom and Dad needed to know that.

“You look happy, sweetheart,” Dad said. “That makes us happy.”

“It’s been a weird last six months,” I said. “The restaurant, Daniel, moving to Vancouver for a job, becoming a personal chef, falling in love with Brandon. Last summer, I thought I’d hit bottom, and look at me now.”

“We are so proud of you,” Mom said, hugging the life out of me again.

When we got to the house, my brother and his family were there. I got to spend time with my little niece and nephew, and while Mom, Dad, and Jen were busy with them, Craig pulled me aside.

“I have to tell you something,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere private.”

This sounded ominous. I followed him to my bedroom, and we closed the door behind us. Unlike Vancouver and its mild weather, it was freezing cold outside and hardly a place for us to talk unless we wanted a healthy dose of frostbite. Craig leaned up against my dresser and had pain etched on his face. I was starting to worry that someone was sick. Mom and Dad? One of Craig’s kids? Jen?

“I don’t want you to get mad at me.”

Oh god. This was a terrible way to start a conversation.

“What have you done?” I asked. Craig didn’t usually do anything reckless, so he had me on edge.

“Things changed for me when I had kids, and if you have kids one day, I think you’ll understand this. I want them to be happy and healthy, and to know what they are dealing with if something ever comes up. I know you get asked, too, about family histories and everything, but I had to know, so I looked into our birth parents.”

I couldn’t stop myself from frowning. Craig and I had made a pact a long time ago not to find them. They didn’t want us, so why should we want them in our lives? I didn’t so much harbor resentment; it was more about not complicating my life with people who had made a choice not to be our parents. I didn’t hate them, but I also didn’t need them. Besides, we had the best parents two foster kids could have. But at the same time, I could appreciate where he was coming from. We knew nothing about our pasts, or not much, anyway.

“Did you find them?” I asked.

“I did. Before you ask, I ran all this past Mom and Dad before I even did it. I wasn’t going to keep anything from them.”

“They were okay with it?”

“They understood.”

I thought of Brandon’s parents for a moment. That thought scared me. If our birth parents were anything like Peter and Susan … “Did you connect with them?”

“I did with our birth mother. I talked to her once. Wols, I respect you and love you to death, so if you don’t want to know, I won’t tell you. I just didn’t want to blindside you at some point down the road.”

I looked out the window. Night had fallen, but it was cloudy outside, and the snow always reflected the light a little. I’d left the rain of Vancouver to feet and feet of snow for Minnesota, and while the cold had been a shock to my system, I found it comforting as well.

I looked at Craig. “What did she say?”

He let out a sigh of relief. “She told me that she was never married to our father. That he walked out on her after you were born. She couldn’t make ends meet, and her family couldn’t help her because they had nothing to help with, so she gave us up. She said it was hard, that she thought about us all the time. I told her we had good lives and incredible parents. That made her happy. I asked about family history and what she could tell me about our birth father’s. I wrote it all down so I would have a record of it.”

“She was nice?”

“Yes. I connected with her on Facebook so she could see the kids. If you ever want her info, I can give it to you. If you want to meet her.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “What did she say about our father?”

“Not a lot. He was a truck driver coming across the border all the time. They met at a diner she worked at. They hooked up, had kids, and then he decided to go back home because it was hard to find work. Sounds like he didn’t want to be much of a father. She never heard from him again.”

I groaned. “How do you have kids and never want to know a thing about them?”

“Beats me. “

“I don’t ever want to meet him,” I said with disgust.

“I get that. And I didn’t want to keep any of this from you, but you were going through a lot with the restaurant. Now seemed like a better time to tell you.”

“I totally get why you contacted her. I’m not sure I can do it.”

“I understand.”

We rejoined Mom and Dad and the kids. We all had dinner together, and then Craig and Jen went home. I kept thinking about my birth parents, more so my birth mother since it sounded like my birth father was a deadbeat. But the more time I spent with Mom and Dad and remembered how they nurtured us, made us feel loved and secure, the less I wanted to know about my birth mother.

Mom had the whole week planned almost to the minute, but I carved out some time to go see Jan. I wanted to thank her in person for all she’d done and try to pay something for her time. Mom gave me a few hours to myself, so I headed down to Jan’s office for the appointment. I checked in with one of the receptionists, who insisted I make myself comfortable and help myself to a beverage. That was when I saw the full coffee bar, complete with fridges filled with various pop, juice, bottled water, and just about anything you could think of. On the white marble island was an assortment of pastries, and I thought about trying a muffin but decided against the potential sticky fingers.

I helped myself to a bottle of water and returned to Wendy, the receptionist. Wendy looked up and smiled. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

“Does Jan usually take on pro bono cases like this?”

Wendy tilted her head. “Pro bono? Like what cases?”

“Mine.”

Wendy blinked a few times, then typed away at her computer. A few seconds later, without looking up, she said, “Your case wasn’t pro bono.”

I gasped. Oh god, how much money did I owe? Would she take partial payments? But hadn’t we discussed this on the phone? She’d said it was pro bono, right? Maybe I was remembering wrong, and a full-on panic was setting in. “What? I thought she was doing this pro bono! How much do I owe?” I had money set aside, probably enough to pay the bill if the bill wasn’t astronomical. How had this happened? I was suddenly sweaty and feeling a need to sit down. Had anyone passed out in their office before?

“Nothing,” Wendy said. “All your invoices are paid.”

I gaped at her. What was going on?

“Sorry ... paid? Who paid it? Can you print out a copy of the invoices?”

“Sure. And give me a second, and I’ll tell you who paid it.”

She printed off the invoices painfully slow, and when she handed them to me, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. The legal bills were just over sixty-seven thousand dollars.

When I glanced back at Wendy, the color had vanished from her face. “Oh no. Okay, maybe I should talk to Jan about this. I see a note on the file.”

Wendy had screwed up, and she’d just figured it out. But as the saying went, the horses were already out of the barn. Or whatever that saying was, because horses shouldn’t be in a barn to begin with. They led happy lives in the wild.

“I’m not going to get you in trouble. I just need to know if Brandon Warde paid the bill.”

She took a long second to answer. “Yes.”

“And here I was to thank Jan for her pro bono work. I guess that’s pointless now. I’m not going to say anything about this, but I think I’m going to go. I don’t need to see her anymore.”

Wendy looked a little scared, but I assured her again that I wouldn’t get her in trouble. I then took off before Jan showed up.

I didn’t know what to do with the invoices. The only thing I knew was how furious I was. Not once had Brandon told me about this. How many times had I brought up Jan? He had more than a few opportunities to come clean, but instead, he and Jan had come up with this lie!

It bothered me for the last few days of my trip, and when I got home, I called a friends meeting with Jill and Tangi, to be held at Tangi’s house. The Kodiaks road trip had a few days left, so I had more than enough time to stew about this.

“Look at these,” I said. “He paid all my invoices. He lied to me. ”

Jill looked over the invoices briefly and handed them to Tangi. She spent even less time looking at them.

“Yeah, he’s a horrible human being. Dump him,” Jill said sarcastically.

I scowled at her, and she laughed.

“You are completely missing the point. He led me to believe that I was getting Jan’s services pro bono, and Jan went along with that. Instead, he paid more than sixty thousand dollars.”

“Pure evil,” Tangi said with a grin. “I’m with Jill. Kick him to the curb.”

I wagged my finger at both of them. “I don’t want to be a kept woman. I don’t want a man to save me. I am not a damsel in distress, and I certainly don’t like the lies.”

“I get it, and it’s all shitty,” Jill said. “But you know who does something like that? A person who loves you.”

I shook my head. “We weren’t even dating then.”

Tangi smirked. “I think I rest my case. It seems he loved you before he even knew it.”

“He felt sorry for me,” I protested, suddenly losing the will to fight. He had told me he loved me. No, that was not the subject at hand.

“No, no, no,” Jill said. “You’re not going to do this. We won’t let you sabotage your relationship with him. This is what I think you should do, and maybe Tangi has another strategy, but mine is simple: get over it!”

I looked at Tangi.

“I concur,” she said.

“So I just let this go like it never happened?”

“If you want, you can tell him you found out, thank him for doing it, and get over it!” Jill said.

“I still concur,” Tangi said.

I wanted to argue, but they were right. Was I going to start something over lawyer fees? No, but I did still want him to know I knew and that in the future, we had to be partners, not unwitting participants because I didn’t want secrets out there.

“I hate when you guys are right.”

Tangi smiled and put her arm around my shoulder. “I just channeled what my best friend would tell me to do in this situation.”

She had me there.