“So you just gave up on your son?” Rebecca asked Isaiah sharply. She wasn’t a person who knew how to fight for herself, but she’d fight for Xander every time.
“I managed to scrape together enough for a third-rate lawyer to file suit when Xander was born. The court ordered a paternity test. But wouldn’t you know, it came back negative.”
So said the man with Xander’s eyes. Xander’s smile. The man who heard the word “flowchart” and asked if Xander built them in three dimensions.
“Skye named me Alexander.” Xander wasn’t, by nature, a quiet person, but his voice was barely audible now. “They faked the DNA test.”
“I couldn’t prove it,” Isaiah told him. “I couldn’t get near you.” He tweaked something, then slammed the hood of the car. “And I couldn’t get a job. Enter Vincent Blake.”
“I don’t want to talk about Vincent Blake,” Xander said with enough intensity that I half expected him to start yelling. Instead, his voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re saying that you wanted me?”
I thought about how badly I’d wanted Toby to be my father instead of Ricky Grambs, about Rebecca growing up invisible and Eve moving out the day she turned eighteen. I thought about Libby, whose mother had taught her she deserved a partner that degraded and controlled her, about Jameson’s hunger and Grayson’s punishing perfection, both of them competing for approval that was always just out of reach.
I thought about Xander and how scared he’d been to come here.
You’re saying that you wanted me? The question echoed all around us.
Isaiah responded: “Still do.”
Xander bolted. One second, he was there, and the next, he was out the door.
“We’ll go after him,” Rebecca told me, taking Thea with her. “You ask whatever you need to, Avery, because Xander can’t. He shouldn’t have to.”
The door slammed behind Rebecca and Thea, and I looked up at Isaiah Alexander. Your son is amazing, I thought. You can’t ever hurt him. But I forced myself to focus on the reason we’d come here and the questions Xander couldn’t ask. “So after you were fired and blacklisted, Vincent Blake just came out of nowhere and offered you a job?”
Isaiah assessed me for so long that I felt about four years old and five inches tall. But whatever he saw in my face earned me an answer. “Blake came to me at my lowest point, told me that he wasn’t scared of Tobias Hawthorne, and if I wasn’t, either, we could do great things together. He offered me a position as the head of his new innovation lab. I had free rein to invent whatever I wanted, as long as I did it in his name. I had money again. I had freedom.”
“So why did you quit?” I asked. That was a guess, but my gut said it was a good one.
“I started noticing things I wasn’t supposed to notice,” Isaiah said calmly. “The pattern’s there if you look for it. People who stand in Vincent Blake’s way—they aren’t standing for long. Accidents were had. People disappeared. Nothing anyone could prove. Nothing that could be tied to Blake, but once I saw the pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. I knew who I was working for.”
We’d come here in part to find out what Vincent Blake was capable of. And now I knew.
“So I quit,” Isaiah said. “I took the money I’d earned—and saved this time—and I bought this place so I’d never have to work for another Vincent Blake or Tobias Hawthorne again.”
What had happened to Isaiah wasn’t right. None of this was right.
Rebecca and Thea reappeared. Xander wasn’t with them. “There’s a doughnut shop down the street,” Rebecca told me, out of breath. “We have a twelve-jelly-and-cream situation.”
I looked back at Isaiah.
“Sounds like you’re needed,” he said, calmly returning his attention to the car he’d been working on. “I’ll be here.”
CHAPTER 60
Rebecca and Thea led me to a doughnut shop, then waited outside. I found Xander sitting at a table by himself, stacking doughnuts one on top of the other. By my count, there were five.
“Behold!” Xander declared. “The Leaning Tower of Bavarian Cream-a!”
“Where are the other seven doughnuts?” I asked him, taking his cue and not pushing this too much too soon.
Xander shook his head. “I have so many regrets.”
“You literally just picked up another doughnut,” I pointed out.
“I couldn’t possibly regret this doughnut,” Xander stated emphatically.
I softened my voice. “You just found out that the Hawthorne family faked a paternity test to keep your father, who wanted you, out of your life. It’s okay to be angry or devastated or…”
“I don’t super excel at anger, and devastation is really more for people who slow down long enough to let their brains focus on the sadness. My expertise falls more squarely in the Venn diagram overlap between unbridled enthusiasm and infinite—”
“Xander.” I reached across the table and laid my hand on top of his. For a moment, he just sat there, looking down at our hands.
“You know I love you, Avery, but I don’t want to talk to you about this.” Xander removed his hand from underneath mine. “I don’t want to have to explain to you what I don’t want to explain to you. I just want to finish this doughnut and eat his four best doughnut-y friends and congratulate myself for probably not vomiting.”
I didn’t say another word. I just sat there with him until Oren appeared in my peripheral vision. He inclined his head to the right. Xander and I had been spotted—by a local, I was guessing, but when it came to the Hawthorne family and the Hawthorne heiress nothing stayed local for long.
We went back to Isaiah’s garage. “Do you want us to wait outside?” I asked Xander.
“No. I just want you to give me that little metal disk,” Xander replied. “I’m assuming you have it on you?”
I did, and I handed it to him because right now, I would have done anything Xander wanted.
He pushed open the door and walked slowly back to the car Isaiah was working on. “I need to ask you two things. First, what are your thoughts on Rube Goldberg machines?”
“Never made one.” Isaiah met Xander’s gaze. “But I tend to think they should have catapults.”
Xander nodded, like that was an acceptable answer. “Second, have you ever seen something like this before?” He held the disk out to Isaiah, the two of them towering over everyone else present.
Isaiah took the disk from Xander. “Where the hell did you kids get this?”
“You do know what it is,” Xander said, his eyes lighting up. “Some kind of artifact?”
“Artifact?” Isaiah shook his head, handing the disk back to Xander, who handed it to me. “No. That is Mr. Blake’s calling card. He always called it the family seal.”
I thought about the wax seal on the envelope of the last message, bearing the same symbol.
“I think he had, what, five of those coins?” Isaiah continued. “If you had one of the seals, it meant you had Blake’s blessing to play in his empire as you wished—until you displeased him. If that happened, you were stripped of the seal and the status and power that came with it. It’s how Blake kept his family on a very short string. Every person with a drop of his blood or his dead wife’s fought tooth and nail to have one of the seals.”