Maybe that was a choice.
Their aunt stared at Gigi for a moment. “You look like him, you know. My boy.”
“I know,” Gigi said softly.
Grayson thought about Acacia telling him that the resemblance had endeared Gigi to their father when she was very young, and for reasons he could neither pinpoint nor understand, his heart ached.
This woman was his aunt. Their aunt, and she’d never met a single one of them.
“Are you here to tell me why your father won’t return my calls?” Kim asked bluntly.
Savannah was the first one to summon up a reply to that question. “Dad’s gone.”
Kim’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“He left on a business trip a year and a half ago and never came back.” Savannah’s voice didn’t waver.
“Did you call the police?” Kim dumped her dachshund on one of the recliners. Cinnamon hopped to the floor with a thud.
“Mom did, back then. But he’s not missing,” Gigi told her aunt. “He left.”
Grayson could hear how saying those words hurt her. Now you believe he left. That should have made Grayson happy. That had been his goal, after all. To keep her—to keep both of them—from questioning that explanation, from getting at the truth.
All I have to do is make sure it stays that way.
“It appears your brother was having some difficulties,” Grayson told his aunt. “Financial and with the law.”
Kim walked to the far wall. She braced her hand against it for a moment, then pulled down a framed picture. “This is him.” She walked back, more slowly, then held out the frame. “Shep. He was twelve or thirteen here. That’s Colin beside him.”
Grayson made himself look at the photograph. A lanky young teen with silvery gray eyes held a basketball. A toddler reached up for it.
Kim let out a breath. “Shep came to live with me not long after Colin was born. Our mom died, and her husband decided he was done with kids who weren’t his. It was either take Shep in or let him go to foster care, so I took him in. Colin’s father was in and out of prison for years, so most of the time, it was just me, taking care of both boys.”
“You call him Shep,” Grayson said, because that observation felt like less of a landmine than looking at that picture and searching for any kind of resemblance between himself and the boys in the frame.
“That was his name. Not short for anything. Just Shep. He changed it the summer before he went to college. His last name, too.” She snorted. “Sheffield Grayson. He got a basketball scholarship. Met a pretty girl.” Kim settled down into one of the recliners and waited for each of them to do the same before she continued, “My brother was pretty much done with me after that. Didn’t want anything to do with the rest of my kids, but he loved Colin.” There was a slight pause. “Shep took care of Colin a lot growing up. Too much, probably. Used to take him with him to basketball practice when I was…” Kim looked down. “Working.”
Kim was a recovered addict. Her brother hadn’t just watched her son while she was working.
As if she could hear his thoughts, the woman looked away from Grayson and to the girls. “After Shep married your mother, he told me that Colin was going to live with them.”
“And you let your brother take your son,” Grayson said softly.
“I had other mouths to feed. Shep agreed to help with that. But he wanted Colin with him.”
Grayson hadn’t realized, when Sheffield Grayson had said that his nephew was the closest thing he’d ever had to a son, that he’d raised the kid from the time he was a child himself.
Grayson wondered—just for a moment—if a man who’d loved his nephew like that, sacrificed for his nephew like that, could have been all bad.
He thought about the photos in the safe-deposit box, and breathing got just a little bit harder. We didn’t come here to talk about the past, he reminded himself. “Did your brother continue to help you financially after Colin passed?” Grayson asked, steering the conversation back toward the reason they’d come.
The withdrawal slips. Petty cash, with a notation on the back.
“Not the way he could have,” Kim said bitterly. “Not the way he would have if Colin was alive. Shep blamed me, you know. Said that Colin picked up my bad habits, but it’s not true. Colin never touched pills until he tore his ACL. It put him out a season, but do you think the great Sheffield Grayson ever let up?”
Grayson didn’t know much about Colin Anders Wright, other than the fact that he and a young Toby Hawthorne, Grayson’s uncle, had met at a high-priced residential rehab facility more than two decades before. Colin and Toby had then reunited for a drug-and-alcohol-fueled road trip that had ended on Hawthorne Island with three dead, Colin included.