Here Without You Read Free Page B

a couple of other children, a few pieces of ancient playground equipment, and a mousy middle-aged woman talking on a cell phone.
    Compared to my stepbrother, who’s a few months older, this child looks slight. Undersized. His clothes are mismatched and his face is dirty, as are his small hands. His hair is shorn so close to his scalp that I can barely make out the colour – though given his DNA, it must be blond. Light browsendorse that guesstimate. His nearly bare head makes him look even more vulnerable than his size.
    When I was young, I hid behind my hair. Tilting my chin forward, I watched the world slide by between the pale strands, pretending indifference to the resentful body language of my increasingly miserable parents and their half-heartedly cryptic conversations, so easily decoded. I anticipated their end before they saw it, and made plans to go with my father when they finally split.
    But I was missing a few crucial pieces of the puzzle, and stupidly, so was my mother. Neither of us predicted that other woman – the soon-to-be third wife. The son she would give my father, beginning his third tiny empire, negating the second. Negating
me
.
    Now, from the static image in my hand, River stares straight into my eyes as though he knows a high-powered zoom lens is trained on him. As though he knows I am on the other side of it. His eyes aren’t the ice blue I share with my father. They’re Reid’s deep blue. Dark, like the sky at dusk in that split second after the sun disappears for the day. His mouth, too, is Reid’s. His button nose is mine.
    What an unfair trick God decided to play on me. This dirty, scrawny, ill-clothed child is mine, and the vision I’ve carried of the life I gave him – when I’ve thought of him at all – was a lie. I thought he’d be cared for. Wanted. Loved.
    Sitting across from Bethany Shank four hours ago, I refused to cry no matter how my eyes stung. ‘I want to see him.’ I heard the words I said aloud, followed by her intake of breath. She was no more shocked at me than I was at myself.
    ‘Well, let’s not make emotional dec–’
    ‘I. Want. To. See. Him,’ I said, my sub-zero gaze freezing her in place. ‘Find out what we need to do to make that happen.’
    She cleared her throat and smiled blandly. ‘Arranging meetings is not a function of my investigative services, Ms Cameron.’
    A good decade older than me, Ms Shank is yet another woman who wrongly imagined me to be a vaporous young Hollywood plaything. I tend to allow the world to think I’m spoiled and gullible. Not only is it mildly amusing most of the time, it makes for satisfying expressions of shock on the opposite side of the table during contract negotiations. Behind closed conference-room doors, I am my father’s daughter. My agent and manager know this. A handful of studio execs know this too.
    I cocked an eyebrow. ‘I suggest you make it part of your services, Ms Shank.’
    She drew herself up in the chair, her mouth falling open slightly.
    Leaning forward, I fixed her with a concentrated stare. ‘You’re an investigator. I’m asking you to investigate. Are you concerned about further compensation? Do you require an advance of some sort? I was assured you were the best in the business. I would hate to have to report otherwise to potential clientele.’
    Her face took on the mottled appearance of someone newly disabused of unjustified superiority. Ten minutes later, she left my apartment after assuring me that she would be in touch tomorrow with more information.
    Once she took off, I fell on to the sofa and dredged up memories I’d never intended to exhume.
    I went to live with my stepmother in Texas for the six months it took to get from the blue stick to the birth. My parents were irate and disbelieving when I refused to get an abortion, as though I was staging a rebellion for the sake of extra attention.
    ‘What do you
want
, Brooke?’ My mother threw her shoes across the room – yet I was