An hour later, we were parked outside a small-town mechanic shop with a large security team in tow, having given the paparazzi the slip on the highway. There was only one man working inside the shop. He was under a car when we walked in.
“You’ll have to wait.” Isaiah Alexander’s voice was neither low nor high.
I hoped, for Xander’s sake, that he really wasn’t involved in any of this.
“Need a hand?” Xander offered. When some people got nervous, they clammed up. Xander babbled. “I’m pretty good with mechanical things, unless or maybe especially if they’re flammable.”
That got a chuckle. “Spoken like someone with too much time on their hands.” Isaiah Alexander rolled out from underneath the car and stood. He was tall like Xander but broader through the shoulders. His skin was a darker brown, but their eyes were the same.
“You looking for a job?” he asked Xander, like wayward teenagers showed up here all the time with a trio of teenage girls and several bodyguards in tow.
“I’m Xander.” Xander swallowed. “Hawthorne.”
“I know who you are,” Isaiah said, his tone no-nonsense but somehow gentle. “Looking for a job?”
“Maybe.” Xander shifted his weight from foot to foot and then resumed nervous babbling. “I should probably warn you that I’ve dismantled four and a half Porsches past the point of no return in the last two years. But in my defense, they had it coming, and I needed the parts.”
Isaiah took that in stride. “Like to build things, do you?”
The question—and the slight upward curve of his lips—almost undid me, so I couldn’t imagine how hard it hit Xander.
“You’re not surprised to see me.” Xander sounded stunned—this from a person who could literally stun himself and proceed without missing a beat. “I thought you would be,” he blurted out. “Surprised. Or that you wouldn’t know who I was. I prepared a mental flowchart that geared my reaction toward your exact level of surprise and knowledge.”
Isaiah Alexander looked at his son, his expression steady. “Was it three-dimensional?”
“My mental flowchart?” Xander threw his hands up in the air. “Of course it was three-dimensional! Who makes two-dimensional flowcharts?”
“Nerds?” Thea suggested, and then she stage-whispered, “Ask me who makes three-dimensional flowcharts, Xander.”
“Thea.” Rebecca nudged her.
“I’m helping,” Thea insisted, and sure enough, Xander seemed to steady a little.
“You knew about me?” he asked Isaiah, quiet but more intense than I’d ever seen him.
Isaiah met Xander’s eyes. “Since before you were born.”
Then why weren’t you there? I thought with a ferocity that stole my breath. My own father had been mostly absent, but this was Xander, king of distractions and chaos, BHFF, who’d known about this man for months but had only come here for me.
I couldn’t bear the idea of him getting hurt.
“Do you want me to go?” Xander asked Isaiah hesitantly.
“Would I have asked you if you wanted a job,” Isaiah replied, “if I did?”
Xander blinked. Repeatedly. “I came here because we need to talk to you about Vincent Blake,” he said, like that was the one thing he could say of the thousands pounding through his brain.
Isaiah cocked an eyebrow. “Sounds like a want more than a need to me.”
“That’s what people say about second lunch,” Xander replied, reverting to babble mode, “and it’s a dirty lie.”
“On the lunch bit,” Isaiah told him, “we agree.” Then he turned, eyeing a nearby car. “I worked for Blake for just over two years, beginning shortly after you were born.”
Xander took a deep breath. “Right after you worked for my grandfather?”
Isaiah seemed to steel himself at the mention of Tobias Hawthorne. “The entire time I worked for Hawthorne, competitors tried to steal me away. Each time, your grandfather would sweeten my contract. I was twenty-two, a prodigy, on the top of the world—and then I wasn’t.” Isaiah popped the hood of the car. “After Hawthorne fired me, the offers dried up pretty damn quick. I went from young, rash, and flying high with a mid-six-figure salary to untouchable overnight.”
“Because of Skye,” Xander bit out.
Isaiah looked up from the engine to pin Xander with a look. “I made my own decisions where your mother was concerned, Xander.”
“And the old man punished you for them,” Xander replied, like a kid pushing on a bruise to see how much it hurt.
“It wasn’t a punishment.” Isaiah returned his attention to the car. “It was strategy. I was a twenty-two-year-old who’d been so flush with cash that I’d never imagined it would stop coming. I’d blown through most of what I’d made, so once I was fired and blacklisted, I conveniently didn’t have the resources to put up much of a fight for custody.”
It wasn’t about Skye. I realized with a start what Isaiah Alexander was saying. Tobias Hawthorne fired Isaiah because of Xander. Not because the old man had been unhappy about his youngest grandson’s conception but because he’d refused to share him.
“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.”
