from behind the corner, startling me.
I stare at him, at first unable to open my mouth and say a word.
“Oh, no worries, this is great,” my dad says, taking a sip.
“What are you doing here?” I finally ask.
“I came as soon as I heard. I'm really sorry, Emma,” Alex says and pulls me close to him in a half hug.
I quickly jerk away, but that doesn't seem to faze him one bit.
“Why did you call him?” I demand to know of my mom.
“Craig and I were having a meeting about his investment portfolio,” Alex says. “When he got the call from Lindsey, he took off straight for the hospital and I came as soon as I could.”
I clench my jaw and move it from side to side trying to alleviate the tension in my head, but it doesn't help.
Alex's involvement in my family is more than just irritating, it's offensive. I know that we are all a little bit incestuous here with Craig working for my father's firm and him investing money in Alex's hedge fund.
Up until the day of our engagement, I never saw anything wrong with that, but now?
I can't stop thinking about how involved Alex is in my life and how much I hate that.
“Can I talk to you?” I ask, pulling Alex to one side.
I lead him down the corridor halfway to the nurses’ station but hopefully out of earshot from my family.
When I look at him and his perfectly poised eyes and chiseled jaw, my thoughts scatter.
“I don't like you being here,” I finally say.
“I'm sorry, but Craig asked me to come.”
“I don't like you being so involved with my family.”
“You had no problem with that before.” He points out.
“Yes, that's when I thought that you were going to be joining my family. That's when I thought that you were an honorable person who wasn't going to hurt me and lie to me.”
“I'm sorry for what I did and I will keep apologizing for as long as you need to hear it. To tell you the truth, I wasn't going to come here, but Craig said that he really wanted me to be here. When I tried to leave, your dad insisted that I stay.”
26
Emma
An hour in the hospital is like two days on the outside. I bury my face in my phone, aimlessly scrolling through social media and the news.
It becomes an endless loop of information that just makes me feel worse instead of better.
It feels like I'm being productive, but I'm actually just losing track of time and the grip on my emotional state.
Finally, I decide to just pull out my laptop and do some actual work. I go to Google and again look up the name Parish. The name is relatively popular, but none of them seem like good options for who my Liam is.
I do a similar search on Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube thinking maybe there are some videos of him out there under that name.
My search comes up with nothing.
Then I do the same thing for Peter Mueller Schmidt.
I was tempted to search that name as soon as I got into the car, but something kept me from doing it.
I guess I was scared of what I might find.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I find nothing.
That name doesn't seem to match anyone who I know as Liam, but that doesn't mean that…
What does that mean exactly?
I'm a journalist, but my research skills when it comes to identities is limited by my experience.
I should really contact that private investigator, but I won’t allow myself to do that until I’ve exhausted everything that I can think of myself.
“Try Liam Carson Benjamin Linville,” Alex says, looking over my shoulder.
I jerk to close my laptop but then pull it back open. He did say that he was going to tell me more about him.
This seems like as good a time as any.
“Carson Benjamin? How do you know that?”
“I went to school with him, remember? I remember because we did some project together in seventh grade and we talked about our names. I think it was a genealogy thing.”
“Tell me more,” I say.
I'm sitting somewhere near my father and our talking is clearly distracting him.
So, Alex waves me over to the window. I sit across from him, nursing my cold cup of coffee and ask him again.
“We were friends. Sort of. I had other friends, but he was kind of shy.”
“So, he's from California, too?” I ask.
“That's the thing, his parents lived there for some