Empire of Lies - Whitney G. Page 0,87

light a cigar, waiting for the woman who lives in 3246 to walk outside her front door.

At exactly nine-thirty, she steps onto the front porch—wearing a bright yellow sundress and a matching floppy hat.

With her long brown hair and light green eyes, she’s pretty, but not in a striking way.

I’ve watched her from afar for an entire year, taking flights during my free time just to get glimpses of her life. She has two sons, a husband she adores, a spot on The Parent Board at the exclusive school down the street. Her name is Lauren Clarkson, and I’ve wanted to force her to sit down and talk for years, but I can never pull the trigger. No pun intended.

All of her “friends” know her as the mom who likes to bake cookies for the neighborhood kids on Sunday afternoons. Her husband works in Silicon Valley, and he has no idea that she was once two steps away from a heroin overdose, one strike away from losing everything she had.

I watch as she picks up one of her sons and kisses him on the cheek. He laughs and demands to be put down to return to the swing set. The other son runs into her arms to take advantage of her time.

She’s doing for them what she was never able to do for me and Trevor. She didn’t have the time or money “to handle two really advanced boys,” so she gave them up to the very uncle who’d abused her when she was younger. The uncle who promised to keep us “only for a little while,” and make sure we were placed into the best foster care.

She never called to check and see if he did it, though. Once she dropped us off on his doorstep, we no longer existed.

Instead, she placed us in the back of her mind and never sought us out. And after picking up the pieces of her miserable life, she checked into rehab and got clean. She washed away all of the things that made up her past—her children included, and then she hitchhiked here. To the fucking West Coast.

Once, I sent her a Christmas card—telling her that we wanted to reconnect. That Trevor was wondering if she was still alive and well, and that he still held out hope that he’d be able to see her again.

She never wrote back.

In fact, I sat across from her in a car as she checked the mail that day. Watched her face pale as she read my handwritten words. Then I watched her look over her shoulder, up and down the street, to make sure that no one was watching before she ripped my heart to pieces and tossed the paper shreds down the drain.

I never told Trevor that I found her.

I know him well enough to know that he’d never understand it, and he’d add her to our personal list. He’d even insist that he be the one to handle her.

As she chases her oldest son around a makeshift swing, my phone buzzes in my jacket pocket.

“Yeah?” I answer.

“The McGregor job is in the works,” Trevor says. “I need a few more days of research, though.”

“Noted.”

“Where are you on Ryan Teddy, the foster care asshole who Uncle Avery paid off?”

“I’m—” I pause as he steps out of the same house where my ex-mother lives, as he kisses her on the cheek. He’s married to another woman who lives in a different suburb, and he and my mother are, apparently, fucking cheaters.

My blood boils as he waves to each of her sons on his way out, as his familiar, depraved greeting runs through my mind.

“You can call me Teddy, like a teddy bear…Treat me like your favorite teddy bear…”

I shake my head. It’s ironic that my mother flew across the country to tear her life away from ours; she’s unknowingly bound us together anyway.

“Are you there, Michael?” Trevor asks. “Did you find him?”

“I did,” I say, turning around to walk away. “I want to save him for last.”

Michael

Now

The sound of the automatic coffee maker whirring forces my eyes to flutter open far earlier than I intended. Meredith is sound asleep on my chest—her hair frizzy and wild, her hand still cupping my cock after a long night of insatiable sex.

I’ll never be able to get enough…

Looking at the clock on the wall, I blink repeatedly when I read the time. It says that it’s six fifteen in the morning, but I know that can’t be fucking