Love Irresistibly (11 page)

Cade’s gaze softened at the thought. “Sure, we can talk in my office. Follow me.” He led Zach through the corridor and gestured to his office door. “Have a seat.” With a quick glance at Demi, he signaled that she should hold any calls that came in. Then he shut the door behind them and sat down at his desk. “So,” he began casually, careful not to go into cross-examination mode, “what case would you like to talk about?”

Zach exhaled. “This is really awkward.”

“Take your time,” Cade assured him.

“I wasn’t sure I could go through with this. When they started asking me all those questions at the front desk, like my name and the purpose of my visit and for some kind of picture ID, I sort of panicked. I’d decided to bail, but on the way out I bumped into you and it seemed like, I don’t know, a sign or something.”

Cade cocked his head, catching something Zach had said. “So you recognized me?”

“Well, yeah. You’re Cade Morgan.”

Cade smiled at the slightly reverent way Zach said his name. “I take it you’re a football fan.” Either that, or he was strangely fascinated with criminal prosecutors.

“I get that from my dad—he’s big into football, too.” Realizing that the next move was his, Zach shifted in his chair. Then his eyes fell on the bag on Cade’s desk. “Cookies. So that’s what smells so good in here.”

Clearly, Zach was stalling, but Cade went with it. No sense pushing the kid; he needed to do this, whatever it was, on his own time. “Help yourself. I got suckered into buying twelve of them.”

Like any teenaged boy offered something to eat, Zach didn’t hesitate. He reached for the bag and looked inside. “Cool, there’s one with M&Ms.” He pulled out the cookie and inhaled it in one bite.

Cade smiled. “Those are my favorite, too.”

For some reason, this seemed to strike a chord with Zach. He swallowed the cookie, his expression turning more sober. “I lied about my name. Actually, Zach Thomas is my first and middle name. I was afraid you wouldn’t agree to see me if I gave the receptionist my last name.”

Cade looked at him in confusion. “Why would I not want to see you if I knew your last name?”

“Because it’s Garrity.”

Cade’s entire body went still. Whatever he’d been prepared to hear from Zach, it wasn’t this.

Zach looked him dead in the eyes. “And I’m pretty sure you’re my brother.”

Ten

CADE SAID NOTHING
for a moment—probably the first time in his life he’d been rendered speechless. “You think I’m you’re brother,” he finally managed.

“Is your father Noah Garrity?” Zach asked bluntly. He gestured at Cade. “I mean, I kind of know already. You look just like him.”

Do I look like him, Mom?

Cade winced at the sudden flashback, a ten-year-old boy excited and desperately eager for information.

Quickly, he pushed the memory away. “Yes.” It took a lot for him to admit even that much.

Zach smiled as if this was the greatest news in the world. “I knew it. He’s my dad, too. That means we’re half brothers.”

“He’s not my dad.”

Zach’s smile faded. “But you just said—”

“Biologically, Noah Garrity may be my father, but I don’t have a
dad
.”

Zach nodded, looking embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean . . . I don’t, like, know the whole story between you guys.”

“It’s a pretty short story. I met him once when I was ten, then I never saw or heard from him again.”

Zach stared awkwardly at the ground. “So that probably makes this extra-weird for you.”

Cade ran his hand over his mouth.
Noah Garrity
. Christ, he hadn’t thought about the man in years. And, frankly, he would’ve preferred
not
to have thought about him for many more.

Given the sudden appearance of the teenager sitting across from him, that plan had just been blown out of the water. “I think we can safely classify this as extra-weird, yes.” He took a moment to look Zach over, more carefully this time. The boy’s hair was a lighter brown than his, but when it came to the eyes he could’ve been looking in a mirror. “How did you find me?” A thought suddenly occurred to him. “Don’t tell me Noah sent you.”

“No,” Zach said quickly. “He and my mom don’t even know I’m here. My dad . . . doesn’t like to talk about you.”

Glad to hear it’s mutual
. “Then how did you figure out who I am?”

“He told me once, a long time ago,” Zach said. “I was four years old, and we were watching your Rose Bowl game. It’s the first time I can remember watching a game with my dad. He was cheering and shouting at the TV, and in the last play, when you threw that awesome pass and won the game, he grabbed me and did this stupid little dance around the coffee table.”

Zach had been smiling at the memory, but then his expression turned serious. “Then everyone realized you were hurt, and the sportscasters were talking about how you’d taken a bad hit and it could be a broken shoulder. I remember that the entire stadium was on their feet, clapping for you as the coach and trainer helped you off the field. And I looked over at my dad, and there were tears in his eyes. It was the first time I’d seen my dad cry, so I asked him if he was sad because the man on TV had gotten hurt. And then he turned to me and said, ‘That man is your brother, Zach.’”

Cade stared at him, just . . . unable to understand any of that. The kid might as well have walked into his office and told him that he was a time traveler from the future who’d been sent to save the planet from evil cyborgs, it was that surreal. He had
one
memory of Noah Garrity, and it ended with Noah walking out of his life for good. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same Noah Garrity? From Hoffman Estates, dropped out of Conant High School?”

Zach seemed surprised by this. “He never told me he’d dropped out. I just knew that he’d played wide receiver and was some big star in high school.” He switched gears, finishing his story. “I don’t think he meant to tell me you were his son, because anytime I asked about you after that, he would change the subject. But it stuck with me, the fact that I had a brother out there. I always wondered what you might be like, and, you know, whether we might get along and stuff. Then I saw your name in the papers last week with the Senator Sanderson case, and I . . . guess I just wanted to finally meet you.”

Cade ran his hand through his hair.

He had a
brother
.

Since Noah had written him off, Cade had never allowed himself to speculate about the rest of the Garrity family—especially since none of them had ever reached out to him.

Until now, apparently.

“Are there any more of you? Any siblings, I mean?” he asked.

Zach shook his head. “Nah. It’s just me.”

“What are you looking for, Zach? From me.” Cade hoped the words didn’t sound callous; he was just trying to wrap his mind around all this and be as direct as possible.

Zach shrugged. “Look, I get that I’m basically this total stranger to you, but I don’t know . . . maybe we could grab a burger sometime or whatever. Just hang out.”

Cade saw the eagerness in Zach’s eyes, a look he understood. Because twenty-three years ago, he’d felt the exact same thing, and had put himself out there for a near stranger, just as Zach was doing now.

He didn’t know jack squat about being a brother. And, no doubt, he was wholly unprepared to have suddenly acquired one at 3:45 on a Friday afternoon. But he did know one thing.

He would not do to this kid what Noah Garrity had once done to him.

So he nodded. “I’d like that, Zach.”

* * *

AFTER ZACH LEFT,
Cade shut his office door and took a seat at his desk. The two of them had agreed to meet for lunch the following weekend at DMK Burger Bar. Cade had only one condition, and it was non-negotiable.

“Noah can’t be there,” he’d said. “I don’t care what you do or don’t tell him about the fact that you came to see me. That’s your business with him. But he is
not
a part of this.”

Zach had seemed a little surprised by his vehemence, but he’d nodded nevertheless. “Yeah. Sure. No problem.”

Cade didn’t know what it meant that Noah had been crying over his Rose Bowl game, and he didn’t care. He was a lawyer; he dealt with facts. And in this case, there was one irrefutable fact, the only one that mattered: Noah Garrity hadn’t bothered to contact him in twenty-three years. He wasn’t a part of Cade’s life, and never would be.

Cade knew enough of the story, although it had taken him years as a kid to piece it together. Noah Garrity got his mother, Christine Morgan, pregnant during their last semester of high school. Christine’s parents had remained surprisingly levelheaded that their homecoming queen daughter was going to have a baby; Noah, on the other hand, had freaked out. His older brother had flunked out of Illinois State University and decided to move to California with a buddy to open a landscaping business. When they asked Noah to join them, he packed his bags for the sunny west coast, and broke up with Christine by leaving a note in her school locker.
Don’t hate me, babe. I’m just not ready to be someone’s father.

Luckily for Cade, Christine realized that—ready or not—the arrival of a baby, one she’d decided to keep, meant that
somebody
needed to act responsibly. She finished high school and enrolled in the local community college. Cade, never one to cause his mother too much trouble, conveniently arrived during winter break, allowing Christine—with her mother as a babysitter—to resume classes by February. After two years, she received her associate’s degree and transferred, with Cade, to Northern Illinois University where she earned a nursing degree.

When Cade was about five years old, right around the time he and his mother moved back to the Chicago area and she took her first nursing job, he began to ask questions about his father. Quickly, he realized it was a sore subject. His grandparents tried to skirt around the topic as much as possible, and his mother, only twenty-three years old at the time, talked about Noah exclusively in the negative: how he’d dropped out of school, how he’d flaked on them when she’d gotten pregnant, how he’d never tried to contact them once. Eventually, Cade just stopped asking.

Until the day, five years later, when his mother came to
him
.

He’d been in his room, playing
Super Mario Land
on his Nintendo Game Boy before bedtime, when she knocked on the door and said they needed to talk.

Cade knew exactly what
that
meant. Trou-ble. “It was Sean’s idea to put the cricket down Mandy Franklin’s dress during the assembly.”

His mother folded her arms across her chest. “I hadn’t heard anything about the assembly. But now I know what we’ll be talking about next.”

Oops
.

She sat down on the bed next to him. “That phone call I just got, the one I took in the bedroom? That was your father.”

Cade pushed the Game Boy aside and sat up. His. . . 
father
? “What did he want? Did he say anything about me?”

“He did. He’s back from California and he asked if he could see you.”

Cade got an excited but nervous feeling in his stomach, like when he was waiting in line for one of the upside-down roller coasters at Six Flags. “What did you say?”

“I told him that it was up to you,” she said.

When she said nothing further, Cade wondered if this was some kind of test.

“Will you be mad if I say yes?” he asked cautiously.

She shook her head. “I won’t be mad, sweetie.” She reached over and brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “This is your decision to make.”

Cade thought that over. “When does he want to see me?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I want to see him.”

His mom nodded, as if she’d expected that answer. “Okay. I’ll let him know.”

“You’re making that weird smile,” Cade told her. “The fake one you make whenever Mrs. Kramer comes over to remind us that our grass is getting a little long.”

“Yes, well, Mrs. Kramer needs to find something better to do with her time than monitor the length of her neighbors’ front lawns.” She suddenly reached over and pulled him in for a hug. “I’ll work on the smile for tomorrow, Cade. For you.”

She’d tucked him in and then lay down on the bed next to him, something she only did when he was sick or on nights like the one when he was positive he’d heard a strange scraping noise in the closet after his friend Sean’s older brother had let them watch
A Nightmare on Elm Street
. “Is there anything you want to ask me?” she said as they both looked up at the ceiling, her head on the pillow next to his.

“Maybe you can just tell me something about him?” Cade paused. “But, Mom . . . how about if you tell me something good this time?”

His mom swallowed, and wiped her eyes.
Uh-oh
, Cade thought. Maybe he’d pushed it with that one.

She turned to face him. “I haven’t totally messed you up, have I?”

Cade pretended to think about that. “Even if you have, I probably wouldn’t know it.”

She smiled, just like he’d hoped. Then she tucked her arm under the pillow, getting more comfortable. “All right, three good things about Noah Garrity. He can make people laugh. Back in high school, everyone wanted to be friends with him. Second, he was an awesome football player. Whenever he had the ball, the entire stadium cheered so loud you could probably hear it a mile away. And last,” she stopped for a moment, as if this one was most important, “for the homecoming dance, he told me he’d spent an hour picking out the flowers for my wrist corsage. He said he couldn’t find anything as pretty as me.”

Cade parsed through these precious nuggets, the most information he’d learned about Noah Garrity in ten years. He thought the part about the flowers sounded a little mushy and lame, but the other stuff was good to know. And he couldn’t resist one last question. “Do I look like him, Mom?”

She touched his cheek softly. “The spitting image.”

All next morning, his stomach was doing the roller-coaster thing again. His mother seemed about to say something when he came out of his room dressed in his best button-down shirt, but then she bit her lip and went back to making their breakfast.