The Game of Love: (BWWM Romance) (24 page)

“Family emergency, or are you just trying to get out of telling the world who Olivia’s mother is? Are you ashamed that you had a baby with a
Black woman, Austin? You’re okay with presenting your
mixed
child to the world, but not her brown mother?”

For one brief second, Austin wished that Wendy was a man just so he could comfortably punch her in the face.

Refusing to dignify her accusation with a response, he turned and left the set. There was only one thing that he could think of that would cause Sommer to scream out in pure grief like that, and he didn’t want to think about what that one thing might be.

As he disappeared down the hallway, Wendy folded her arms across her chest.

“Where’s Austin going?” One of the producers asked, tugging at his headset. Shooting him an evil look, she spun around, stomped a heel, and released a shrill curse into the air.

It was nighttime before Austin finally arrived in Yearwood. He briefly stopped by his mother’s house to give Olivia a kiss before she was put down for the night, and did his best to ignore the solemn look on his mother’s face. He’d even refused to ask her what was wrong when she broke down in his arms, still unready to hear the news. For some reason, he wanted it to come from
Sommer.

Emma had understood and resigned herself to sobbing lightly into his chest.
Then she told him that Sommer had left her with Olivia to go off to have a few moments by herself, however no one knew exactly where she’d gone.

After he was sure the two would be okay, he set back out to see if he could figure out where
Sommer had gone. According to Reese, she hadn’t gone back to Cherry Avenue as her mother’s house now stood drearily on the lot as though all life had been sucked from it. So, on a whim, he headed for the bakery, even though it had already closed about an hour before his flight had landed.

There were no cars out front
, but one of the lights in the kitchen was on. He walked up to the door and pulled the handle to find it unlocked, and then navigated his way around the front, guided only by light coming in from one of the posts on the street. When he approached the door that led to the kitchen, he knocked.

“Go away,”
Sommer’s voice came through, sounding as though it had been robbed of all its strength.

“It’s me,
Sommer,” he answered. “Can I come in?”

There was silence for a few seconds
, and then she answered with a quiet, “Yes.”

When he pushed open the door, she was sitting on the floor with her back pressed against the large, wooden island that sat in the middle of the kitchen. In front of her on the floor was a large pie with a few slices cut out of it, and a half-eaten slice on a plate in her lap. Her hair was pulled back into a disheveled ponytail with a few wisps falling out of the elastic tie, and her face was stained by streaks of tears.

Austin walked over and slid onto the floor next to her. Turning, she reached into one of the island’s built-in cabinets, pulled out a second plate and fork, and roughly cut him a slice of what he recognized as Caroline’s signature chocolate pie with whipped cream and coconut flakes. She would make a fresh batch every Friday evening right before the dinner crowd rushed in. The pies were always cleaned out by the end of the night with people begging her to make them available more than one evening per week.

The fact that
Sommer was sitting in her mother’s bakery and eating the dessert that she was best known for only meant one thing.

“When?” Austin asked, accepting the portion she offered.

“Two forty-two this afternoon,” Sommer answered.

“What happened?”

“Brain herniation.” She stuffed a piece of pie into her mouth. “Cancer spread to her brain.”

Silence.

“And you?” Austin asked.

Sommer’s
throat quivered as she swallowed. “Devastated.”

He wanted to reach out to her and pull her into his chest as though he could drain all of he
r sadness into his body, but it wasn’t time yet.

“Talk to me,” he said instead.

She leaned forward and cut another sliver of pie. “I wasn’t there when she needed me.”

“But where were you,
Sommer?”

“In Dallas playing house with you. I should have been here. Being a daughter.”

It stung him to hear her refer to their arrangement as “playing house” when it had clearly been more than that.

“I had duties here,” she went on, cutting another piece without even touching the first slice. “Responsibilities. But what did I do? I shucked them and got knocked up by the first guy that came along.
Then I had the audacity to think I deserved a happily ever after.”

Austin set aside his slice. “Don’t do this to yourself,
Sommer. You know just as well as I do how much I love you.”

She reached to cut off a third slice to add to her other two uneaten pieces, but she cut the wedge too thin, causing it to break in half. In a fit of anger, she tossed the knife across the room, pushed the plate aside, and finally looked over at him. When he opened his arms, she fell right into them, releasing all of the emotion that he knew she’d
been keeping pent up inside. She gripped his shirt and he fastened his arms around her, pulling her into his chest. Restraining his own feelings at the sight of her devastation, he cleared his throat and pressed kisses into her hair.

“She knew she was dying,” she forced between tears, “I’ve been sitting here for the past two hours trying to think of the reason she would keep that from me. Why she wouldn’t tell me that she was dying. Then, when I can’t come up with a reason, at least a reason that I can accept, I get so mad, Austin. I get so pissed. She didn’t give me a chance to help her. She didn’t even give me a chance to prepare.
She
promised
that she would not hesitate to reach out for help when she really needed it.”

Sommer
thought back to the day they’d hooked pinkies right there in the kitchen.

“But, no matter how much I want to be angry at her for not giving me the chance to help her, I get it. I get it, Austin. I was sitting here thinking about what if this had happened and I had no one to be there for me. No Ms. Emma, no Olivia, no you…”

Her voice trailed off.

“Baby, I’m so sorry this happened.” He struggled to find the right words. “And I know how close you were with your mother. Right now, you probably feel like there’s no future
for you. I mean, how do you go on living when a part of you has died? Who can answer that for you?”

She solemnly shook her head. “I don’t know, Austin.”

“Well, what do you think your mother would want you to do?”

She shrugged.

“Okay, well let’s try this,” he continued. “If it had been me instead of your mother, what do you think I’d—”

“Don’t say that.” Her head shot up. “Don’t even speak that into existence. Despite everything that she’d been through, my mother sacrificed a lot to make sure that I had a decent life. A
good
life. What would she want me to do? She would want me to mourn her loss and keep her close to my heart. But then, she’d want me to think about the little girl fast asleep right now at your mother’s house. The same little girl who shows me the world whenever I look into her eyes. Then she’d want me to think about you. The way you’re always there for me regardless of whatever else it is you have going on, and the way you sat on the floor with me instead of trying to pull me up. How you got down to my level and let me grieve instead of trying to pull me out of my misery. Austin, I want to be pissed at her for not giving me the chance to try to have her around for a few more years, but every time I try, all I do is miss the way she smells, the way we joked together, the way she looked at me like I was a priceless treasure—”

“Which you are,” Austin cut in. “She looked at you that way because you are. To her, to me, and to
Livvie.”

“Which…
I am,” she echoed, her voice low. “As much as I try to be mad at her, I realize that I can only be thankful for the way she’s pushed me. The opportunities she’s given me: to see a new place and to fall in love with you and Livvie. And I know that I’ll be this way for a while, sad and heartbroken over the fact that I’ll never be able to hold my mother again, but there’s this weird calm that comes over me whenever I think about her.”

She placed a hand on her chest.

“She’s still here, Austin. My mother has always lived in my heart. And, because of that, she’ll never be gone. She lives on through me, through Livvie, and the lives she’s touched. God, Austin, I miss her, but it fills me with so much joy,
so
much joy, to know that she’s still with me, in my heart, and that she’s no longer in pain.”

Austin pressed a few more kisses into the top of her head.

“You are an amazing woman, Sommer Hayes,” he told her. “And I’m with you every step of the way.”

She squeezed him tighter and cried into his shirt. Austin laid his cheek on top of her head and let her grieve without saying a word. This was what she needed: a rock to
support her when the weight on her shoulders became unbearable. She didn’t need fumbled words of consolation. All she’d needed was to hold on to something that wouldn’t move and would never leave, no matter what life threw their way.

No matter what curveball fate had in store for
them.

Chapter Eleven

The year was 1954.

It was a raging Friday afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama, with temperatures exceeding the high nineties for the fifth day in a row. Four boys sat in the Montgomery County Courthouse in white collared shirts and tailored black jackets, none of them older than the age of sixteen. Curious onlookers filled the streets divided, some with furrowed brows of perspiration and others with looks of hope and righteousness.

Inside, the courtroom was packed to the hilt. Twelve jurors sat complacently in the juror’s box as the verdict was delivered to presiding judge Theodore Walcott. With a pert nod, the judge turned his attention to the foreman and the rest of the room followed suit. Breaths were hushed and the room was so still that the racing thumps of the four boys’ hearts could be heard reverberating around the room.

“And what say you, foreman?” Walcott asked.

“We, the jury, find the defendants not guilty, your honor.”

The room erupted in cheer
s. On the street, those who previously sported looks of hope were now awash with indignation.

Yet, a
lone cry pierced through the sky.

Four men rushed to the aid of the woman who fell, her face hidden beneath beads of sweat, grief, and sorrow. Her name was H
elena Cartwright, a thirty-four-year-old widow from New York City that had moved to Alabama with her ten-year-old son to live with family after her husband died from tuberculosis.

The next day, Saturday morning papers
expressed satisfaction that justice had been served. However, justice was nowhere present in that courtroom for Helena Cartwright. You see, the four White boys who pleaded and streamed tears of innocence in the courtroom were on trial for the murder of her young son, Henry Cartwright. The ten-year-old was last seen on the morning of October 10, 1953, playing in the front yard of his grandmother’s house.

Turning her back for a brief second, Helena had stepped inside to retrieve a
sweater for her son, but by the time she’d come back to the front, Henry had already gone missing.

Henry’s body would turn up four days later.

The only witness, a shut-in named Frances Tyler, claimed that he’d seen Henry playing when four boys came up to him and asked him if he’d like to join them. Only ten at the time, Henry had been intrigued by the older boys’ invitation and had followed them down the street in the direction of the wooded area where his body was later found. Frances identified the four boys as Charles “Charlie” Mason, John Cronar, James Faveratti, and William “Willie” Riley.

Gary looked up from his newspaper as the reporter recited the last name.

William “Willie” Riley is none other than the father of Dallas Quarterback Austin Riley. The same William Riley that Austin led us to believe had died. However, the man is still alive and well, and living somewhere deep in the recesses of the same Alabama neighborhood that rallied around his indiscretions sixty years ago.

Gary picked up his phone. “Selina?”

“I’m watching it,” Selina Mercado answered. “Where’s Austin? Is he seeing this?”

“No,” Gary answered. “He’s in North Carolina. At a funeral.”

Why is this news, you ask? Well, just a few days ago, Austin Riley revealed to the world that he was the father of a precious, chubby-cheeked baby girl. Searches surged the next day for the mother in question, mostly because of the fact that the girl shared only two traits with her father: his unusual eye-color and his dark hair. However, as the QB’s long, bandaged finger stroked his daughter’s cheek, there was a marked difference. Olivia Camden Riley’s skin was the color of a creamy latte and obviously, quite a bit darker than her father’s.