The Charade: A Billionaire/Fake Relationship Romance (Eden Falls Academy)
The Charade: Chapter 30

‘YOU FOUND OUT WHAT?’ I asked, bolting upright and scooting off my bed to stand in front of my sister.

‘I didn’t want to say anything until I had more information, but ever since I found out that mom and Carter’s dad were so close in high school it got me curious about things,’ Elyse said, her eyes darting to Carter and then back to me. ‘At first I thought it must have been just a high-school romance that ended when they graduated, but then I started talking to Mrs. Simmons one day because I saw her in some of the photos from the play mom was in and found out that she was in their grade. We got to talking about things and she told me that Mom and Carter’s dad were a pretty serious couple in high school and that everyone had been sure they were going to get married someday.’

‘Mrs. Simmons told you this?’ I furrowed my brow, wondering why Elyse hadn’t told me anything about this before.

‘Yes.’ Elyse nodded. ‘Anyway, I was intrigued by this because Mom never talked about Mr. Hastings at all, or really said anything about high school for that matter. So I asked her to tell me everything she could about their relationship, since Mom has always been so closed up about her past.’

‘And what did she say?’ I asked. ‘Did she say why they broke up? Or when?’

‘I guess they had to break up when they graduated and Mom had to move back to Israel,’ Elyse said with a shrug. ‘Mrs. Simmons said she lost touch with Mom after that, but I guess Mr. Hastings took it pretty badly. She said she thinks he even offered to help Mom get her visa renewed and do whatever to make it work between them, but then Grandpa got really sick at the time and so that complicated things.’

‘I remember Mom saying something about Grandpa having his heart attack and surgeries right about the time she was starting college.’

Elyse nodded. ‘Yes. And since Mr. Hastings had to help run his family business and Mom didn’t feel right about leaving her dad, they ended up just having to accept that they couldn’t be together at that time.’

‘Sad,’ I said, thinking about how I would feel if I was in my mom’s shoes.

Carter cleared his throat. ‘So how does this lead to you figuring out who your dad is?’

Elyse bit her lip, and after drawing in a shaky breath, she said, ‘Okay, so according to what Mrs. Simmons said, Carter’s dad ended up dating around again about a year later when he realized that the long-distance thing with our mom wasn’t going to work out. Mrs. Simmons was at Yale with him and remembers him being even more popular with the girls in college than he was in high school.”

‘Uh-huh.’ Carter came to stand by my side and waved his hand like he wanted Elyse to get to the point.

‘And he must have met his wife Dawn sometime after that,’ Elyse said, looking at Carter for confirmation.

‘I think they met during his last year at college,’ Carter said, filling in what he knew of his dad’s history. ‘They dated for about a year, but then Dawn’s ex-husband tried to come back into the picture and so there was a bunch of drama. She ended up going back to him for a little while since they had Ian together and she wanted to try and make things work for his sake.’

‘Is that when your dad went to Guatemala?’ I asked Carter.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He thought some manual labor would help him clear his mind.’ He tilted his head to the side. ‘And apparently, the fling with my mom was supposed to help with that, too.’

I winced because I knew the repercussions that fling had brought to Carter and his family.

‘But didn’t your dad get back with Dawn shortly after that?’ I asked.

Nash had been born about seven months after Carter, so they couldn’t have been broken up for too long, could they?

‘I think they got back together that summer.’

‘Do you know when?’ Elyse narrowed her eyes.

‘I don’t know.’ Carter ran a hand through his hair, which I’d tousled during our make-out session earlier. ‘I think it could have been around my dad’s birthday.’

‘And when’s that?’ Elyse asked, the earnest expression on her face telling me that this information was really important to her for some reason.

‘August thirteenth,’ Carter said, rubbing his forearm.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Elyse, my heart pounding because it almost seemed like she was trying to make it sound like my boyfriend’s dad might be the mystery man who’d gotten our mom pregnant. ‘Why does any of this even matter?’

Please don’t matter.

Please, please don’t let Mr. Hastings be our dad, too.

I’d wanted to know who my dad was for my whole life—wanted to know who had given me and Elyse half of our genetic makeup. But if it was Mr. Hastings who had gotten my mom pregnant, I didn’t want to hear it.

I’d rather not ever find out who my dad was than find out it was the father of the only guy I’d ever wanted to date.

I couldn’t accept that Carter might be my brother.

Elyse handed me the papers she’d been holding on to. ‘These are some of the photos that Mrs. Simmons took from their five-year reunion.’

Carter leaned closer to me so we could look at the images printed on the copy paper together. The first sheet of paper showed a twenty-something version of my mom and Carter’s dad posing together for the camera, with Mr. Hastings’s arm wrapped tightly around my mom’s waist and huge smiles on their faces.

The second page had a photo of them sitting at a round table with a few other people from their graduating class. Mom and Mr. Hastings weren’t sitting by each other in this photo, but the camera had captured my mom looking across the table at Mr. Hastings with what I could only interpret as a longing expression on her face.

I knew it was longing because it was exactly the way I’d caught Elyse looking at Mack the past several weeks during our group study sessions.

We Cohen women did not hide our feelings very well.

The next paper had a group shot of everyone who had gone to the five-year reunion. It took a moment to find my mom, but after scanning the rows of faces, I spotted her at the end of the middle row surrounded by random people I didn’t recognize.

‘Is your dad in this?’ I swallowed as I looked up at Carter who was also studying the photos, anxiety visible on his handsome face.

The handsome face that couldn’t belong to anyone related to me.

Right?

‘Yes,’ he said after a second, pointing to a spot on the top. ‘He’s right there.’

‘So there’s only one photo of them posing together,’ I said, trying to persuade everyone that it was all just a major coincidence. Elyse was probably just making something out of nothing because she wanted to know who our dad was as much as I did.

But Elyse just nodded toward the papers I held and said, ‘There’s one more.’

I switched the papers around so I could look at the last photo Elyse had printed off. In this one, my mom was sandwiched between Mr. Hastings and another guy with brown hair who I didn’t recognize and who was the same height as Carter’s dad. Mack’s dad was standing on the other side of Mr. Hastings.

My mom may have been standing slightly closer to Mr. Hastings in the last photo, but that didn’t necessarily mean that anything was going on between them that night.

‘I don’t think this proves anything,’ I said to Elyse, handing the papers back to her. ‘It just shows that Mom and Carter’s dad were at the same party one night. I think you’re doing a lot of mental gymnastics to make this work in your mind.’

‘You think so?’ Elyse raised her eyebrows at me, folding her arms. ‘Then why don’t you ask me when this reunion happened?’

‘When did it happen?’ Carter asked, looking between my sister and me as if trying to figure this puzzle out.

A strange mix of hope and fear swirled in my gut as I waited for my sister to answer.

Elyse pressed her lips together, and only after my palms had begun to sweat did she say, ‘It was July twenty-ninth.’

July twenty-ninth?

Elyse just stared at me with eyes that were identical to mine, waiting for me to piece together the puzzle she had already solved. But when I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me, she added, ‘It was July twenty-ninth the summer before we were born.’

Oh.

That summer…

My whole body went tingly and a heavy feeling filled my chest, because though I’d been searching for this answer for my entire life, I suddenly wanted to un-hear everything that Elyse had just told me.

Even though I’d never been that great at math, based on the fact that Elyse and I had been born two weeks early, if you subtracted nine months from our due date, we would have been conceived around the end of July or beginning of August of the year our mom had turned twenty-three.

Which meant, our mom had likely gotten pregnant the weekend of her high school reunion.

And there was a huge chance that Carter was our half-brother.

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