“Th-the beginning?” Autumn asked tentatively.
Nick nodded and gestured towards the back of the house. “Let’s move away from the front of the house, okay?”
She frowned before remembering, through the anxiety, that there was still considerable noise from the media. “Yes, of course. Uh, Liz…”
“It’s going to be okay, Autumn. Everything’s going to be perfectly fine,” she reassured her friend and shot Nick a warning glance. He lifted a brow and cleared his throat.
“Well?”
Autumn swallowed nervously before she let Liz steer her back towards the den. She didn’t know how to tell the story. Had never had to really retell the story more than once. She wasn’t sure if she’d make it through the ordeal of having to explain everything to Nick. He had a right to know, though. She certainly should’ve told him before now about everything. Hadn’t she already trusted him with so much?
“I’m like those desperate housewife chicks on television. I need to know.”
Remembering his words from a couple months ago, she tried to smile at him when he sat across from her. “You deserved to know all this a long time ago, Nick. I just thought it would be safer if more people didn’t know.”
“Where’s your child, Autumn?”
She bit her lip. “At a neighbor’s. She’s two houses over.” And safer there than here.
“And you don’t think your neighbor’s going to freak out when she sees all the reporters outside your house?” Nick asked.
Liz placed a hand on Autumn’s. “Sweetie, maybe we should get Lily back here. At least Mrs. Greenly won’t have to worry about what’s going on that way.”
“How? How will we get Lily over here? They’ve got the front covered,” Autumn whispered, frantically trying to think of a way to safely move her baby back to her house.
“We’ll figure it out. Call your neighbor, so she knows what’s going on,” Nick said quietly and had Autumn reaching for her phone.
Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the back door. Autumn jumped up and hurried over to open it. Nick simply waited as she spoke to whoever was on the other side and listened to the cheerful babbling of a toddler. He had to admit that, through the anger he felt at being kept in the dark, he was still interested in meeting Autumn’s kid. Funny, he’d never pegged Autumn Evans as the type for the mommy track. Besides, she was a small woman, and it was difficult to imagine her carrying a child for nine months.
His breath caught when Autumn stepped inside carrying the tiny little girl. They were nearly identical, he thought. The child had her mother’s smile, the eyes, and the beginnings of all that wild dark hair Autumn had. Mother and daughter were grinning at each other, but he could see the way Autumn kept running her hands over her daughter, as if to reassure herself that her baby was safe.
She looked over at Nick and studied him warily before approaching him. She knelt next to his chair and turned her daughter to face him. “Nick, this is Lily. Lily, baby, say hi to Nick.”
Lily’s pretty green eyes sparkled up at him as her smile flashed, and Nick found himself smiling back. “Nick,” she said very precisely. “Hi! Nick! Nick, Nick, Nick!”
Autumn set her down and had to smile at the way Lily eagerly scooted her way into Nick’s arms. “Well, she seems to like you. You’re her new favorite word.”
He grinned at the armful of energetic child he held. “I feel flattered. Hi, Lily.”
Autumn stepped back and sat next to Liz again. “Everything’s going to be okay, right?”
“It might just be,” Liz murmured back before her phone rang again. “Sorry, I have to take this.”
“I know.” She tried not to think of how they’d fix such a PR nightmare. “I’m sorry about this, Liz.”
“Don’t apologize. This, none of this, is your fault.”
Even as Liz moved off into the kitchen, Autumn couldn’t help but feel that it was. There were a thousand things she could’ve done to prevent this day from happening, she knew, and so many of those would involve Lily never having been conceived. That, she wasn’t sure she could live with.
“Who’s Lily’s father, Autumn?” Nick watched her carefully as she lifted her gaze from her hands to his face. Her eyes were saddened, and she seemed nearly lost.
“It’s what the magazines said, Nick. My twin sister’s fiancé,” she whispered.
He shook his head. No matter what she said, he couldn’t believe that she would’ve betrayed her sister in the way that the tabs had insinuated. Besides, “You didn’t tell me you had a sister. I thought you were an only child.”
“It’s easier to pretend to be an only child when the only times you’ve seen your sister was when you were so angry with her you couldn’t think straight. Well, that, or the two of you were strangers,” she added. How could she explain that she and Summer had stopped being sisters, let alone twins, the night their parents had died?
He was going to need the whole story, Nick decided. Though Lily had settled into his lap and was pressing the buttons on his locked Sidekick, he leaned forward and met her gaze. “Start at the beginning, Autumn. Whatever that may be.”
Somehow, she found that his direct, unwavering look gave her some measure of courage. He, too, knew what it was to have skeletons in the closet, and she realized that he was willing to listen before passing judgement on her.
“I’m sorry, Nick. Really and truly sorry for not telling you the whole truth before,” she began but was cut off.
“Autumn, I don’t give a damn about what your reasons for not telling me before were. I know about Lily now,” he said quietly, brushing his fingers over the baby’s curls and making her gurgle. “I just want to know what happened in the past to cause all those tabloids to go nuts and why there are so many paparazzi buzzing outside your door. So, please, will you just tell the freaking story?”
“Damn,” Lily enunciated perfectly.
Nick winced. “Sorry.”
“I think I can let that slide as I owed you several.” She sighed. “My parents named us Summer and Autumn, and she’s older than me by three minutes. I guess they named us pretty aptly because Summer was always more hotheaded than I was. We balanced each other out, though, and things were pretty good for the first few years. And then our parents died.”
When the Evans twins were left without their parents, relatives split the twins up and took them in. The day of their parents’ funeral had been the last time Autumn had seen Summer. They’d stood in the cemetery in their identical black dresses as the coffins had been lowered into the ground. Holding onto each other for comfort, they’d wept silently. Three hours later, Autumn had watched her twin head off for Seattle, while she stayed in North Carolina.
Summer had found Autumn in LA on their twentieth birthday. She’d had some story about being kicked out of the house when she was fifteen and having lived on the streets and finally managed to find her long-lost twin. Out of sentiment and the thrill of finding her sister again, Autumn had moved her into the small two bedroom apartment she’d been living in at the time.
Living with Summer had its ups and downs. Though they were physically identical to a T, the twins’ personalities were as different as night and day. Autumn went to auditions and worked as a waitress the rest of the time to pay her bills and the rent. Summer, though, barely worked and borrowed money from Autumn to pay for her addiction to needles and the substances she could inject into herself at an alarming regularity. It had scared the crap out of Autumn the first time she’d seen Summer high, but, thinking that she’d rather Summer was somewhere safe when she was, she’d learned to live with it. And the parties.
The parties that Summer threw pulled in some of the shadiest of LA’s residents and were chock full of alcohol and other more illegal substances, but Autumn had overlooked that, too. At first. When she’d found one of Summer’s guests stealing her jewelry, she’d threatened to throw her twin out. Summer, being conniving, had calmed her sister down and promised not to throw anymore parties.
On one condition.
Summer had met, fallen for, and gotten engaged to a fellow junkie and dealer. He’d been out of a place to live, and Summer had convinced Autumn to allow him to move in. Wary but sure that she’d rather one junkie over the crazies that the bashes had pulled in, she’d agreed and had bought mace. Just in case.
The mace failed her.
Summer and Kyle, her fiancé, convinced her to let them have a party. Nothing big, they promised her. And certainly drugs would be kept to a minimum. So, believing them, she’d agreed to it. When she’d returned home from another day of auditions and aching feet and found the bash in full swing, she’d reminded herself it was what she’d promised them.
Kyle had spotted her on her way to her quiet, off limits bedroom and tugged her back. Handing her a glass of something that she found tasted all right, she’d gotten into the mood quickly enough. She hadn’t noticed the mistake when Kyle had called her Summer nor did she really object to when he pulled her into one of the bedrooms. The objections had gotten stuck in her throat when he’d pushed her onto the bed and proceeded to force himself on her. Her head swimming and limbs feeling too heavy to move, to force him off, she’d been unable to do anything but scream inside her head as Kyle had gone about his business and walked out.
“Whatever he’d given me in that glass had had some sort of poison in it,” Autumn spoke quietly, willing her voice not to break. “That was why I couldn’t move, couldn’t push him off. God, I couldn’t even say anything to stop him.” When her breath hitched, she pressed a hand to her lips in an effort to hold back the sobs.
Nick didn’t know what to say. There were tears on her cheeks, and he wanted to brush them off. Then he wanted to find the bastard who’d hurt her and beat the crap out of him. He wasn’t sure how she’d gotten past something that terrible, but she had. He set Lily, who’d dozed off, on the couch as he shifted to crouch in front of Autumn.
“Did you call the cops?”
She shook her head and swiped at the tears. “No. I couldn’t think straight at all. I was hurt, afraid, and angry. God, was I angry. I scared the shit out of the two of them and my neighbors when I kicked them out.” She gave a half laugh and pressed her palm to her aching head. “I haven’t seen them since.”
“You found out you were pregnant.” He took her hands in his and squeezed comfortingly.
Autumn stared at their joined hands and remembered the emotions she’d felt when she had discovered that she was expecting. “I was terrified. I’d gotten all of the tests for STDs and HIV and whatever else I could think of getting. They all came back negative, except for the pregnancy one.” She shook her head. “First time I’d ever done any sort of sexual anything, and I get pregnant. Not such a great deal when you think about it.”
“But you never once thought of aborting the baby,” Liz reminded her as she came back to sit next to Autumn. “You were insistent that there was a reason you’d gotten pregnant, and you were going to see it through.”
Autumn shut her eyes for a moment. “I’m glad you were there for me, Lizzie. I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
“If you’d listened to me, you wouldn’t have had Lily or Rein of Silence.”
Nick frowned as he listened. “Did you plan on an abortion? Were you pregnant when you auditioned for the film?”
She opened her eyes and found herself looking right into his. “Adoption. I’d planned on adoption, and, yes, I auditioned for the role when I was three months gone. When I got the part, I had to explain to the producers why they needed to wait on filming. They’re the only ones who knew about the pregnancy besides Liz, Sherrie, and Leah.”
“Why did you keep Lily?”
“I began to love her. Instead of the feeling of disgust I’d wanted to feel towards the child that had been made in such a violent way, I fell in love with my baby. She would move around, and, every time I felt that fluttering, I got in deeper. By the seventh month, I realized I couldn’t let her go. And there she is,” she added, gesturing to the sleeping baby. “She’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and I wanted to protect her from the press, the attention.”
Nick let go of her hands and stood. “I get that, but I still wish you’d told me before when we talked about the past. You left out such an important piece of your life, Autumn. But you wanted to keep her safe, and you weren’t sure you could trust me,” he added when he saw both women open their mouths in protest. “I’m glad you could trust me now. Better late than never.”
Autumn gave him a weary smile. “Thank you, Nick. It means a lot that you’d get past your anger with me. That makes one less person to explain everything to.”
Liz placed a hand on her shoulder. “Autumn. Leah and Sherrie found out who leaked the story.”
“Who?”
“It was Summer, Autumn. Kyle OD’d and died last year, but Summer’s alive and kicking. It was your twin.”
Author's Chapter Notes:
I know, it's been a while since I've updated this story. Fortunately, it's moving into interesting areas of the plot, so there will be more frequent updates! Thanks for reading...and your reviews are fabulous and greatly appreciated!
