Not A Single Word

Chapter 13

It was finally time to tell him the truth.

He had earned her trust and she couldn't put it off any longer. Things were getting serious and dangerous. Even if she risked his disgust at the end she needed to tell him everything. Beside this beats therapy and God knew she would need a lot of it after all of this ended.

Taking the paper and charcoal from him she waited for his questions patiently.

He saw it in her eyes. He knew when she was ready.

"What's your name?" He asked first surprising her when she expected him to ask about more pressing things. He saw her surprise and elaborated, "I was looking for you just now and didn't know what to call out and I panicked. I think the first thing I want to know is your name. We are doing all of this in reverse but I want to begin by fixing that."

She wrote, "I'm Faith Drake."

"Faith," he repeated with a small smile. "Your name suits you. He could see the gratitude in her eyes. He smiled then and hugged her to his side.

"So what's your story?" He asked getting serious now.

"I'm adopted," She wrote. "I think my first mom was a hooker who was knocked-up by one of her clients." She waited to let this sink in expecting him to hate her now even before she got to the really gruesome parts, but he waited patiently for her to continue. He looked at her steadily not betraying any hint of anything other than compassion.

"She decided to have me and raise me. She left her profession and tried to hold down a steady job. But the stress of the new lifestyle with the demands of a baby were too much to handle as a single mom. So she decided to seek the help of my birth father and she found him eventually. He was married with a family of his own and she would have caused him a scandal. I think she threatened him with the truth. And since he had a lot to lose he decided to silence her and get rid of the evidence, namely me." She wrote down in quick strokes spilling in a flood of emotion, and tears as well, the story of her life as she knew it.

"I think he had us followed and after one of my mom's shifts at the grocery store near the ump we call home, a car tried to run us over. Mom threw me out of the way at the last second and she got the brunt of the hit. She died saving me. The car backed-up. The driver wanted to run me over too. But the first hit accompanied by my mom's scream before she had died caught the attention of the people in the neighborhood and they ran over to help. The driver ran away. I was four at that time. I still remember the incident clearly." She exhaled heavily letting the burden go little by little.

"So your mom was the only one who knew the truth?" he asked. And she shook her head in confirmation.

"I discovered the details later. I think that's roughly what happened. I took a DNA test when I was 15 to find out who my father was and I remembered the accident and how determined the driver was to kill us both and I put the rest together. I already knew she was a prostitute when I was adopted." She explained. "I think after that he left me alone since he assumed that I would never know the full truth and I couldn't cause him trouble anymore."

"Did you ever confront him with what you suspected?" Sam asked laying his cheek on the top of her head comfortingly.

"No. By the time I suspected all of this and did the test, he had died of a heart attack." She wrote.

"I would have thought he didn't have a heart." He said defensively.

This brought fresh tears to her eyes. But she loved him for it.

"Then you were adopted?" He asked.

She held up the paper indicating that she was out of space so he took the book she was using as a table to write on the paper and turned it to the last page. There was only one blank page left before the back cover and he ripped it out carefully giving her the paper to continue.