after you let slip that the big Three-Five was coming up.”
“Did I?” he said, wondering how, and when, and why he’d been so loose-lipped.
“At that dinner for the mayor last month, remember? Someone at our table was moaning about turning forty, and you grinned and said wasn’t it a pity he was such an old fogy, that you were only just approaching—”
All Tyler’s good intentions fled. “I wish you hadn’t done this, Adrianna.”
His mistress laughed softly. “You’re just annoyed that I peeked over your shoulder while you entered those codes.”
“Yes. And that you went through my wallet. And that you arranged this party.”
“Don’t you like surprises, darling?”
“No,” he said coldly, “I do not.”
“Well, then, next time, you can help me plan your party.” Adrianna smiled coyly. “We could even make it a special occasion, Tyler. After all, we’ll have been together more than a year by then.”
Tyler didn’t answer. He took her hand in his, put his other arm around her waist and whirled her in a head-spinning circle while he wondered just how long it would take for the night to end.
An eternity, that was how long. That was how long it seemed, anyway.
The last guests finally left, the last catering van departed. The house was silent, the big, expensively decorated rooms were empty, now filled only with the lingering traces of perfume and roses.
“I’ll take you home,” Tyler had said to Adrianna. He’d known his voice was expressionless, his eyes cold, but he’d done the best he could and now it was time to deal with reality.
Either Adrianna hadn’t recognized that, or she’d pretended not to.
“Let me get my things,” she’d replied, and vanished up the stairs.
He’d waited and waited, pacing the length of the foyer, telling himself to control his temper, that he could, at least, end this thing without a scene. After five or ten minutes, he’d scowled and gone upstairs.
Adrianna was in the shower. He could hear the water running in the bathroom.
Tyler had flung an oath into the darkened bedroom, jammed his hands into the pockets of his trousers and settled in to wait.
Now he stood at the window, staring out at the inky darkness, the façade he’d maintained the past few hours crumbling more with each passing minute. All evening he’d smiled, he’d chatted, he’d shaken hands with the men and kissed the women’s cheeks when his guests had offered their birthday congratulations.
He puffed out his breath, watched it fog the glass. How generous would they have been with their good wishes, their handshakes, their kisses, if they knew the truth, he wondered. If the front door had opened and the boy he’d once been had come strolling across the marble floor, his defiant expression just daring anybody to try to throw him out.
The thought was so preposterous it almost made him laugh.
“Damned fine party, Kincaid,” the mayor had said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Not every man gets to celebrate his birthday in such style.”
My birthday, Tyler thought. His mouth twisted. Who in hell knew if this was his birthday or not? The truth was, he might have come into this world yesterday, or maybe even the day before that. Babies that were dumped on hospital doorsteps didn’t come complete with birth certificates.
The Brightons, who’d raised him, had told him all about it. They told him how he’d been found and given to them. They’d told him, too, that nobody was sure exactly what day he’d been born, but that the authorities figured he’d been somewhere between one and three days old, when he was found.
When he was really little, he just hadn’t understood it.
“Everybody has a real birthday,” he’d said, and the Brightons would say yes, that was true. And he had one. Those same anonymous authorities had decided on July 18.
“But who was my mommy?” he’d ask. “And my daddy?”
Myra and James Brighton would look at each other, then at him. “We’re your parents,” one of them would say.
But they weren’t. Oh, they were kind to him. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say they didn’t mistreat him—but he knew they never loved him. He saw how it was, with other kids. How a father smoothed a hand over a son’s hair, how a mother pulled her boy close and kissed him.
Tyler’s life wasn’t like that. Nobody touched him, or kissed him. Nobody hugged him when his grades were good or even got angry when they weren’t.
And his name. Tyler’s mouth thinned with the pain of the memory. John Smith, for God’s sake. John Smith. How could a boy grow up with a name like that?
He’d wanted to change it but the Brightons said he couldn’t.
“It’s your name, John,” James Brighton said.
So it was. And he lived with it. With all of it. By the time he was ten, he’d stopped asking questions that never were answered. What was the point? The Brightons never adopted him, never gave him their name—and then, in one fatal moment, his entire life changed. The three of them were on a Sunday outing when a truck hit their car.
Tyler wasn’t so much as scratched. He stood by the side of the road, a policeman’s big hand on his shoulder, watching without a trace of expression on his face as his foster parents’ bodies were removed from the wreck and taken away.
“The kid’s in shock,” he heard the cop tell the social worker who came for him and maybe he was. But the reality was that deep down, he couldn’t mourn people he’d never known.
The state took him in. He was sent to live in a place with lots of other boys like him, kids nobody gave a damn about, kids with no future—
But even they had real names.
He took a lot of crap over his.
“John Smith,” the kids said with sneers. “Who’re you kidding? Nobody’s named John Smith.”
They were right, and Tyler knew it. On the day he turned sixteen—the day his bogus birth certificate said he turned sixteen—he took his first name from a chapter in his American history textbook and his second from a character in a TV movie.
The kids laughed and sneered even harder.
“Nobody names himself,” they said.
“I do,” Tyler had replied, and when they went on laughing, he bloodied some noses, beat one kid to his knees. No one ever laughed again.
From then on, Tyler Kincaid was who he was. It was Tyler Kincaid who danced on the edge of the juvenile justice system, not John Smith. Tyler Kincaid who finally got caught joyriding in a car he’d “borrowed” from a mall, Tyler Kincaid who lucked out—though he sure hadn’t thought so, at the time—and got sentenced to eight months at a place called
