The Truth About Kian

09. One minute I held the key

:: C H A P T E R N I N E | ONE MINUTE I HELD THE KEY ::

I spent the rest of the weekend working on Kian's article. Between his journal and the information that I'd gathered I was making progress, but it wasn't enough. I was missing something; I just didn't know what. But Liam did and if he wasn't going to tell me, I decided that I was going to learn about it without his help.

    On Sunday, while forcing out a particularly tricky paragraph about Kian's adoption (as much as I didn't want to broadcast his secret to the world, I felt like it was too important to leave out), I found an email from my mom in my inbox.

    Reed, it said, I hope you are doing well. I'm currently in Turkey, reporting on the flood of Syrian refugees, but I expect that I'll be moving on soon. Your father is still in Hollywood with Karter. We haven't spoken for a few weeks, but both of us agree that we will not be able to be home for your birthday. Work, for both of us, is far too busy. Please don't expect to hear from me for several weeks as the internet connection here is nearly nonexistent. Happy birthday. Mom.

    My mother was a brisk and efficient I-have-to-inform-the-world kind of woman whose maternal instincts were as bad as her WiFi.

    She was a war correspondent who was as successful and well-paid as someone in that field could be (which wasn't very much), and she was the reason why I'd wanted to become a journalist in the first place. But despite our similar interests, we'd never connected. She was situated in a foreign country more often than she was home, and even when I was a kid, I'd always compared her to the Greek goddess Athena who I'd read about in my book. She was brilliant and beautiful, but absent, both physically and emotionally — like a deity who didn't take an interest in what she'd created.

    While my mother resembled Athena in nature, Mom looked different than the goddess of war, but she was still beautiful. Despite spending most of her life on the move, trudging through war zones and witnessing terrible things, she was lovely with her golden hair and skin and slanted eyes that were the colour of burnt sugar. I wanted to be like her more than anything else in the world.

    And she was always too busy to realize it.

    Without thinking about it, I opened the FaceTime icon on my laptop. My mother wasn't available, but maybe my dad would have time to talk.

    As it turned out he did. After less than a minute of waiting, his cheerful face appeared on my screen. We looked alike with our brown hair and eyes and slim build. But he smiled more than I did.

    "Reed!" He grinned, his eyes focusing on his own camera instead of my face. "How's my girl?"

    "Good, Dad." I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice as he fiddled with his phone. If he was so busy with it, why had he never found the time to call? "What about you?"

    "Oh, you know," he said. "Karter's keeping me busy."

    Ah. Karter. The favoured child in the Elliot family.

    Well, sort of.

    Karter Kane was a movie star, and a famous one, too. My dad was his assistant, and for reasons unknown to me, he had been Karter's personal errand-boy for several years despite the crappy pay and terrible hours. Looking around my dad's office, I could see yellow sticky notes everywhere, and they gave me a pretty good idea of why I hadn't heard from my dad in a few weeks.

    Find new fitness trainer, one said in my dad's thick, bold scrawl that looked like a three-year-old had written it.

    Call Armani, said another.