Mr. Knight/A Jordan Knight Fanfic ✔️

19

19. (end) scene

Claire and Griffen pick me up from the airport Sunday night. Emotionally bankrupt from the last few days, I answer their well-meaning questions with monosyllables until they give up trying to reach me.

Once home, I thank them for the ride and escape to my room. And later, alone in bed, I stare sleeplessly at the shadows on the ceiling. I think about my mother, who sobbed while the ashes were scattered yesterday, but mostly I think about the untold story of Richard and Alexandria Davis.

I know they met in his senior year and her sophomore one at UC Berkeley. He saw her dancing in a university production. He fell in love. Or lust. Either way, he doggedly pursued her over the following year, until she at last succumbed to his charms. Despite his proposal six months later, she made him wait until she graduated to get married.

His poems about her, compiled in the book Alexandria, capture a vast range of emotion. Obsession and desire. Love and comfort. They're in turns darkly arresting, gut-wrenching, and achingly sweet. Every one of them is unquestionably masterful.

My mother was an attentive, joyful caretaker to my brother and me. Not once did either of us feel a lack of love. And yet, she's always been a private person; to this day, there are depths to her that I've never dared explore. Memories that remain puzzling. Finding a locked box in her nightstand. Hearing her crying softly in her bedroom while my father was on a book tour.

There was a moment in the car on the way back from the funeral that I almost asked if she'd had an affair. But her pain was so obvious, I couldn't bring myself to add to it. Over the course of the drive, my need became secondary to the blossoming acceptance that whatever happened between her and my father, she loved him as much as he loved her.

And suddenly, I have to know.

Pulling my phone from the nightstand, I call Jordan before I can talk myself out of it. It rings twice.

"Darcy," he says softly. My heart pounding, I ask, "Did she really have an affair?"

He's quiet for several moments. "According to Richard, when Derrick was four and you were one, Alexandria asked your grandmother over one morning to watch you while she ran errands. It wasn't uncommon, but that day she left the house and didn't return. When Richard came home, it was to his worried mother-in-law. As the night wore on, he became more distraught. He drove for hours looking for her but couldn't find her. He called every hospital in the area and even reported her missing. Two days later, she returned. She wouldn't tell him where she'd been and acted like nothing was amiss."

"God," I whisper.

He sighs sadly. "Shortly afterward, Richard found letters in a locked box in her nightstand. They were from her high school sweetheart, and it was clear the man still had feelings for her. Richard confronted her about them, about that weekend. She never denied his accusations. But she never admitted an affair, either."

I don't say anything.

I can't.

Because suddenly, I see the past in a new light. The years of her polite, emotional distance from him at the dinner table. His impassioned bouts of temper behind closed doors. Her eventually move to the guest room. His growing habit of staying overnight near the university before finally, a friend of my mother's had spotted him with the first of many young women.

Rubbing my forehead, I say, "I wanted to ask her Saturday. But I just... couldn't."

He hums in understanding. "I don't blame you, love."

"Don't call me that," I say tiredly.

"Darcy..."

So much longing in the word.