Janice asked first. “Is everything all right, honey? You look like you have something on your mind.”
“There is . . . and I’m not sure how to say it.”
His mother reached for her husband’s hand. They weren’t a touchy couple and the gesture wasn’t lost on him.
“You’re not sick, are you? Zach? Judy?”
“No. I’m fine . . . we’re all good.” At least as far as he knew.
Sawyer narrowed his eyes. There was no smile on his face.
“Remember when I told you the reason behind Karen and me getting married?”
They nodded in the silent room.
“I offered you half the reason . . .” Michael reflected on the moment when his father asked if money made through his career was a reason to sell his soul. It was easy to put his father in his place then. Karen didn’t deserve his disapproval and Michael was more than willing to offer a buffer for her.
Michael stood, unable to sit during this conversation. He crossed to the mantel, looked at the photographs there. It would only be a matter of time before his siblings added more grandkids to the shelf. He wouldn’t be the one to do that . . . not in the traditional sense, in any event. “I never wanted to disappoint you, either of you.”
“You haven’t,” Janice said.
He didn’t look at her as he straightened an askew frame. I’m about to.
“Karen and I agreed to a paper marriage because Hollywood likes their leading men on the arm of a beautiful woman. Marriage was a perfect diversion from the truth.”
The room grew heavy with the sound of crickets from outside. Did they actually get louder?
“What truth?” Sawyer asked.
Michael turned, met his father’s eyes. For better or worse, he needed to see his dad’s reaction to his words. “Hollywood wants their leading men to be heterosexual. And I’m not.”
It took two seconds for the words to register. Sawyer’s nose flared as he sucked in a deep breath. “What are you saying?” he asked, his teeth grinding together.
“I’m gay, Dad. I knew long before I left Utah.”
His mom squeezed his father’s hand and a strange look of calm washed over her.
She knew . . . all this time.
“Jesus.” Sawyer moved from the chair and straight to a liquor closet across the room.
Without asking, his father poured whiskey into two glasses and handed one to Michael without looking at him. “Janice?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
OK . . . they aren’t yelling . . . no one is telling me to get out.
The whiskey felt good burning the back of his throat.
Then his mother spoke. “After your divorce, we . . . we wondered.”
“You knew?” Michael nearly choked on the liquor.
“We wondered,” Sawyer corrected.
“Your father didn’t want to discuss it,” Janice told him.
Sawyer took a healthy sip of his drink, poured more into his glass, and returned to his wife’s side. “Before you look at me like that . . . I didn’t want to discuss it not because I thought less of you. I just didn’t want that life for you. Maybe when you were a kid I would have tried to beat it out of you . . .”
His father never used his fist so the past threat wasn’t real.
“You can’t—”
“I know.” Sawyer met his eyes. “I know that.”
They drank in silence . . . letting the words digest.
On a sigh, Janice patted the space beside her on the couch. “This must have been hard for you to do.”
Michael blew out a long breath, parked his ass on the couch. “You have no idea. You’re taking it really well.”
His mom leaned in. “Your father hasn’t touched that bottle since Christmas.”
Michael laughed.
Sawyer grunted. “Why now? What prompted this?”
Without many details, Michael told them about Val’s island and about pictures that should never go public possibly making a debut. He touched on Gabi’s fiancé being behind the photographs.
Meg had sent word to Michael that more information regarding Gabi and her fiancé was pending and that she and Val were headed back to Florida. In the meantime, Michael had to deal with his own drama . . . then he’d be back wherever his friends needed him to help.
“So let me get this straight. Someone might have pictures of you and . . . ?”
Ryder . . . but that wasn’t his story to tell . . . not yet anyway. “You’ll know soon enough,” Michael told his mother.
She smiled and patted his hand. “Fine. But the man who has these pictures is trying to blackmail you? Blackmail your friend, Mr. Masini?”
Michael thought of Gabi. He didn’t know her well, but couldn’t imagine what Meg had described in her brief e-mail. “I think he just wants me to stop looking into him. It’s Masini’s sister who is in trouble right now.”
“You just met this Masini and his family. How is it you’re involved?” Sawyer asked.
Michael finished his drink, set it aside. “It started with the threat of being revealed. But it’s so much more than that now. Val and his family are good people. This asshole playing them is the ultimate scumbag. The perfect villain for a movie, only it’s not a script. And right now Gabi is in danger.” Michael spared his parents the details.
“Yet you’re here talking to us . . .”
Michael leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees. “I couldn’t have a tabloid telling my parents about my real love life. That wouldn’t be right.”