Free Crush by Crystal Hubbard Page A

my father. The woman was definitely not my mother,” she laughed bitterly. “I went to him and he looked properly surprised, but then he acted like being with another woman wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Later, I found out that it wasn’t.”
    She quieted, and she appreciated Lucas’s silence. She spent a moment wondering if it was the soft music of the tumbling sea or Lucas’s presence beside her that dulled the pain she usually endured whenever she recalled the moment she caught her father cheating on her mother.
    She stared at her hands in her lap as she said, “I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe he was having some kind of late mid-life crisis thing. For two weeks I agonized over whether I should tell my mother. I didn’t want to betray my father, but I also didn’t want my mother to hear it from someone else, or to be surprised if my father told her that he wanted a divorce.”
    “Miranda, you’re trembling.” Lucas took his sweater and draped it around her, carefully moving her hair from the collar. He put an arm around her and hugged her into his side. A hard lump formed in her throat at his unexpected attempt to comfort her. “No one should ever be forced to chose loyalties between parents.”
    “I decided to tell her,” Miranda croaked around the lump that refused to budge. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I flew home, sat her down, and told her, but she already knew about the redhead in Baltimore. She knew about another woman in New York City and another one in Atlanta, and all the women that had come before them. By my mother’s reckoning, my dad started cheating on her less than a year after they were married.”
    Miranda reluctantly pulled from Lucas’s embrace to face him directly. “I never knew. Through vacations, Father-Daughter dances, charity events, family reunions and funerals, I never knew that my father wasn’t faithful. He never forgot an anniversary or birthday. When I was sixteen, he bought me a used Honda and I thought he was the greatest dad in the world. The only complaint I had about my upbringing was the amount of traveling my father did for his job. I never knew that my family was held together with deceit and selective blindness.”
    “Perhaps, in their own ways, your mum and dad have found happiness,” Lucas offered.
    A tiny burst of rage flowered and died in Miranda’s chest. “My mother isn’t happy. How can she be, with her husband spreading himself thin with God knows how many other women? She makes me so angry! How can a smart woman be so dumb?”
    Miranda’s overly long shirtsleeves covered her hands as she gesticulated wildly before Lucas. “My mother is nothing like me, Lucas.” She slapped a hand to her chest. “She’s so beautiful and poised. When she met my father, she was a twenty-one-year-old college exchange student at the University of Southern California. She went to a baseball game in Anaheim and my dad was playing first base. He saw her in the stands and got the team’s publicist to fix him up with her. They’ve been together ever since.”
    In a rush of words and emotion, Miranda further extolled her mother’s virtues. “She speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese, and she has a degree in public health. And she’s gorgeous, Lucas. She’s negro branca , a Brazilian of African descent with very, very light skin. But she isn’t enough for my father.”
    Miranda didn’t realize she was clenching her fists until Lucas gently pried her fingers apart. “My mother thinks everything’s okay as long as he always comes back to her, as long as he’s a good provider and a good father. It wasn’t okay.” Her voice broke on a sob she managed to swallow back. “It’s not okay.”
    Lucas embraced her and she hid her face in his shoulder. “This has been bottled in you for a long time, hasn’t it?”
    She laid her head on his shoulder, thankful for the solid, secure support. “I’ve never spoken to anyone