Love Is More Than Skin Deep (A Hidden Hearts Novel Book 4) (26 page)

I probably could’ve saved myself a bunch of sleepless nights if I’d really paid attention to Tristan and Isaac’s background. Intellectually, I knew they had some military connections and training. I know that Tristan is highly entrenched in the law enforcement community and has the respect of politicians and front-line folks alike. I know less about Isaac Roguen, but I know he worked for some agency which had alphabet soup after their name. Still, it’s hard for me to reconcile the video game playing, sangria-drinking, salsa-dancing fun people that I know with the straight-laced, serious professionals I see in front of me today.
 

Even though I’m looking forward to introducing Ketki to all of her favorite things at Universal Studios in California, I’m nervous about her safety on this trip. She can get so focused on small seemingly meaningless minutia and the world around her fades and she forgets to watch out for her own well-being. It’s overwhelmingly scary. Ketki has been known to literally wander into traffic, even at ten years old. Had I known Tristan and Isaac were going to run this like a fine-tuned military operation, I might not have been quite so worried.

The participants all have special Identity Bank shirts on, which indicate which team they’re playing for. There seem to be five people on each team. I swallow a chuckle as I note that my daughter’s team colors appear to be hot pink. I bet that went over well — not. The teams seem pretty balanced between children and adults, with two adults per team.

I hear Shelby suck in a breath beside me as she hisses, “Do you see what I see?” She points her finger toward the group. “What do you think this means? Did you
know
about this?”
 

“
Hell no
, I didn’t know,” I snap. I try not to blow my stack as I see my ex-wife wearing a green shirt, similar to the one my daughter is wearing. I take a few breaths to try to calm myself down before I speak to anyone. The last thing I want to do is ruin my daughter’s birthday party. I set off to find someone in charge who can explain this whole debacle to me.

Finally, I locate Marcus sitting on top of a cooler with a clipboard. Ironically, he is wearing a polo shirt which says,
Need info
?
Ask me
!

I gulp in another deep breath before I blurt, “You know anything about the game?”

Marcus just laughs as he replies, “God, I should hope so by now. It seems like I’ve been working on it forever with Super-Secret-Spy-Guy.”

“Marcus, This is
serious
shit,” I warn in a lethal tone.

He immediately stands up and walks me over to the formal command station which looks like a big horse trailer. It’s my turn to be shocked as I ask, “Didn’t we just fly across the country? How does he have all this in place? I thought we were just having a birthday party for Ketki.”

“I’m not even shocked any more, I don’t bother to ask. It’s Tristan Macklin. He just does what he does and it’s impressive as hell. So, you had a question?” Marcus prompts.

“Do you know anything about the players?” I ask.

“All of them are completely checked out before they’re allowed into the software testing program, why?”

I openly sneer as I challenge, “You missed one, Sherlock.”

“WTF?” Marcus asks with alarm.

“See that tall one, with the braid down her back? She has no business being here,” I declare, pointing at Tanyanita.

Marcus follows my finger with his gaze and looks back at me with surprise as he says, “Are you talking about Scrubs? Why would you ask about her? She’s been with our organization for over five years. She’s been working with Tristan to develop software to help families use social media to connect to lonely family members with health concerns.”

“So, you are telling me she didn’t just weasel her way in to play the game with my daughter?” I demand impatiently.

“No, of course not. Scrubs has been on the Alpha team since the beginning. She’s been a huge gamer from the start. I think it is one of the ways she relaxes from her day job. She’s one of our most talented players,” Marcus answers. “Maybe you should try it, you seem a little stressed out.”

“Does she know she’s playing with kids? She doesn’t even like kids,” I reveal.

“Dude, that’s harsh!” Marcus reprimands. “But —no this is the first time most of these people have met. Most of us have identities separate from our real selves, and we don’t really discuss our true age or identity online. It’s especially true at Identity Bank. Tristan wanted his participants to be judged only on skill, so he had them develop identities that were gender and age neutral.”

“That’s smart.” I comment.

“Didn’t you read all that paperwork Tristan sent over when he signed Ketki up for the program? Our guidelines are outlined in there,” Marcus explains with a curious glance. “I still don’t understand why you are going ape-shit over Scrubs. If anybody belongs in the software testing program at Identity Bank, it’s Scrubs. The only other person I’ve met who is as much of a natural at all of this is Stones.”

“Stones?” I repeat blankly.
 

Marcus lets out a surprised gust of air as he comments, “Boy, you sure don’t listen to Ketki talk about her gaming stuff much, do you? Stones
is
Ketki. Before you ask, your girlfriend is rather kick-ass at this as well. Although she hasn’t been on a formal testing team because she’s been feeling so lousy, she sometimes helps us out. Her moniker is ‘Dream Catcher.’”

I scrub my hand over my face as I admit, “I feel like I’m living in some alternate universe. Do Stones and Scrubs ever play together? Do they know each other? Are they sometimes on the same team?” I ask, pinching the bridge of my nose to cope with my headache.

Marcus shrugs nonchalantly as he replies, “I suppose it’s possible. The players are involved in round-robin play and play at will. They just play whoever is available at any given time. We don’t prescribe any of that — it would mess with the game flow. I don’t know, that stuff is all beyond me. Tristan studies all of that. I’m mostly just a gamer, I never even knew about all this stuff until I met Tristan. Why are you suddenly so curious about this?”

“I’m wigging out, as Ketki would put it, over the possibility that over the past few months, my daughter has been hanging out and playing computer games with my ex-wife,” I answer as I pace in front of him.

“Scrubs is Stones’
mom
? The one that Ketki thought had committed suicide? Wow!” Marcus exclaims. “This is great!”

“Would you care to tell me on what planet this is great? I don’t mean one of your pretend worlds. I mean like the real one I have to live in,” I challenge.

“I
do
mean this one, Doofus,” Marcus responds with a grin. “If you’d stop panicking over not being in charge of the universe for a moment, you’d see that I’m right. This is probably the best of all outcomes.”

“
Right.
Whatever you say.” I add sarcastically.

“Think about it for a moment. Your ex-wife and her daughter are already friends of sorts. They have something in common and something to talk about. If nothing else, they can talk about the game. That’s more than most parents can talk about with their kids. As a special bonus prize, your ex-wife and your current girlfriend both play the game. How often does that happen? They have stuff to talk about too. I’d say that you’re lucky enough that you should go stock up on lottery tickets or something.”

I stop a moment to ponder all that.
It’s a lot to hope for but... still if it all works out
.

“Marcus, you’re a funny looking dude with all of your tattoos and piercings, but when you’re right, you’re right,” I utter out loud as excitement starts to build in my stomach.

Marcus performs a little bow as he says, “Thank you, I try. I wonder… what’s the best way to break this sort of news?”

“Oh God, I don’t know!” I exclaim. “They don’t have manuals for this kind of thing.”

“Let me ask the Boss-man,” Marcus suggests as he talks into a walkie-talkie. When he finishes, he looks up at me and says, “It turns out that the cyber-world has a little less draw in the face of a real life theme park and everyone wants to go explore, so Tristan says everyone is free for the next couple of hours anyway.”

This news stops me in my tracks. I guess I was counting on the structure of the game to protect me a little while longer. I really have no game plan. My mind is whirling at a thousand miles an hour. The potential for this to go catastrophically wrong is exponentially high. Everyone has so much to lose.

Suddenly, I hear Marcus whistle through his teeth quietly as he mutters, “Look at that — trust the women to figure it out before we do.”

Sure enough, as I follow his gaze, I see his wife, Ivy taking family shots of my ex-wife and my daughter with her cell phone. Every once in a while, she includes Shelby in the pictures. From this distance, they all seem to be surviving the encounter.

“Come on, man. It’s your daughter’s birthday, you can’t avoid this. Look at it this way, it must be fate, right?”

“I suppose you could call it that, or you might call it the universe’s giant practical joke —” I mumble as I cautiously make my way toward my family.

Ketki sees me from several yards away and starts to call my name. “Dad! Dad! Dad!” She comes and gets me and pulls me toward Tanyanita and Shelby.
 

Marcus salutes me and declares, “Good Luck,” as he quietly watches the interaction with Ivy by his side.

Ketki is a little breathless as she informs me, “You are
never
going to believe what just happened to me. This is my mom! In California! Weird, huh?”

Before I can even almost explain, she continues her non-stop play-by-play, “So, we were playing the game and I noticed that she looks like me. Like, you know, we don’t see so many people from Cherokee Nation. I recognized her user name from the game, because I sometimes watch the TV show and I thought her alias was funny. We played together before — because I talked to her about being a nurse in RL. She’s really good at the game; almost as good as me.”

“Ketki, take a breath,” I caution.

My daughter takes a dramatic deep breath in and blows it out before she continues speaking, “So, I see this Cherokee who looks like me. I decide to be brave and introduce myself. You know I don’t really like crowds, but I figure she’s a gamer, so I go for it because Tristan knows her and she must be okay. Then the weirdest thing
ever
happens, I told her my name and she turned almost as white as Shelby. I thought she was going to fall down on the ground — you know how Shelby felt after her operations when she could barely stand up? That’s kinda how Mom looked. I was really confused. I was polite and everything when I said hello, so I didn’t know what was going on.”
 

Shelby places a protective arm around Ketki’s shoulder as she replies, “Ketki, you didn’t do anything wrong, honey— neither did Tanyanita. I think she was just surprised to find out that you had grown into such a lovely young lady.”

Tanyanita steps forward and kneels beside Ketki. “I’m sorry I scared you. I was planning to surprise you for your birthday, but it turns out that you’re the one who surprised me. I was nervous about coming here, because the last time I saw you, you weren’t much older than a baby. I figured you wouldn’t even remember anything about me and I was afraid you might not even want to know me because of what happened. I never expected that we would already know each other — even if it’s only through the Internet. I didn’t expect that you and I would have so much in common. I guess I always thought that you would be just like your dad, because I wasn’t in your life.”

Ketki awkwardly pats Tanyanita on the head, but there’s a stubborn tilt to her chin as she asks, “Why weren’t you here?”

Tanyanita takes a deep shuddering breath. “I don’t know if I can explain it all to you. After you were born, the chemicals in my brain went a little crazy and I got really sad. I couldn’t do anything to make myself feel better. To keep you safe, I left you with your dad. I went to school to become a nurse. I needed to figure out why I felt so bad. I finally learned that I’d had something called postpartum depression. By that time, I had been gone so long, I was embarrassed that I wasn’t a good mom. You and your dad were doing so well together I didn’t want to disturb that. I always loved you, but I never knew how to make us work as a family,” she admits candidly, wiping away her tears.
 

“Why are you here now?” Ketki asks, astutely.

“I heard that you thought that I hated you and I wanted to show you that that isn’t true. I
never
hated you. I just couldn’t cope with the depression. I’m sorry if you thought anything else,” Tanyanita discloses in a shaky voice.

I can tell that Ketki is weighing her Mom’s words carefully. After a few moments, she looks up at me and asks “Dad, is that depression stuff like the thing we saw on YouTube where the lady drowned her kids in the bathtub?”

I nod curtly as I remember the horrific documentary I caught Ketki watching one night. “That very likely played a role, yes.”

Ketki’s brows furrow in concentration. After several moments she posits, “It’s probably a good thing Mom left for a while. Otherwise I might be dead.” Ketki’s hands start to move rhythmically before she closes them into fists and jams them her pockets. After a minute of awkward silence, she blurts, “I have another question —”

I crack a smile as I respond, “Why does that not surprise me? You seem to always have another question —”

Ketki wrinkles her nose at me as she recognizes that I’m teasing her. “This is pretty important, Dad. Is it all right if I have more than one mom? I like Tanyanita, but I really want Shelby to be my mom too.”

I reach out to stroke my daughter’s cheek as I respond, “Working on it, Ki. Totally working on it,” I assure her. “How about if we tackle one problem at a time? Right now, you’ve got a birthday party to attend.”

Ketki starts bouncing excitedly on the balls of her feet as she announces, “
I know!
It’s like the most epic birthday ever. Tristan said that it would be really fun to make this an annual thing. Did you know that annual means to do it every year? Next year I want Mom to be on my team. Isn’t it funny that we’re on different teams? Maybe next year, you and Shelby can join my team too — we could be like one huge family team.”