Forever Yours

“Clearly this child wasn’t you,” Nick said after handing the paper back to Sarah. Sarah nodded in agreement.

“I just turned eighteen eight months; there is no way that I was the mystery child. According to some other papers that I managed to find, May-Lynn admitted to grandfather, weeks before she disappeared, that she had taken the child to the nearest hospital, after my mom told her to ‘get rid of it.’ Grandfather confided in me before I left that May-Lynn had been distraught at the time, and he didn’t think anything of it, until she disappeared for the second time. He also told me that mother and May-Lynn had had a horrible fight before May-Lynn’s disappearance. I asked him, if my older sibling’s father was the same as mine, but grandfather was sure that we had different fathers.”

“Do you know who your father is?” Nick asked, realizing that she had her mother’s maiden name.

“Jeremy Banks is my father,” Sarah admitted.

“Then why don’t you have his last name?”

“Because after my father divorced my mother, my mother changed my name, in order to spite him. I was only seven at the time, and had no say in it. My father retaliated by marrying another woman who was barely old enough to be out of high school, which naturally royally pissed my mother off. I’ve been the mouse of their cat fights for years, and when I was old enough, I just learned to stay out of their way. Grandfather and Granddaddy Bank’s pretty much raised me.” Sarah explained. Telling Nick some of her story wasn’t that hard, but she knew that he would never understand why she really had to disappear from her hometown. She didn’t know if he would ever believe her story, but she was hoping that no one ever had to find out.

“Sarah, we can't tell Billie any of this, not yet, anyways,” Nick said. Sarah frowned.

“Why not?” she asked confused.

“Because Joe and Billie are going through a slight rough patch, and this could break her,” Nick explained. He didn’t want to get into detail about his brother’s life, but he knew that Sarah needed to understand where he was coming from.

“But I have to get to know her,” Sarah said, her voice become distraught.

“We’ll tell her that you’re my girlfriend. We just have to make it believable.”

“You would lie, just to allow me to meet her?”

“Sure, it’s clear that you need to get to know her, and I don’t want to upset Billie, or her dad, so this would be the best possible choice, to insure that Billie can become comfortable around you.” Nick looked around his home. “You can stay with me; I have plenty of spare rooms.”

“I couldn’t do that, you’re supposed to have a reputation to uphold,” Sarah said. “Besides, I’m a well known socialite; my parents might as well be southern royalty. The press could get wind of this, and try to come bring me home. Neither one of them know that I’ve taken off.”

“Does anyone know?”

“Grandfather and Granddaddy Banks are the ones who helped me get on the plane, unnoticed, but they don’t now that I’m here. They got me this,” Sarah handed Nick a license. Nick looked it over.

“According to this, you’re Sarah Lynn Maze, eighteen from Atlanta, Georgia. You’ve got brown hair and green eyes. Sarah, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see brown hair,” Nick as he looked up at Sarah.

“I know, I need to fix it,” Sarah said with a shrug. Nick sighed.

“Come on,” he said as he grabbed two ball caps and his sun glasses. “You have shades right?” he asked as he looked at Sarah.

“Well yeah, but where are we going?” she asked as Nick placed a cap on Sarah’s head. Nick adjusted it, so it would fit, and then fixed her hair so that it wasn’t on her face. Sarah shivered at the contact that Nick’s fingers made against her skin.

“We’re going to make you look less like a socialite and more like my, beautiful-non-recognizable-looking-who-just-so-happens-to-be-living-with-her-very-famous-virginal-boyfriend, girlfriend,” Nick replied with a smile.