Chapter 2

Mischa Clarke’s sister Melissa sat in Rawhide coffee shop in Cody Wyoming. It was two months later, and she was nervous to meet her birth father’s new wife. She had talked with Mischa about her meeting with Richard and when she finished telling her everything that happened, Melissa was also in tears.

“I can’t believe he was that angry, do we deserve it?” Mischa asked.

“Of course we deserve it! What did you expect him to do?” She shouted at her. “We screwed him over and took everything from him. We never called, wrote, emailed, or anything to him. He’s completely justified in how he feels about us. And you go and just show up out of the blue thinking you could just throw out a half assed apology, kiss his ass a little bit, and everything would be hunky dory?” Melissa asked through her tears.

“I didn’t know what to think. I was hoping that he’d at least talk to me instead of all the hate and vitriol he gave me.” Mischa said wiping her eyes.

“You should have expected that, Mischa. And to be honest, I did.” Melissa calmly told her. She got up, grabbed her phone, and went into her home office.

“What do you mean that’s what you expected? Did you know he would be so hateful?” Mischa asked following after her.

“Put yourself in his shoes. How would you feel if a daughter that had shown you as much hate as we showed him, suddenly showed up and acted like you did?” She asked her sister who started to look at the floor in shame. “I tried to tell you before you went to Wyoming to see him, but you didn’t listen to me.” Melissa said sitting down to her laptop. “You also never heard him when he talked either. If you had, you’d have gone about going to see him a different way.” She said as she started typing.

“I listened to him every time he told us something.”

“But you didn’t HEAR him.” Melissa said firmly. “You should have paid better attention to HIM instead of our whore of a mother.”

“I know that now...” Mischa said quietly. She watched as Melissa started typing. “What are you going to do?” Mischa asked.

“You failed because your plan sucked on a galactic level. I’m going to take some time and do some reconnaissance on him and go from there.” She said as she kept typing. Mischa stood there as she started writing out long strings of code. A few minutes, Melissa turned and looked at Mischa. “The more you know about your target, the better prepared you’ll be when you meet him ... Or in this case, HER.” She said smiling as she remembered what she was taught.

Back in the coffee shop, Melissa smiled as she remembered how humbled Mischa was after that conversation. She looked around the café for his wife Taylor. She looked close to the door and saw a dark-haired woman who was watching her. She took the picture out of her purse and compared the two. “Let’s do this...” She said quietly as she stood up and walked over to her. She stood and waited for Taylor to talk to her.

“You must be Melissa...” She said in a neutral tone.

“I am. It’s a genuine pleasure to meet you Mrs. Mason.” She said with a friendly smile. She waited for Taylor to offer her a seat at her table. She watched as Taylor motioned her to sit down.

“I’m impressed, most people would just sit down without waiting or asking.” She told Melissa.

“Despite later life, most of the things I learned as a girl actually did take.” She replied.

Taylor and Melissa stared at each other for a couple minutes. Finally, Taylor spoke. “I’ll ask the same thing he did with Mischa, just for the symmetry of it ... Why are you here?”

“I want to TRY to talk to your husband. My sister and I were horrible to him when we were younger. I would like to, at least TRY to apologize and ask for his forgiveness.” Melissa told her looking her in the eye.

“What happens if he doesn’t forgive you?” Taylor asked.

“If he doesn’t, then I’ll be upset and probably cry my eyes out. It would be completely what I deserve. But I will have at least TRIED.” She replied.

Taylor was nodding her head that she understood. “Fair enough ... So, why am I here instead of him?”

“May I be completely honest with you?” She asked Taylor.

“I’d appreciate it.” She replied. She watched as Melissa put her hands on the table, palms up. She smiled knowing that this was a way for Melissa to show that she was trying to be honest and convince her that she was sincere.

“I’m sure your studies in Kinesiology and your time in the Wyoming state police taught you well to see when someone is lying.” Melissa told her.

“You’ve done your homework...”

“And then some, yes.” She paused to gather her thoughts and then spoke. “There are two reasons. First, Mischa’s plan to just sit down and talk with him was more wrong than chocolate on broccoli. I would never think that he’d ever talk to me after what we did to him.” Melissa told her.

“And you’d be right.” Taylor told her.

“Unlike my sister, I remember what your husband taught me when I was a girl about knowledge and planning. I tried to tell her that exact thing would happen if she just showed up in Wyoming out of the blue after 15 years.” Melissa told her. “Second reason ... without going into lots of detail, you’re the gatekeeper. I won’t get to him unless it’s through you. You and your kids put him back together after the whore, Mischa, and I tore him apart. You, but more so your children showed him the love that we SHOULD have shown him.”

“I’m kind of curious about that. Why did you just throw him aside and ignore him for the last 15 years?” Taylor asked.

“First off, let me say this to you so there’s no misunderstanding. I’m not here as a proxy for Mischa. Her mistakes are hers and hers alone. I’m here for me and no one else.” Melissa told her. Taylor nodded her head that she understood. “I have no reason or excuse. The only thing your husband did was to unconditionally love us, and we spit on him and cast him aside like a bag of trash. I say with absolute certainty that I don’t deserve a man like that as a father.” She said trying to keep the tears out of her eyes. “The only honest thing I can tell you is that as a teenage girl, I was caught up in the money and the lifestyle that we had.”

“Thank you for your honesty. The question still stands ... Why are you here?” Taylor asked.

“6 months ago, I had an experience at work that gave me a sort of kick in the ass or slap in the face. I went home and worked remotely for the rest of the week. I think I cried more than I worked. When I told Mischa what happened, she agreed that we needed to try and mend the fences with your husband.”

“May I ask what happened?” Taylor asked.

“One of my friends at work, her father died. She broke down in the break room after she got off the phone with her mother and was inconsolable. She loved her father more than life itself. I took a long look at that and realized that I was wrong about everything.”

Melissa reached into her purse. She handed an envelope to Taylor. She opened it and looked at a check for $195,000. She stood up and her eyes took on a harder edge as she started to get angry. “If this is a bribe, I’m going drag you out into the street and beat your ass all the way to your little red Alfa Romeo.” She told her.

Melissa held both her hands up and moved back away from the table. “NO ... NO ... PLEASE ... This isn’t a bribe at all.” She pulled out more paperwork and put it on the table so Taylor could read it. “This is college costs and child support that he NEVER should have paid. We want to return it to your husband. I’m asking ... No, I’m BEGGING you, please, at the very least offer it to him. If he doesn’t want it, donate it to someone who needs help in life or going to school. Either way, Mischa and I don’t want the money back.”

“Is this something to assuage your guilt?” Taylor asked.

“No, this is me and my sister trying to make something right that should have never been wrong.” Melissa said quietly. She pushed the folded pages over to Taylor.

Taylor read over Melissa’s college transcripts and the costs of each class. She put the paperwork down and looked at Melissa. “Why would you do this?”

Melissa paused to gather her thoughts, sighed deeply and then spoke. “I honestly had no idea that the money for Stanford came from Mr. Mason. When ‘the whore’ read the letter telling us we were going to Stanford, they both said they were proud to pay for our degrees. I asked if they were sure they could afford it, the only thing they told me was that it was only money, and they could get more.” She said as tears started falling down her cheeks. “I am so sorry. I didn’t know that the money came from da ... I mean your husband.” She said picking up a napkin and drying her eyes. “When I looked at the whore’s checking account...”

Taylor held up her hand to stop her. “You hacked your mother’s checking account?”

Melissa looked up at Taylor with a devious look. “I admit to nothing ... The point is, I saw where the money came in for all the classes we took.” Melissa picked up the papers and flipped to the last one and pointed to the last account. “This was your husband’s account when he was still paying for Mischa and I.”

Taylor grabbed her phone and took a picture of the page. “Stay here...” She said to Melissa.

Melissa watched as Taylor walked outside and made a call. She picked up her phone and looked at the 6 texts she got from her sister, all of them pretty much asking how it was going. Melissa shook her head and shut her phone off. She watched as the door opened, Taylor walked in, and sat back down.

A server walked over to them at the same time and spoke. “Would you like a refill? Taylor, another latte?”

“Caramel please.” Taylor answered her.

Melissa looked at the server. “Just black with two sugars please.” She said smiling at the server making a note in her mind that the server is on a first name basis with her.

“Richard drinks it that way...” Taylor told her.

“I know.” She said with a smirk.

“And the fact you know more than you should about me and my husband ... un-nerves me.” She told Melissa.

Melissa paused for a moment as she thought how to explain it. “Your husband’s lessons never fell on deaf ears with me. I remember almost everything he taught me. Especially the parts about information being the most important part of a plan.”

“Touché...” Taylor said. She paused as the server brought their coffees over and sat them down. “I have another question I’d like to ask you...”

Melissa took a $20 out of her purse and told her to keep the change. “I’m an open book.” She replied pouring the two packets of sugar into her coffee.

“You’ve called your mother ‘the whore’ and your adoptive father ‘the asshole’ and I’m curious why.” Taylor asked.

“Well, ‘the whore’ is an easy one. She literally is a whore.” Taylor raised an eyebrow at her statement. “When the divorce with the asshole was final, she was working for a high-end escort service in LA until she could get back on her feet and get re-certified in nursing in Washington state. In truth, she was looking for another sugar daddy to take her in. I’ve never gotten along with her very well. She was constantly saying I needed to be more like my sister...” Melissa scoffed and smiled. “Come to think of it ... that’s probably why Mischa and I aren’t as close as we should be ... but we’re working on us. But ‘the asshole’ is an asshole because I had to...” She made air quotes “motivate him to stop leering at me.”

Taylor’s eyes widened in shock. “Did he try...”

Melissa held her hand up. “No, but he wanted to. We went skiing in Vail for vacation our junior year. He was staring at me every chance he had.”

“How did you deal with it?”

“I put on some yoga shorts, a sports bra, and went outside in 15-degree weather, ran two miles and did my katas for an hour. He left me alone after that.” She replied with a smirk.

“What style?” Taylor asked.

“I did Aikido when I was a girl. I started Krav Maga when I was 16. I test for my blue belt next month.” She said with some pride in her voice.

“Richard teaches Aikido locally, mostly kids, teenagers, and women. He got 1^st dan three years ago.” Taylor told her.

“He always was a great teacher; he was so patient with me starting out. But that was what made him a great soldier as well. I was so proud of him when he put the green beret on his head. That’s what he was born to do.” Melissa said with sadness in her voice. Her eyes looked out the window and didn’t speak for a couple minutes. “I’ve wasted so much time...” She said as she lowered her head.

“Tell me what you’ve wasted.” Taylor asked her.

“I’ve wasted the 15 years I SHOULD have had with my ... Your husband. He should have been at my high school and college graduations, and then watching when I was awarded my master’s degree.” She said not keeping her voice steady. She leaned over, put her head in her hands, and started crying. “I’m so sorry ... I miss you...” she whispered to herself.

Taylor walked over and wrapped her arms around her to try and console her. “It’s ok, let it out...” she said over and over. Melissa wrapped her arms around hers. She let Melissa cry for a few minutes. The server came over and gave her some more napkins. When Melissa was more coherent, Taylor looked at her. “Finish your coffee and let’s go for a walk...”

They walked down the street to the local elementary school and saw kids out there playing a pick-up game of baseball. Taylor stopped and watched for a minute as Melissa wondered why they were here. “Come on, let’s sit and watch for a few minutes.” She said as they went and climbed into the stands. She smiled as the smallest kid on the team cracked a pitch into center field and he took off running. Both the women clapped and yelled for him as he slid into second base. They could see the blush on his cheeks from where they were sitting. It was right after that when Taylor spoke.

“Did your sister tell you everything about Richard?” She asked.

“She told me that he had been wounded and that it was a head injury.” Melissa replied. “She mentioned something about a TBI and a grade three concussion.”

“Did she tell you that the doctors had to cover his eyes to give his optical nerves time to heal?” Melissa nodded her head yes. “I’m sure that she told you about the restraining order then...”

“She did. And honestly Mrs. Mason, neither one of us knew Ryan had done that.” Melissa told her.

“Oh, I believe you. Some adoptive parents are just spiteful...” She told her. “Want some background info on Richard for the last few years?” Taylor asked. Melissa nodded her head yes. Richard’s wife pointed at the boy on second base. “That was my Caleb 5 years ago. He wanted to play ball but couldn’t catch one to save his life. Richard worked with him every chance he had. He put flood lights up in the back yard so they could throw the ball late into the night. I remember him taking Caleb to batting cages almost daily for two months straight. This year, as a freshman, he’s the starting first baseman for his high school varsity team.” Taylor said with pride. “Come on, lets walk some more.” She told her.

They walked a bit further and stopped across the street from what looked like a martial arts dojo. Melissa looked in the window and saw Richard teaching a bunch of kids. Her heart soared that she was able to see her father after so long. The smile and the tears on her face gave her away.

“Happy to see him again?” Taylor asked.

She nodded her head as she wiped the tears away.

“Sit down and watch him for a couple minutes, I’ll be right back.” Taylor said. She walked over and went inside the bakery behind them.

Melissa watched as her father ran the kids through the initial katas. She smiled as she remembered him going through them with her. Her hands started moving along with the kids. She started to giggle when one of the younger kids almost fell but caught herself. The little girl picked herself up and got right back into practicing.

“Bring back some memories?” She heard Taylor ask.

“More than a few. The little girl in the front is going to be good when she grows up some. Her patterns are so much more fluid than the boys in that class. She’s got the gift.” Melissa told her.

“She does. That’s Daniel Woodrow’s granddaughter.” She told her. Melissa looked at her puzzled. “He’s the sheriff. He’s also Richard’s best friend. They met when the department shooting range needed repairs. Richard bid on it and won. By the time he was finished doing the work specified in the contract, the whole thing had been repaired or replaced.” She looked directly at Melissa when she spoke next. “After the contract was finished, the county bought the materials, and he did the rest of the work on his own time ... Just because he could.”