Sour Candy Read Online Free PDF

I don’t want to
know it.”
    “ His name is Adam. Adam
Pendleton. His mother’s name was Hannah Ward.”
    “ Hannah? I don’t know any
Hannah Ward either. How could I not know the mother of the child
you’re insisting is mine? Are you seriously trying to make me
believe I somehow just forgot all of this? That’s ridiculous.”
    “ No argument there. But
Hannah Ward was the boy’s mother.”
    “ Was?”
    Cortez looked closely at him, studying
Phil’s eyes for some sign that he was pretending not to remember.
Both men now had something in common: the sheer implausibility that
Phil could have forgotten such major events. “Yes, was. She died
the day Adam was born. A fire in her room, thought to have been a
ruptured oxygen tank. Blew her to pieces. Luckily, Adam was in the
intensive care unit at the time.”
    Phil turned and began to pace despite
the discomfort it caused him to do so. He put his hands in his hair
and looked at the houses around him. It all seemed so very normal,
and yet it wasn’t. Somewhere between encountering the woman in the
store and his arrival home, he’d entered The Twilight
Zone.
     
     
    5. Alteration
     
     
    “Do you need us to call someone to help
you?” Cortez asked, not unkindly.
    Phil scoffed. “Help me? You’re the
ones who are supposed to be helping me.”
    “ At this point, if you
really do believe what you’re claiming, I’d advise you to let us
hook you up with a psychiatric professional. Is there someone you
can call who can look after the child for a few days?”
    “ I already told you, I don’t
know the child. Nobody else in my life does either.”
    “ Your mother,
maybe?”
    “ I haven’t spoken to her in
years.”
    “ Let me ask you something:
if I called her right now, would she back up what you’re saying?
Would she claim she’s never heard of her own grandson?”
    “ Yes.”
    “ Okay.”
    “ Wait…” Phil muttered,
raising a hand as if the solution to all of this had somehow
materialized in front of him. “Wait just a minute…” He turned back
to face Cortez. “A DNA test.”
    Cortez closed his eyes for a moment,
clearly growing tired of Phil’s stubborn refusal to claim a child
that was obviously his own. “A DNA test.”
    “ Yeah. That’ll
prove—”
    “ Nothing.”
    “ What?”
    “ It’s not surprising you
don’t know Hannah Ward. You never met her.”
    “ Okay, good, that’s a
start.”
    “ The child was put into
foster care. Which is where you and your then wife Stacey Miller
found him.”
    “ Oh for fuck sake, look,
here.” Phil dug his cell phone out of his pocket and shoved it into
Cortez face. “Call her. Call my ex-wife. We divorced because I
didn’t want children.”
    “ Yes, we already spoke to
her.”
    “ So then…what you’re saying
can’t be true. She backed it up.”
    “ Not quite.”
    Phil stared at him. “What does that
mean?”
    “ It means you’re correct in
that she divorced you because you didn’t want children. The part
you’re leaving out is what made the situation worse: you already
had one. She accused you of neglecting him, of not wanting anything
to do with him.”
    “ If that was true, then how
could the kid end up here with me?”
    “ After your ex-wife’s
accident, she agreed to let you have sole custody of the
boy.”
    “ Accident? What
accident?”
    “ She was struck by a car
while crossing an intersection downtown. She survived but lost the
use of her legs. You’re seriously telling me you don’t remember any
of this?”
    Phil turned away, his vision swimming.
“I need to sit down.”
    “ Please do.”
    Wincing, Phil lowered
himself to the damp grass. His head hurt. Everything hurt. His mind
felt like weak tin being crumpled by a merciless hand. He knew this
was all wrong, that something had happened to the fabric of his
reality, had been made to happen by someone or something, but how it might have been
done was beyond him. Worst of all, the overwhelming evidence
presented to