"Your mom died? I'm "I'm sorry, too," said
"Thank you, guys." "Wait a minute," said the
driver to George, "you are not this child's father?"
"No," said Corey and looked back at George for a few seconds, intending to tell him that he'd get out of this. "He's a friend of my father," and George looked back at him, astonished and then smiled.
"Oh," said the driver, "So your friend gives you permission to take his child places."
"Yes," said George smiling, "Noah," he said and then looked back at Corey and Corey nodded. The driver focused on the road so he didn't see any of this. "He trusts me completely with his children. His children are his most precious treasures and he trusts me so much with them that sometimes I feel like I'm their father."
Corey leaned over to his ear, covered the mouth and the ear with his hand and whispered, "That was beautiful. You should be a poet or a writer."
"I'm a songwriter," George whispered back doing the same thing. "I co wrote five of the eleven songs of Henry's debut album."
"That's fantastic," Corey whispered back.
"That's beautiful," said the driver. "You should be a poet or a writer."
George and Corey laughed and then hugged. Corey said in a very low voice, "I am starting to like you!"
"I am starting to like you, too," said George. "When I have a son, I want him to be as sweet as you are."
Amazed, Corey asked, "You have no kids?"
"I have three daughters," said George.
Twenty minutes later, they arrived back at the mansion. Noah was still drunk, confessing everything to Galloway as if he was confessing crimes that he'd committed, and Galloway was a police officer taking his testimony. They entered the mansion together. George went in with him to keep him from being kidnapped. As soon as Samaria, the maid, let him in, he tried to leave, but she invited him in, making him feel at home. Corey and everyone that was linked to him, they were kings and queens to the eyes of Mr. Galloway and everyone that was linked to him.
While Samaria attended to him in the kitchen and served him everything that he wanted to eat and drink, Corey went back to Mr. Galloway's office, only to find Mr. Galloway in his desk, with a tape- recorder in his hand and his father half drunk in front of him. This is it, thought Corey as he went in.
Hailey, it's the beginning of the end for you, my love. Then he smiled and said, "Hi, what are you guys doing?"
Mr. Galloway stopped the recording and said, "We're doing great and having fun," and laughed hysterically. "Your father has told me the greatest story that I've ever heard. He must think that I'm a psychologist or something like that because he literally opened up to me and told me everything."
Half-sober and when he was just realizing what he'd done, Noah said, "I did?"
"Yes," said Mr. Galloway, smiling. "You should write your autobiography. I'm certain that it'll be a bestseller."
Noah smiled and thought, I can't believe that I've told him everything that I've hidden from everybody else! Only Dr. Lester knows 'everything'! Then he said, "Mr. Galloway, how would you like intense reconstructive surgery?"
Corey took the jar in both hands and placed it where the eye that Mr. Galloway had left, where it could see, and Mr. Galloway gasped and said, "I'd love to, but I tried it, and as you can see, it didn't work." Corey walked up to him and said, "It didn't work because when the doctors don't have the right parts of the human body to reconstruct the parts that were damaged, it never turns out right," and took the aluminum foil off of the jar. "Mr. Galloway, I give you," and gave him the jar, "the face that you were born with, courtesy of Enrique Rubio."
Noah gasped and said, "You were with Enrique Rubio? It seems that all that he did was give you that and send you back here because you weren't even gone for-
--" he looked at his wristwatch, but his eyesight was blurry and he couldn't see the time.
"It's not known exactly," said Mr. Galloway, looking attentively at his literally disassembled face, "how long he was gone because he slipped right under our noses. We didn't even know that he had left. However, that doesn't matter right now. What matters is that Enrique gave me my face back, literally. It's something that I never thought that he would do."
Noah had just realized,
despite his drunkenness, that Henry wasn't as vicious and evil as he thought. He said, "And I had stopped loving him in less than a minute."
Amazed, Corey looked at him, sitting on Galloway's lap and said, "You loved him?"
"Yes, I did. I feel that I love him again."
"Good, you should," said Galloway. "I never thought that I would say this, but I feel that I love him, too. I never thought that he would pick up the pieces of my face, put them in a jar, keep them intact, and give them back to me. I wonder how long he's had them."
"He told me that he's had your face since he tore it off."
Galloway gasped.
"You talked to him before meeting with him?" said Noah. "Where did you meet?"
"We met at his house," said Corey and gave Noah's cell phone back to him. "He called me at your cell phone."
phone?"