He started to walk away… and I watched my happiness walking with him.
“I filed the restraining order against him,” I blurted out, desperate to keep him from leaving like this.
He stopped, but he didn’t turn.
“I don’t want him dictating my life. He goaded you, Dean. You were defending my honor.” I moved closer to him until his scent overwhelmed me. It made my skin crave his touch. My lips burn for his kiss. “I know what… what happened that night.”
He turned, and I saw her in his eyes. Saw the pain. The torture. The secret he kept while the whole town talked behind his back.
“I’m… I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. I know you, Dean, and I know you’d never hurt anyone on purpose. Lucy—”
He winced when he heard her name.
“She was lucky to have you there,” I said anyway. “I… I was lucky to have you. Who knows what Matt would have done had you not been there.”
His shoulders bent forward as a fury of emotions mixed within his eyes. “My whole life, Andy, I’ve watched people like him walk. The good guy gets shit on while the bad guy goes on their merry way.”
“Is that what happened? With Stan?”
He looked past me, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “After Stan’s parents dropped my dad’s legal counsel, your father took on my case and settled out of court with Stan’s new lawyers. I knew going in that doing it that way meant I couldn’t prove my innocence since Lucy refused to press charges. But your father knew… he knew Stan’s lawyers didn’t know Lucy wouldn’t have gone after them. So, he bluffed them, and they paid Lucy off. The money she was awarded was put into a trust fund for her to use after she graduated.”
Tears fell past my cheeks as I watched the torment wrench the expressions on his face.
“She’s happy, you know. She graduated from a university in Florida. She’s a nurse now.”
“You still talk to her?”
“Every once and a while,” he said with a small shrug. “I like to check in and make sure she’s okay. Especially on the day…” His words broke off. With it, my heart did too. He inhaled and then coughed to clear his throat.
Awkward silence skipped between us as the leaves rattled in the wind.
“Listen, I know why you’re here. I know what this means.” He looked me in the eyes for the first time since I wandered up the driveway. “It’s okay, Andy. I’ll be okay.”
It felt like the world was slipping through my fingers. “I don’t know why everything had to get screwed up.”
He put his hand over my cheek. I leaned into it, wishing I could freeze his touch forever.
“Like every perfect story, there has to be an ending at some point.”
I tried to smile, but it faltered into a frown. “I have to protect Charlie.”
I closed my eyes as he kissed my forehead.
“If I can just win this case, then nothing will hold me back. But for right now, I can’t let anything come between that.”
“So don’t.” Pain lived inside his words. “Goodbye, Andy.”
I opened my eyes, staving off my tears. Watched him cross the driveway to the front door. Felt my heart being dragged with his every step until the front door shut and I was left standing alone.
As it always should have been.
22
O P E N W O U N D S
Your lies were the chains around my wrists,
and your truth is the key that set me free.
MOM PEERED THROUGH THE WINDOW when I finished putting the last suitcase in the bed of my truck.
“You good, man?” Josh asked as he leaned against the front end.
I shrugged. Toed the gravel with the front of my shoe.
“She’ll come around. She loves you. You know that.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. He looked too much like her. “Thanks for bringing my bags. It was just… you know.”
“It’s cool, bro. I got you.”
A gust of wind blew between us.
He sighed. “I guess I should go. I have a meeting in an hour with the sheriff.” He pushed off from the truck. “Who knew I’d find my way into law.”
I forced a chuckle. “Well, you did always fight to be the cop every time we played cops and robbers.”
He laughed as memories danced in his eyes. “Yeah, if only we could go back to those days when stress was a six-letter word that didn’t exist.”
I snorted. “If only.”
He looked at me, concern etched on his forehead. “You sure you’re okay, man?”
I tried to swallow. “She can’t be forced. She—” I stopped, feeling a hot rush in my throat. When I was certain I could speak again, I finished, “Andy needs to do what is best for her and Charlie. Right now, that doesn’t include being with me. I love her. I’ll always be there for her. She knows that. But I… I need to go.”
There was a flicker of sorrow swimming in his eyes as he inhaled. “She’s stubborn.”
I nodded as a knot formed in my stomach.
He patted me on the shoulder, offered me an encouraging smile, and then got into his car.
Leaning down, I rested my forearms on the windowsill. “You’ll let me know about the job?” I asked as he put his seatbelt on.
He looked over with a grin. “Duh. How could they pass up someone like me?”
I chuckled as I backed up, waving him off. Dust billowed as he sped down the dirt road.
“Love always finds a way,” Mom said from the porch. “Maybe not when we want it to, but when it’s right, it will.”
I headed up the steps and pulled her in for a hug. It hadn’t been easy, raising me under my father’s roof, knowing we butted heads as bad as we did, and it killed me to think about all she’d been through.
“I just wish you hadn’t moved so far away,” she said as she held the collar to my button up.
“Momma, you know I had to.”
She stepped back. Smoothed the front of her apron. “I know. I just… I wish—”
The door opened behind her, and my father stepped out. “Son.”
I hated that I felt like a put-off little boy every time he called me that. I dug my hands into my pockets and looked up at him. “I have to be at work tomorrow, so I need to get going.”
His face was just as unreadable as it had always been. He was a well-chiseled pawn for the courtroom.
“Don’t let us hold you up,” he said with a small dip of his head.
Mom glanced over her shoulder at him. I could just make out her lips moving. She was urging him on. Pushing him to fix what I doubted was even fixable.
His eyes moved away from her, and I already knew his answer.
Nobody could bend the unbendable.
“I should get on the road,” I said, about to turn for my truck.
“I made lunch. You wouldn’t turn away your mother’s famous turkey club, would you?” Mom asked. The desperation in her tone wrapped chains around my feet.
“Of course not, Mom.” I followed them into house. It was weird how a place could look like home but feel so unfamiliar. Too many nights I spent at the Hale’s, running from my past and his expectations. It was easier to avoid him. To keep from seeing the solid form of disappointment residing in his eyes especially for me.
The same disappointment he wore today.
“I’ll be right out with the sandwiches. Why don’t you two sit and talk?” Mom said before disappearing into the kitchen.
I didn’t sit. I moved to the window, staring out through the blinds at the road that would soon carry me far away from there.
I heard the familiar crystal ping as he removed the lid of the decanter and poured himself a scotch, and then, a second later, the leather gave under my father’s weight as he sat in his thinking chair.
“I’d offer you one—”
“But I have to drive,” I finished. I turned and looked down at him. At the gray in his hair turning white at the roots. “Listen, I don’t expect you to under
stand what happened at the fair, but it wasn’t without reason. I know you like to think I have an anger streak, but that isn’t the case.”
His gaze pondered me for a moment, face like a blank canvas. “Sit with me for a moment.” He pointed to the leather chair next to his.
I did, even though I wanted nothing more than to eat my sandwich and leave. Nothing we ever tried to hash out had ever panned out in a good way.
“Uncle Paul went to jail once,” he said before taking a slow sip from his cup. He pulled it from his lips and swirled the glass, leaving me in suspense.
“And?”
“And that’s why I decided to go into law,” he said, as if I should have put this together on my own.
“Enlightening.” I huffed, and then leaned back in the chair, wishing Mom would hurry so I could leave.
“He was falsely accused,” my father added.
I looked over at him.
“He paid six years of his life for a crime he didn’t commit,” he continued, watching memories play out within the amber liquid.
“Sounds somewhat familiar.” I didn’t bother to mask the spite.
His eyes found mine.
“I don’t understand why you hate me so much. I helped her. I did what any man should do—”
“No,” he said over me, his tone sharp and cold. “You put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like my brother. You tried to be a hero, just like my brother, only he wasn’t lucky enough to get off.”
Each syllable stacked on top of the next until his words towered over me
“I never asked for help,” I said. My chest was heavy and hot. “What was I supposed to do? Let it happen? Leave her there to be tortured?”
He set his drink down and leaned in. “You should’ve called the police and let the law handle it. That’s how impossible situations are dealt with. Not with our fists. Not with an act of martyrdom. But with the law.”
His words were so final. Damning. I stood. “Maybe. Maybe I should have slowed down. Maybe I should have been more prepared. I was sixteen, Dad. I was scared and angry and disgusted with what I’d witnessed. You didn’t see the bruises on her body. The blood. The tears. You didn’t see his face as he tried to pin her back down beneath him. You didn’t see the checked-out look in his eyes when I tried to get him off her without violence. You didn’t get punched… knocked clean out… only to wake up and see her fighting her way out from under him once again.”
I shut my eyes, wishing those images didn’t surface every time I did.
“I had one option, and that was to protect us both from a monster. From a boy I thought was my friend. A teammate I thought I could trust. I don’t regret what I did. I never will. I may have damaged your name, but I’ll take that responsibility any day if it means Lucy is out there somewhere knowing there is some form of justice in this world.
“The law wouldn’t have protected her from the continued horror he would have inflicted on her had I sat back and waited for help. The law wouldn’t have listened to her if she spoke against him. Her family had little. His father was the mayor… and your friend.”
Dad gripped his glass so hard I thought it might shatter. He sat forward, shoulders stiff like he was preparing to go to war.
Mom walked in holding a plate of sandwiches. It didn’t take her but one look to tell what was happening. She set the plate down, and I waited for her to leave like she always did, but she continued forward until she stood over my father.
With hands on her hips, she said, “Now you listen here, Samuel James Thurston. I will not sit by and let you push our son away once again. Eight years I’ve gone without saying a word, hoping you’d get over your ego enough to apologize for not being the father to him you should have been—”
He went ramrod straight. “I don’t know where you get off—”
“No,” she said in a tone that shut him right up and pushed him back in his chair. “I have had enough, Samuel. He was a boy doing the right thing. He saved that girl from unspeakable acts, and you couldn’t even bring yourself to stand by him when the Libermans smeared his name around town, painting him as a jealous, arrogant young man. If it wasn’t for that Lucy girl speaking with John, I don’t know where he’d be today.”
Dad scowled, opening his mouth, but Mom shoved her hand in the air, fingers splaying wide as she shook her head, shushing him.
“I mean it, Samuel. You will find it in you to make amends with our boy, or you can find yourself a new roof to sleep under, because I cannot and will not tolerate another minute of you pushing him to the point of walking away from this family once and for all.”
She left the room, taking all the air with her.
I wanted to go after her. That hadn’t been easy for her. She never stood up to Dad. Never spoke out against him.
I turned for the hallway, but when he said, “Wait,” I stopped. It felt like years before he spoke again. When he did, his tone had changed, caving, like an enemy retreating behind their line.
“I never hated you, Dean.”
My jaw clenched as I stared ahead at nothing. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say.
“Look at me, son,” he said.
When I did, past regrets swam in his eyes, glazing them. “Paul went to jail for me, Dean.”
I felt my eyes dip in question.
“I was young and stupid, and not the best when it came to peer pressure. I thought if I could do the dare, then I’d be accepted within a group of kids who usually picked on me. It was supposed to be simple—I break into the library, steal a bunch of electronic equipment, and then give it to this boy, Tommy, so he could pawn it all for money. I was so thorough in my planning that nothing should have went wrong.
“What I didn’t plan for was Tommy calling the cops. There was never a dare. It had all been a prank. A good laugh to watch me scramble when the cops showed up. Paul had followed me that night, worried I was doing something stupid. When we saw the sirens out the front windows, he told me to run.” He hung his head. “So I did.
“Paul took the rap for me. He knew the details of my plan and laid them out as if he’d been the one to make them up. And I never spoke up for him, even after they found a knife in the back of the truck I’d borrowed, his truck, and decided to label it an armed robbery. I was too afraid of our father to tell the truth.
“Paul spent six years paying for a crime I committed, and I vowed I’d never let another man go to jail who wasn’t deserving. I vowed to pay my penance by serving others.
“And then you went and found yourself in a similar pickle. Taking the heat to protect Lucy. I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror, let alone try to coach you through it all.”
I didn’t know what to say. This man… who I always feared. Who I always compared myself to and thought I was less than.
He was nothing more than a miserable old man filled with regrets.
“Do you understand now? It was never because I hated you. It was always because I was ashamed of myself,” he confessed, his face contorted in pain as tears swam in his eyes.
Something shifted in the air. It was like all the resentment had been swallowed up within the truth, leaving nothing but an empty void and a broken relationship.
He downed what was in his glass and sat it on the table. “I know I could have been a better father to you. In some ways, I was glad John was around, because I knew you had someone in your life who could be the father figure I couldn’t be.”
I didn’t have words. All that time… the hell he put me through… it was because of his own past mistakes.
I stood up.
“Son?”
It was then that I looked at him. “What do you think is going to happen here? I smile and tell you thank you for telling me the truth? Thank you for realizing your problem is with yourself and not with me?”
He flinched and cast his eyes to the floor.
“You think because you went to law school and
took on cases to help people, that it’ll just erase the man you are underneath your fancy suit and big words? It doesn’t change anything, Dad. You’re still the same boy who let his brother serve time for a crime he didn’t commit. You’re still the same man who couldn’t love his son because he couldn’t love himself.”
He stood from his chair, fists forming at his sides as a scowl formed over his lips, but I didn’t care. The damage was done. I was sick of being pushed around. Tired from the bullshit.
“Mom doesn’t deserve to be punished because you’re a selfish old man, so I’ll make sure I come back to see her, but as far as you and I are concerned…”
I let the words hang as I picked up my plate and walked away, leaving him sitting there to chew on his own misdoings.
Leaving the past in the past.
23
B R O K E N H E A R T S
Time was always waiting,
And I was always a minute too late.
RETURNING TO NASHVILLE DIDN’T FEEL like coming home.
Charlie helped me lug the few suitcases we brought up the stairs, both of us drenched from the torrential downpour outside. He’d said we were in for storms, but the heaviness of the rain was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
After I grabbed us towels, we stood in the foyer, drying off. Everything felt out of place since I left Dean. Even breathing was strenuous. I felt like I’d left my heart back in Georgia. Back with him.
Charlie dropped his towel. “Home sweet home,” he said as he rushed through the living room and hugged the TV. “I missed you, television,” he said to it. He turned to the shelves. Trailed his fingers over the spines of books. “I’ve missed you, books.” He did this for the next ten minutes with his favorite things. His bed. His iPad. Even his book bag.
I couldn’t help but giggle as I watched him, a momentary relief from the heartache chipping away at my composure. Sighing, I carried our suitcases to our rooms and set them in front of each of our dressers. Mother helped me finish our laundry before we left so all we’d have to do was unpack and put our clothes away. It was weird how much my clothes smelled like I was back at my mother’s as I pulled them out, one by one, and put them in their places.
The Taste of Her Words Page 25