“You want to talk about it?” he asks.
It hadn’t occurred to me to question why he was here. “What do you know?”
He kisses my shoulder. “My mom called me, gave me some highlights. Why don’t you tell me?”
Leaning my head against his chest, I tell him the whole story. “If he slept with that woman who killed my mother, it changes everything. Her whole defense was that she was delusional, that she’d never met my father, but clearly that’s not true.”
“Slow down a second,” he replies softly. “My mom said she didn’t know if he’d had an affair with Jaime.”
I wipe my tears with the back of my hand. “The plea deal never made sense to me. She kills my mother and gets to spend the rest of her days in some cushy psych ward? I looked it up once—it’s nicer than a lot of luxury hotels I’ve stayed in. Satellite TV, gourmet chef—it’s a sweet life for a murderer. I never understood why my father would sign off on that. But now it makes sense. He couldn’t have a trial because then the whole world would know about his dirty little secret.”
He runs his fingertips up and down my arm. “Image might have been important to your dad, but there is no way he would let his wife’s killer get off to avoid scandal. I know it might not feel like it right now, but he loved your mother. He was devastated by her murder. I’m sure he signed off on the deal because he thought it was the best way to get justice for your mom,”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I respond, my voice cracking. “I look around this house. It’s filled with so many memories, and I don’t know what was real and what was made for TV.”
Holding me tight, he kisses the top of my head. “It wasn’t all lies.”
“It certainly wasn’t the truth!” I snap.
He recoils from my tone but doesn’t say anything. I feel awful for taking my frustration out on him.
Taking a deep breath, I try to sort out exactly what I’m feeling and how to explain it. “I feel like I didn’t even know him or my mother. Affairs? A forced abortion? The people I thought they were would never have done this. And now he’s gone, and I’ll never get the chance to ask him about it. Ask him to help me understand. I’m ashamed of their behavior, and I’m so pissed off at him for dying without telling me about the sibling I might have.”
He twirls a lock of my hair. “It tortured him.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Everything that happened. It tortured him. I’m not sure if that makes you feel any better, but it wasn’t easy on him. The guilt crushed him. Haunted him every day.”
What the hell? I must have misheard him. There’s no way he knew about this and kept it from me. He wouldn’t do that. His hand on my back feels like a lead weight. Needing to put distance between us, I sit up and turn around.
“How do you know that?” I say with a shaky voice.
He props a pillow up behind him. “Right before the draft, your dad brought over this thirty-year-old bottle of scotch and sat me down to talk about everything that was going to change for me: money, business opportunities, people trying to take advantage of me. He had a lot to say about women. Apparently, women were a reoccurring problem for him and your mom. He wanted me to learn from his mistakes, so he told me about this whole mess.”
My jaw drops. “He—he told you?” I can’t believe it. Hearing it from Katie was one thing, but hearing it from Chase and knowing that my father confided in him instead of me is another.
Putting his hand on my knee, he speaks in a soft voice as if a gentle tone will take the sting out of his words. “Once he got really liquored up, he told me that when he was at a bachelor party for some friend from high school, he got hammered and slept with someone. She got pregnant then came after him for money. He said that it was a struggle. Every time they’d settle on a figure, she’d ask for more and threaten to go to the press. Eventually they got her to sign a confidentiality agreement, and she said she had an abortion. They paid her off, and the deal was done. But his guilt ate away at him. He worried about her, so on the sly, he hired a PI to check up on her. As it turns out, she ended up having the kid after all. He kept waiting for her to show up asking for more money or something, but she never did.”
This just keeps getting worse. Every word out of his mouth makes me want to scream or vomit or both. “He knew? He knew he had a kid out there and did nothing about it?”
“He said it would have nullified the contract if he contacted them or something like that, so he just watched from afar. Ultimately, he decided it mustn’t be his kid. The PI said she’d been seen with a bunch of men around the time Aiden had been with her and the timing wasn’t exactly right. He figured she didn’t come after him for more because the kid was someone else’s. But even still, for a long time, he’d go to Texas a few times a year and just sit outside their house and his school and watch.”
My father hadn’t just kept secrets—he’d had a whole secret life.
I want to beg Chase to stop, but I need to know it all. “A few times a year?” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I’m not sure what upsets me more: that he lied to me all those times or that he stalked his child but wasn’t man enough to be the father the poor kid deserved. He was such a coward.”
“Ari—”
I’m not sure I want to know, but I have to ask. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”
He looks at me with sad eyes. “No. Not that I can think of.”
“Did he tell you about Jaime? Did he talk about her at all?”
“No. But I never thought to ask. My head was spinning from what he told me as it was.”
I jump off the bed. “Your head was spinning? Your head? How the fuck do you think I feel?”
He reaches for me. “Ari, I’m so sorry. I know this must be breaking your heart.”
“How could you keep this from me?” Every word out of his mouth enrages me more. I’d bit my tongue, waiting for him to finish and hoping he would say something that would prove to me that he hadn’t betrayed me in the most painful way, but all he did was reaffirm my fears.
He holds up his hands. “Hold on. I didn’t exactly keep it from you. We got into that fight at the draft, then you wouldn’t talk to me before the wedding, then you ended things. When was I supposed to tell you? You wouldn’t speak to me!”
“You pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, guess what? You might have a brother or sister out there!’ Who cares if we were fighting? If I learned something like that about you, I would have picked up the phone and called you. No, better yet, I would have gotten on a plane and told you in person, no matter the state of our relationship. But that’s always been the difference between us. I love you, and you’re a selfish prick who only thinks about himself!”
Jumping back, he looks at me through narrowed eyes. “Whoa! How the hell have I become the bad guy?” His voice loses all sweetness and takes on a sharp edge.
“If you had told me, I would have talked to Daddy about this. I could have asked him if he had another child. If what you say is true, if he was tortured by this, I could have pushed him to go meet this kid so maybe he could have had a couple of years to get to know the child before he died. I could have asked him about Jaime. Then I would know for sure if my father was responsible for my mother’s death. But now he’s dead, and I can’t do any of those things. I’ll never know the truth.” I poke Chase in the chest. “And it’s all your fault.”
He grimaces as though I’ve offended him. “My fault? Arianna, look, I know you’re upset, but come on! I’m not sure what you expected me to do. Your father specifically told me not to tell you, and I had to respect that. What choice did I have?”
“You were supposed to respect me enough to put me above your loyalty to my father. How am I ever supposed to trust you again?”
He runs his fingers through his hair. “Come on, don’t do this. Don’t push me away. I thought we were done with this love/hate bullshit. What happened to dealing with everything together?”
I glare at him. “That went out the window when I realized I can’t trust you. Apparently I can’t trust anyone in my life.” He reaches for me, but I push him away. “Stay the hell away from me.” I walk to the door. “Since Daddy trusted you with his secrets, you can deal with his mess. I don’t care about protecting his legacy. I’m done. Done with you. Done with him. Done with everything.”
“Ari, stop.”
He grabs my hand, but I pull it back then point my finger at him. “Don’t follow me.”
Chapter Twenty
Chase
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I must be the dumbest bastard on the face of the planet. My girlfriend tells me her world was just turned upside down, and what do I do? I turn it inside out too. Why did I open my mouth? No one else knew Aiden told me about his affair. I could have played dumb and been a supportive boyfriend instead of an accomplice.
Aiden never wanted Ari to find out about his affair and the subsequent drama it caused because he knew she’d never look at him the same way and he couldn’t bear the thought of her disapproval. He knew she’d never forgive him. I always thought he wasn’t giving her enough credit. Sure, Arianna can hold a grudge as if it’s bonded in superglue, but she’d have done anything for Aiden. Had he told her, I think they could have found a way to work through it. But he never wanted to risk the fall from grace. For such a strong man, he was a coward. Now that he’s gone, no one will ever be able to explain this to her in a way that will allow her to make peace with it, and I hate that he dragged me into it.
Now, because he was too chicken shit to deal with his own mistakes, Arianna doesn’t trust me, and she’s going to beat the hell out of herself while she tries to process this. I want to be there for her, but I know her well enough to know she won’t let me anywhere near her until she calms down. With the shitstorm coming for her, that might be a very long time.
I run after her, but when I get out of the house, she’s long gone. I follow her footprints to my parents’ house just in time to see her drive away.
“I take it things didn’t go well.” I turn to see Charlie leaning against the front door and saying, “She ran in the house, grabbed her purse and coat, and drove out of here as though a herd of Velociraptors was chasing her.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Velociraptors?”
“Jurassic Park’s on TV,” she replies. “What happened? I asked her when she came in, but she bolted too fast.”
When Mom called about Ari’s crisis, Charlie insisted on coming with me. As soon as we got here, Mom gave me the rundown about what was going on. As soon as I’d heard the word “tell-all,” I knew what the problem was. Charlie had no idea, so while Mom filled her in on the details, I ran after Ari.
“I just don’t believe it. I mean, I believe Mom, but I can’t believe it. Ari must be devastated.” Charlie smacks me. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell her. Or me for that matter.”
Standing next to her, I lean against the door. “At that point in my life, all I was doing was keeping secrets from everyone. What was one more? And remember, she’d just ripped my heart out and put it through a blender. If I had told her then, it would have seemed like I was doing it out of spite to hurt her. There was no way I could tell her and not end up the bad guy.”
She sighs. “You’re the bad guy now, so you were screwed either way.”
“Pretty much. Which totally fucks me because Ari’s turned this into a reason not to trust me.” I pound my fist on the door. “We just got to a good place, and now she’s going to doubt it all. I need to stop planning proposals because every time I do, something catastrophic happens.”
She squeezes my hand. “You’ll find a way to overcome this. The connection between the two of you is powerful. Electric. I don’t know how you hid it from us for all of those years because I take one look at you now and I see it. Get too close to the two of you when you’re together, and someone’s getting shocked. With love like that, it has to work out.”
“Loving each other has never been the problem. We’ve got that in spades. The issue is that our love is entangled in decades of animosity and mistrust. As soon as something goes wrong, you never know what’s going to kick in, the love or the hate.”
Charlie shivers, so I say, “Come on, let’s go inside. There’s no sense sitting out here freezing. I don’t think she’s coming back.”
Charlie nods then opens the door. “The worst part about this whole thing is that this book will most likely get quashed by a judge and all this drama and heartache will have been for nothing. Ari could have just gone on the rest of her life without knowing any of it. I hate secrets, but this is one that should have stayed buried. Nothing good will come from her knowing.”
“Unless she has a sibling out there,” I reply as I walk in and close the door. “Maybe that’s the good that will come from it. Even though they would have been brought together in a really fucked up way, I think having someone else in her life would be good for her.”
Charlie goes into the living room and plops onto the couch. “I don’t want those people anywhere near Ari. The gold-digging bastards.” She gasps. “What if they try to go after the estate?”
After knocking the throw pillows out of the way, I sit next to her. “They can’t. Well, they could try, but they’ll lose. Aiden had a will. Either he wanted to leave this person something or he didn’t. My guess is with the way Aiden kept track of them, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did leave them something.”
“Do you think it’s—I’m so sick of saying it. Did he say if the kid he was following was a guy or a girl?”
I shrug. “He never said. And I didn’t ask.”
She gently elbows me in the side. “A lot of help you are. Do you think he or she is Aid’s kid?”
“Why would he go down there and stalk them year after year if he didn’t think it was his kid?”
“Then why not do something about it?” Charlie’s phone rings before I can respond. After pulling it out of her pocket, she looks at the caller ID. “It’s Ari.”
“Put it on speaker. Please? I promise I won’t say a word. I just need to hear for myself how she’s doing.”
Charlie nods. “Okay, but keep your mouth shut. If she thinks I’m siding with you, I’ll lose her, and then we’ll both be kicked to the curb.”
I motion as though I’m zipping my lips.
She hits talk then puts the phone on the coffee table. “Ari, I’ve been so worried about you!”
“Did you know too?” she sneers with such venom I’m amazed my ears aren’t bleeding.
Charlie’s eyes go wide. “No, I swear. I just found out a few minutes ago. I’m so sorry.” A car horn blares in the background. “Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to the airport. I have to get out of town.”
Charlie closes her eyes. “Ari, don’t run.”
“I’m not running. I just need some time to sort all this out, and I can’t do that here.”
“I disagree. Wholeheartedly. You’ve just found out devastating news. You need to be with the people who love you and can help you through this. You don’t have to go through this alone. Please come back,” Charlie pleads.
“The same people who have been lying to me?” She scoffs. “I can’t stay here for another second. Everywhere I turn, I’m reminded that everything in my life was a lie. A carefully constructed fabrication that was packaged, marketed, and shoved down the throats of the American consumer. Sure, the squeaky-clean, all-American family image was great for selling cars and clothes and makeup and tires and whatever the fuck else they stuck our faces on, but it was all an illusion.”
“I know it feels that way right now, but I know in my heart it’s not that simple. Your father loved you, and he was a good man. Obviously he made mistakes, but that doesn’t change how much he loved you. It just makes him human.”
“He fucked the woman who killed my mother! The woman I was told for years was a psychotic bitch plagued by delusions. But apparently that was all a l
ie too! My father, the good man, covered up the truth. It was more important to him to preserve his precious image than it was for his wife’s murderer to get the punishment she deserves.”
Charlie’s jaw drops. She mouths at me, “Did you know?”
I shake my head. “Mom told her,” I mouth back. “I can’t believe it.”
“You know that for sure?” Charlie asks. “I know you don’t trust anything you know about your father right now, but people have looked over that case a million times. If there was some truth to her story, someone would have found something by now.”
“All the guilt he felt? Each year it weighed heavier on him. It all makes so much sense now.” Ari’s voice is distant, as though she’s no longer talking to Charlie but talking to herself.
“Honey, you need to come home.”
“This isn’t my home anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. I only came back for Daddy, but he’s dead. It’s time for me to get back to my life.”
“And what life is that exactly? I don’t recall you having much of a life. I remember you working a million hours doing a job you hated. I remember you wasting two years running around the globe hiding from Chase. Something no more than a week ago you told me you regretted.”
“I was happy,” Ari protests.
“Bullshit!” Charlie snaps. “That is complete and utter bullshit. Don’t forget who you’re talking to here! I know how miserable you were.”
I put my hand on her arm. “Go easy,” I mouth.
Charlie sighs. “Look. Please just come home. What about Chase?”
“Chase and I are over. I’ve forgiven him for so many things over the years, but this… no. I’ll never get past this. Not just because he kept something so important from me, but I’ll never be able to look at him and not wonder what else he’s hiding. I can’t trust him anymore.”
Her words feel like a million paper cuts soaking in lemon juice. Not deep enough to be mortal wounds but soul-guttingly painful all the same.
Taking my hand, Charlie looks at me with tears in her eyes. “He loves you. I know he fucks up sometimes, but he loves you.”
Love To Hate You Page 20