My feet carried me down the road subconsciously, but my brain was a million miles away, detaching itself from the carnival of crazy I’d just witnessed, refusing point blank to make sense of it all.
What was going to happen now? Do I even care anymore?
I saw a fleet of police cars with their sirens blaring shoot past me, off to take my loving father into custody I guessed. The flash of their lights and the wail that penetrated through the air made it feel like I was in a disaster movie. Only this wasn’t pretend, this was my life burning to the ground as I walked through the flames. The heat of the fire prickling my skin, making me want to claw my nails across it and draw blood; do anything to dull the pain in my heart. The smoke clogging my lungs, making it difficult to breathe and stinging my eyes with tears I didn’t want to shed. But like any good disaster movie, I was determined I wouldn’t go down without a fight. My world might’ve caved to rubble, but I wasn’t a quitter. I was a warrior. I had to be.
I heard footsteps behind me and felt someone grab at my arm.
“Wait, Emily. Please.” It was Finn and I spun round, my face set like stone as I stared blankly at him.
“What?” I was seconds away from turning back and walking away from him; from all of them.
He ran his hand over his face and I watched as his eyebrows pinched together. I don’t think he knew what to say to me now he’d got me in front of him. I didn’t have time for this. I was done with the bullshit and lies. As I went to walk away, he reached out to me again.
“Em, he doesn’t know you’re here. If he did, he’d be tearing this whole town down to get to you.”
I huffed out a laugh and shook my head. I highly doubted that. He had bigger fish to fry. I didn’t register on his radar tonight.
“You know what, Finn? I don’t care anymore. He made his choice tonight when he decided to go against me. He put you and everyone else in this town above me. I should’ve known what was going on before anyone.” I thumped my chest as I spoke, feeling hurt and betrayed. I’d trusted Ryan. I thought he had my back. It hurt to find out I was so wrong.
“It wasn’t like that.” Finn took hold of both my arms, keeping me in place as he spoke. He obviously thought I was a flight risk and I had to admit he wasn’t wrong. “When we had that meeting at the factory the other night, he didn’t know half of what was going on. Sure, he knew about the money laundering, but he didn’t know about Morgan or Danny.”
I felt another piercing sting in my chest when he said my brother’s name. A million knives thrust into my back wouldn’t feel as painful as the one slicing through my heart at this very moment.
“It doesn’t matter. He knew tonight. He chose to hang me out to dry. Do you think I’ll ever be able to show my face around here ever again? After what you’ve all done?”
“No one is going to blame you, Emily. You aren’t your father.” He hung his head in shame then took a deep breath before breaking open my fragile heart some more. “He didn’t want to do it. When we told him everything, he wanted to come straight to you, but we stopped him.”
“If he wanted to tell me, he could’ve. Since when has Ryan done anything he doesn’t want to do?”
“We told him he needed to stay focused. We’d been on this for years, Em. We couldn’t take a chance on anything fucking it up. Not tonight. Ryan wanted to tell you, but we convinced him it’d be better if he waited until after the opening. Get the truth out there, then find you. Tell you in his own way. We knew if he told you first, he wouldn’t go through with what he did tonight. It needed to be done. If you’d known all that stuff before we outed your dad, would you have stopped us? I think you would’ve. We couldn’t take that chance.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d have done. It would’ve been kinder to hear it in private. To have Ryan tell me himself, but then he did try to keep me away. My stubborn ass had just pushed and pushed to get to the truth. But sometimes the truth is the hardest thing to face. My truth was I was alone, and I didn’t know who to trust anymore.
“Was it him? In the video with the mask?” The whole world went on pause while I waited for his response.
“No. That was Zak. Ryan was on the stage though, with Brandon.”
That fact made me feel somewhat better, not much, but it was something. “Where is he now?”
“He’s still back there,” Finn said, gesturing to the community centre we’d both fled. “When Kian tells him we saw you, he’s gonna lose it, Em.”
“He’s broken my heart.” My voice cracked as I spoke. My heart was breaking for so many reasons tonight, and knowing that Ryan had been the cause of it made the pain that much sharper.
“He never wanted to break your heart, Em. He wanted to own it. He loves you. Has done for years. This is gonna break him too, you know.”
Hearing Finn say that Ryan loves me should’ve made me feel something. Hope, maybe? But it didn’t. All it did was make the hurt so much more unbearable. “I guess he should’ve thought about that before he did what he did.”
“He did it for you.” Finn started to tug on his hair. He wasn’t getting the results he wanted from our little chat and it was starting to get to him. “When we told him about Danny, shit, I’ve never seen Ry so cut up. He cried, Em. And not because he’d lost a friend like that, but because he wanted to shield you from it all. The stuff with your sister, that really pushed him over the edge.” I winced when he said that. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge that girl as anything other than my father’s other daughter.
“He wanted to go to your house and confront him right there,” Finn said, ploughing on with his justice for Ryan speech. “He wanted to take you away from it all and look after you. We knew if that happened, your dad would find a way to bury it. He’d make it all go away. Probably make us go away too.”
That knife wedged into my heart twisted at the thought of something happening to Ryan. I started to gasp for air, but every breath just didn’t feel like enough. That’s when I realised, despite all the heartache and pain I felt now, a life without Ryan would be so much worse. He had brought sunshine when everything had turned grey after losing Danny. He brought clarity, security, a reason to smile through the day. He gave me life. He was my life. I loved him.
Tonight, he’d done a really shitty thing, and it was going to take me a long time to get over it, but Ryan hadn’t done it to hurt me. He wanted the maximum impact to hurt my father. I’d thought I was collateral damage, but if I stopped for a second and really thought about it, I wasn’t.
Listening to Finn, I realised I was duped and conned just as much as the rest of the town, maybe even more. Even though I knew he was driven by his job, deep down, I’d trusted my father to always do the right thing. To put our family first no matter what. But he hadn’t. He’d put his own selfish, self-centred greed first. The money, the power, the status; he’d had his cake and eaten it, keeping my mum and some other woman on the side. I couldn’t bring myself to analyse the Danny situation yet. That was still too raw, and my brain couldn’t comprehend how he could be so evil. But Finn was right. My dad would’ve buried it. These truths would’ve never seen the light of day if Ryan had shown his hand too soon.
And me? I was never a very good poker player. I wore my heart on my sleeve and my emotions on my face. If I’d known this before tonight, I’d have broken down completely.
“Em?” Finn broke through my reverie, rubbing my arm and trying to get my attention back to the here and now. “Do you want to come back with me? See Ryan? I think you need to talk, and I’m worried about you.”
“I need time.” I pulled away, but I looked Finn dead in the eyes, so he knew that something had shifted in me. Some of his reasoning had penetrated through, into my psyche, and I was starting to see the wood for the trees. Not all of it, but it was a start.
“Do you want me to pass a message on to him?”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t sure what to say. I could barely string a coherent thought together, let alone a sentence.
/> “Tell him… I think I get it, but I need space. There’s too much going on in my head right now. I need to process.” I shrugged and Finn smiled.
“I get that. Don’t push him away though. He’s waited a long time for you. He won’t let you go and I think you both deserve a bit of happiness once all this dies down. Be angry at your dad. Give us hell for hacking and digging like we did. But remember everything Ryan did was to try and protect you. You come first with him, always.”
I didn’t want to go back to my house. I knew no one would be there, but there were ghosts there that I wasn’t ready to face. My father would be holed up in some police station tonight, with my mum waiting on him, desperate for any scraps she could salvage from her life. That was a life I wanted no part of any more.
I thought about going to see Effy or Liv, but I didn’t feel right unloading all of this hurt onto them. The burden of grief and hatred was a heavy one. So, I opted to go to the one place I knew I wouldn’t find any judgement. A place I’d actively avoided for months because denial was easier to bear than acceptance.
“Hey, bro.” I tugged at the tufts of grass that the mower in the cemetery hadn’t reached when cutting around his marble headstone and then brushed my fingers over the carving of his name. Even now, seeing his name written there, it didn’t feel real.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here in… Well, forever. I just find it so hard. There isn’t a minute of the day that I don’t think about you. I carry you with me, always. But here…” I looked around the eerily quiet graveyard where the sentiment of my words were only felt by the birds and the breeze. “Here it’s too much. Too final. Sometimes, when I wake up, I forget about what happened and just for a split second I don’t remember anything. It’s like you’re still here with us. Everything is as it should be. But then my brain kicks in and it all goes downhill from there.”
I felt a tear trickle down my face, the first of many to follow.
“Dan, I found out what happened today when you had the accident. I’m so sorry that I didn’t do more to clear your name. Thinking about what Dad did, how he used your death to promote himself, it makes me sick. I thought we had shit parents. Guess that was the understatement of the century. But I can’t shake the feeling that we all let you down; Dad, Mum and me. I knew in my gut… I knew you hadn’t taken anything. I knew you didn’t drink. Why did I let them pull the wool over my eyes like that? I should’ve fought harder.”
I lay down on the ground next to his grave and stroked my fingers through the soft grass that covered my brother.
“Not everyone gave up on you though, Danny. Ryan fought for you. I know you’re probably looking down on us and cursing him, maybe me too, for how close we’ve become. You always were over-protective, but he’s a good guy. He did a really shitty thing today, not telling me about the stuff with Dad, but the more I think about it, the more I can see why he didn’t. I think Finn was right. I would’ve stopped him, and your truth needed to be told. Everyone knows now. They know you’re innocent. You weren’t driving. I think Dad’s gonna go to prison. Not just because of you, Dan, but he was laundering money too. Looks like Mum and me are going to be moving to new digs soon. I don’t care though. I hate him. I never want to see our father again. He doesn’t deserve to be called that.” I sighed. The emotions of today were like a boulder in my stomach and it crippled me.
“God, I miss you.”
I hiccupped as an image of Danny doing his ridiculous diving into the pool during our last summer holidays flickered into my mind. He’d always do anything to make me smile. He pissed me off every day too, usually by hogging the T.V. remote or being an arse, but isn’t that what all brothers do? Mine was the best. He’d belch in my face then smother me with hugs, making me go from fuming to giggling in a nanosecond. I’d give anything to have that again.
“Dad had another family,” I said with zero emotion behind the words. When it came to that truth, I felt like a robot going through the motions, but refusing to open up to the reality of what it meant. “He has a daughter, Dan. She’s the same age as me. Did you know? What am I saying, of course you didn’t. You’d have told me if you did. You’d have kicked his ass too for doing that to Mum.”
I lifted myself up and sat cross-legged at the side of his grave and picked a few daisies out of the ground, giving my trembling hands something to do.
“I heard three truths today. They say bad luck comes in threes. Mine came hurtling towards me like giant bowling balls. Each one was fired by them, Dan. Ryan was a part of that and I want to be angry at him, fuck, I am angry at him, but I… I love him, Dan, and I don’t know what to do. Do I walk away? Turn my back on something that could be the best thing to ever happen to me? Or do I stand firm? Show them they can’t knock me down like that. Do I fight for him? For us? I’m so confused. Everything’s gone to shit, and I feel like I’m losing everything; you, Mum, Dad, and now Ryan. It’s too much.”
I took a deep breath to try and calm my raging thoughts.
“What would you say if you were here? What would you tell me to do?”
I closed my eyes and imagined Danny was standing right in front of me. I knew him as well as anybody and I wanted to tap into his mind. Pull out the wisdom he’d give me if he were here.
I felt the wetness on my cheeks seep into the collar of my hoodie, but I let them flow. I needed to. Tonight, all the hurt from when Danny died had been reopened. My pain was as real now as it had been on the morning that we’d got that life changing call.
“Em, what have I always told you? Our parents are basket cases, but we are not our parents. What Dad did was fucked-up, and let’s not kid ourselves, Mum will forgive him. She always does. No matter what shit he puts her through, she takes it. She’s blind when it comes to him. We are not.
“When I was there I always tried to play all the roles for you. The annoying older brother, the father figure who actually stuck around and gave you some ground rules, and the mother’s ear you never got from her. I hate that I’m not there to do that anymore. But I haven’t left you, Em. I’ll never leave you. I see you when you need me. I hear the words you say and the ones you don’t. When you feel so broken that you can’t carry on, I’m there, Em, putting my arms around you to hold you up. But you know what? I haven’t had to do that as much lately. Not since Ryan took that role from me. I’m not gonna lie, he wouldn’t have been my first choice for you. I knew he had a thing for you. He’d ask about you constantly and he couldn’t take his eyes off you whenever you were around. I ignored it. I had to. He was my best mate and as much as I’d wanted to knock him out, I knew he was a good guy. If you chose him, then that was between the both of you. As long as he’d make you happy, that was all that mattered to me.
“Ems, what he did wasn’t against you. It was against our dad. It was a smack in the face to the injustice that shouldn’t go unnoticed. Dad doesn’t deserve to get away with what he did, and Ryan was strong enough to stand up for that. Em, you need to thank him, not bury the guy. If I know Ryan, and I think I do, he’ll be feeling a million times worse than you could ever imagine. That dude acts like he’s a tough-nut, but he’s a softie at heart. Ask him to tell you about Battlefield, I think it might surprise you.
“So, little sis, I guess what I’m trying to tell you in my rambling incoherent way is, you need to go easier on yourself, and Ryan too. He loves you. I know you love him. Life’s short. Take the happiness where you can. Hold onto it so tightly you feel dizzy from that shit. I want my sister to enjoy her life. And if he fucks up, dump his ass, but he won’t. Let him be the strength you need when you’re too tired from holding it all together. I know you’ll do the same for him when the time comes, and it will. Lose the guilt. Let it go. Imagine me dressed as Elsa singing that to you and when you’ve finished laughing, listen again and do it. I love you, Em. I’m only ever a heartbeat away.”
I fell onto the ground sobbing. I had no idea where all that had come from. That whole conversation I’d just made
up in my head had exhausted and reawakened me at the same time.
I sucked in a breath, realising I needed to see Ryan. I wanted to be with him. I was in love with him and I had to make it work. My family lay in tatters at my feet, my name was mud and my feelings shredded to nothing. But the positives in my life had to win. My friends, my courage to survive, and my love for a man who, in the short space of time that we’d been together, had done nothing but stand up for me, with Chase, with my family. Whenever I’d needed him, he’d been there. I wouldn’t get over what had happened overnight. I’d still harbour some anger towards him for not telling me first, but I understood his reasons. Now, I wanted to move forward with him by my side.
I looked down at my lap and saw the little daisy chain I’d made. I smiled and hung it off the corner of Danny’s gravestone.
“Next time I’ll bring some proper flowers. For now, you can have my daisy chain. I know how much you loved having those planted in your hair when we were kids.” I stood up and smoothed my hands down my jeans. “See you later, bro. I love you.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, but after lighting up it showed me I had one percent charge, and powered off. So, I went back to the community centre, thinking maybe I’d find Ryan there. The police were taking statements and the crowds from earlier had died down, but the boys were nowhere to be seen. I turned to leave and that’s when I noticed Kian in the corner of the room, trying not to draw attention to himself. When he saw me he flinched and then reluctantly he made his way over.
“I’m so sorry, Em.” He held both of his hands up as he walked towards me, then stopped and in a low voice he asked me, “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t ready to go another round with anyone else about what had gone down tonight, so I cut right to the chase. “Where’s Ryan?”
“He’s not here. Finn told him you saw everything, and he bolted. The rest of them left soon after. It’s been a shit-show, Em. They’ve arrested your dad.”
Renegade Hearts (Rebels of Sandland Book 1) Page 24