Combative Trilogy

by McLean, Jay

  Dr. Aroma nods. “I remember you telling me about her in one of our earlier sessions. I didn’t know that you knew her whereabouts.”

  “I didn’t. But someone found her and made contact with her. He told her all about me and everything I’ve been through, and she’s invited me to live with her and her family. She has a new husband. He has three kids, and they had two more together. Only one of them still lives at home, so she has room for me. It’s a decent option. I could start new, get away from all of this.”

  Dr. Aroma stares at me a moment, her lips pursed. “Can I be frank with you, Bailey?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t seem too excited about either of those choices.”

  I chew the inside of my cheek, my gaze dropping. “It’s a tough decision.”

  “Talk to me,” she says. “Tell me why.”

  I swallow my nerves before making eye contact again. “If I choose option A, I’ll always be reminded of what brought us together in the first place. If I stay, I’m pinning all my hopes on this one relationship, and I’d be relying on him to live up to those hopes. And that’s not fair to him... but more importantly, it’s not fair to me. I don’t want to rely on someone else to make me happy. Not again.”

  “That’s a very valid concern you have there,” she says, offering an encouraging smile. “So, what if you choose Canada with your stepmom?”

  I huff out a breath. “If I choose to move in with her, I think I’m always going to fear that she’ll leave me again. Her leaving caused the majority of my abandonment issues. She was the first heartbreak I ever felt, and as much as I love her and I’m grateful for her offer, I can’t help but think that... that I deserved more from her to begin with.”

  Dr. Aroma’s eyes widen at my words, and she heaves out a sigh. “So, you have option A and option B, and both of those come with high risks.”

  My gaze drops again, my thoughts reeling, contemplating.

  “What are you going to choose, Bailey?”

  I lick my lips, feel my chest expand with my intake of breath. Then I look up at her, wondering if she can see in my eyes what I feel in my heart: clarity. “I’m going to choose option C.”

  “Option C?”

  I nod, feeling hope at my fingertips. “I choose me.”

  Chapter 59

  “I’d woken up that morning to Bailey sitting naked on the bathroom floor—her thin, pale frame a contrast against the gray of the tiles. She’d been counting, her finger pointed in the air, and her body shaking, and all of a sudden, that ache I had felt tripled in strength, only it hadn’t been because I needed to be with her, needed to feel her in my arms… No, the reasons were worse. A lot worse. Bailey once told me that the only thing she experienced when she pulled the trigger that night I found her was a repeat of the events that led her to where she was. Gunshot. Breath. Darkness. She’d said those three words as if they were all her life meant, but she said she’d been sad that she hadn’t seen her life flash before her eyes. But I had—my life, I mean. That morning, I’d watched Bailey lean forward, her eyes squinting, her lips moving, and her pointed finger slowing, and my heart hurt to the point where I thought I was dying, or maybe I was because it was at that point when my life flashed before my eyes.”

  Doctor Aroma looks up from her notepad, her eyes wide. “And what did you see, Nate?”

  “Bailey and Hickory.”

  A moment of silence passes, longer than I’m comfortable with, and I squirm in my chair, wonder if I’ve said too much. Revealed too much. She lowers her glasses on the bridge of her nose so she can stare at me in the way I’m used to, the kind of stare that truly makes me believe she can see through me. Through my bullshit lies and honest desperation and my silent screams and frustrations.

  I need to get the fuck out of this hell.

  After what feels like forever, she finally speaks, “Do you blame yourself for what happened to Bailey?”

  I don’t skip a beat. “Of course I do.”

  “Let me rephrase that then. Do you forgive yourself for what happened to Bailey?”

  I shake my head. “Forgiveness is futile.”

  “A lot of Catholic teaching is based on forgiveness. Isn’t that what the Our Father prayer is all about?”

  “I’m not Catholic,” I tell her, my eyes narrowing. Not anymore.

  “Oh.” She points to my chest. “Isn’t that what the cross is around your neck?”

  I hide the pendant beneath the collar of my shirt. “It was a gift from a family member. It holds no significance.”

  “Right.” She nods once, taking longer than necessary to jot down some notes.

  My irritation gets the best of me. “Do I have to keep doing these sessions?”

  She looks up. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  With a sigh, she rests back in her seat, one leg crossed over the other. “Because we’re only halfway there, Nate. Literally and figuratively. You’ve only been in witness protection for a year. You still have one more to go.”

  A growl dies in my throat when she focuses on her notes again, her pen scrolling across the page in rapid flick, flick, flicks.

  I look around the dingy hotel room—the same place I’ve been for a year now. No one goes in or out besides her, the agents, and a doctor that checks on my heart every other week. There’s also a lock on the door that only opens from the outside. If I’d known that this was my only option, I would’ve negotiated for something better.

  Without looking up, she murmurs, “What if I told you that Bailey forgives you?”

  My heart stops, sinks to my stomach. “You don’t know that.”

  Another single nod before glancing up at me. “I do know that, Nate. She told me.”

  “Stop,” I whisper, my eyes drifting shut.

  But she doesn’t stop. “Her exact words were, ‘I feel like I need to find a way to forgive him. Because I feel like he won’t be around long enough to forgive himself.’”

  My eyes snap open. “You saw her?” I ask through the knot in my throat.

  “I did,” Dr. Aroma says. “I didn’t realize she was talking about you during all those sessions with me. She never mentioned you by name, and I didn’t put two and two together until I started seeing you. What concerns me, though, is that she mentioned you not being around long enough to forgive yourself. She knew something was going on with you, Nate, and I’d like to know what that something is.”

  I could lie to her. I could make up something completely irrelevant, but what would be the point?

  “Did you kill yourself on purpose?” she asks.

  “No,” I’m quick to say. “At least not that time.” The cocaine mixed with the massive doses of heart meds I’d been taking had been a deadly combination. Hell, even the amount of meds I was popping wasn’t good. I should’ve known better, but I summed up the pain as emotional rather than physical, and that—that was my downfall. I died in that flower shop and, apparently, they got a soft pulse back in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. When the agents came in to see me, we made the deal: I would stay dead and hide out for two years, and in the meantime, I’d help them with busting the bad guys. It was an easy choice for me. What we were doing was putting everyone in danger, and I needed to give them all a reason to walk away, to leave it all behind.

  Tiny—he would’ve stayed by my side forever, and he’d never move on. Bailey—she was always going to be in limbo, and this was her push to make a solid choice. And Ashton… well, she played a huge part in the deal we’d made. I gave her a day and then I made contact with her. I told her everything, and I encouraged her to go back to Benny’s house and find whatever it is he’d been hiding. She agreed, but more, she understood my decision and respected it. Because she loved me, and loving me meant letting me go.

  “Nate?” Dr. Aroma says, pulling me back to the present.

  “What?”

  “You said not that time. Were there other times?”

  “No. Not yet. But…”
/>
  “You were planning on it?”

  “Kind of. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  She huffs out a breath.

  “Guilt,” I blurt, switching directions because she’s too damn close to getting me to reveal my secrets.

  Her eyebrow quirks. “Guilt?”

  I slump back in my chair, my steady hands resting on my knees. “You said you wanted to know what was going on with me, why Bailey thought that about me, and it’s simple: guilt.”

  Dr. Aroma licks her perfectly applied lipstick. “You know I’m going to need more than that from you.”

  I clear my throat, my chest aching with the emotions of what I’m about to reveal. “It’s the only way I can describe how I felt after my mother died: guilt. I didn’t mourn her death or do any of the things a kid should do. I just felt guilt. Constantly.”

  “But you were only ten years old…”

  I ignore her. “The only way I could fight that guilt was with the promise of redemption.”

  “Redemption or revenge?”

  I ignore her again. “I fucking hated what I did, dealing drugs to low-level thugs or rich kids wanting their next high. I was making money while kids overdosed or died on my supply. But I stayed because I needed to keep my enemies close and keep my promise to myself. And then Bailey—Bailey shouldn’t have been there that night. She had no fucking reason to be. She was too good for that world, or this world in general, and when I saw her… when I saw her lying there with blood all over her, I just...”

  “You saw your mother?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I saw.” I shrug, sniff back my heartache. “Besides, you said she wanted to find a way to forgive me. You didn’t say she did.”

  She stares at me a moment as if contemplating what to say next. “She did, Nate. She told me. In our very last session, she said that in order to move on with her life, she needed to let go of her past, let go of the weight that had kept her heart heavy for so many years. She forgave her dad for his mistreatment of her, she forgave her stepmom for walking out, but she said that the easiest to forgive was you, and you know why?”

  “Why?” I croak.

  “Because she loved you most of all. She never stopped truly loving you, and she regrets so much not telling you before… you know.”

  I sniff back the heat behind my nose, wipe the unexpected tear off my cheek with my shoulder. “She’s something else, huh?”

  “She truly is,” Dr. Aroma says, her voice cracking with her own emotions. “I see a lot of people in my job, Nate. From cops to victims to criminals. But Bailey? I saw her at her lowest point, straight after they found her until the very end, and her growth, her tenacity to keep fighting, to not let anyone keep her down… She’d been through hell and back so many times and…” She stops there, tears welling in her eyes as she reaches into her bag, pulls out a picture frame. “Here,” she says, handing it to me. In the frame is a picture of the sun rising over an ocean. “She sent this to me after our last session. I carry it with me everywhere. There was also a letter—the most beautifully inspiring letter I’ve ever read. I have it framed in my home office to remind me of my purpose, but she wrote something on the back of the frame that encompasses everything Bailey is in this world.”

  I watch her a moment, giving my pulse time to settle, and when I feel that I’ve gained enough strength, enough courage, I flip the frame over, my heart catching in my throat.

  * * *

  Every day, we rise.

  Chapter 60

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what I was going to do today, everything I was going to say to you all. I initially came up with a bunch of lies: I promise I’ll be good! No more criminal activity! I’ll be the most upstanding member of society you’ll ever see!”

  Agent Perceval scoffs while Neilson rolls his eyes at me. Next to him, Dr. Aroma sits, shaking her head.

  Today is D-Day.

  Two years since I went into the witness protection program, which means that, if I play my cards right, I get to walk out in mere minutes.

  But first, I need to prove to them that I’ll do all the things I’d planned on lying about.

  “How about you just give us the truth, kid?” Perceval says.

  I nod, suck in a breath. “Truth? I was going to kill Franco the second I stepped out.”

  Dr. Aroma groans.

  “Jesus Christ,” Neilson mutters. “Not only is that the stupidest thing you could ever do, but Franco’s been on the run since the raids. No one knows where the fuck he is.”

  I shrug.

  “So, what’s stopping you now?” Perceval asks.

  “Two years stuck in here? It gives me a hell of a lot of time to think. And those sessions with Dr. Aroma gave me a lot of perspective, especially over the last year.”

  I catch her smile, but she doesn’t speak.

  I fixate on my hands, no longer trembling because I have nothing left to fear. “I’d always planned on murdering Franco. He was the one I was aiming at when I killed my mom, so in a way, even in my young mind, killing him meant righting a wrong. And then when I found out what he did to Ashton, and then to Bailey...” I stop, try to keep my anger in check.

  When I found out about Bailey, my need for redemption increased two-fold. But I never got the chance. I didn’t plan on dying, obviously, at least not in that way. But if I did kill him, my time would become limited. Franco’s men were stupid motherfuckers, but they’re loyal to a T, and they’re reckless as hell. They’d have no problem putting a target on me, even if it created a bloodbath on the streets of Philly. I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive it, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to hide from it like Franco is right now. That’s why I’d pre-planned Tiny and Bailey’s escape from this hell. I’d have done the same with Ashton, but no one would bother looking into her. She was nothing more than a wife. And in the mob world, that meant she was just a possession. Nothing more. Nothing less. Besides, she loved where she lived, and she loved her salon. I was sure to leave her enough money to fulfill her dreams of expanding, opening up many more salons across the state and then nationwide, all while a part of her earnings went toward funding a task force of web sleuths to track missing and exploited children.

  My chest aches at the memories of her, and a knot forms in my throat. It’s a wonder I didn’t realize I loved her earlier. Shame, really, that I didn’t see her worth until she killed a man who was about to kill me.

  “I get that, DeLuca,” Perceval says. “Believe me, I do. You know how many nights I’ve stayed up looking for that motherfucker, wanting to do the same fucking things. After what he did to my daughter, I’d love nothing more than to—”

  “But there’s a legal system in place for a reason,” Neilson cuts in.

  I look back over at Perceval, my head tilted, assessing him. His jaw’s tense, his face red with rage. His nostrils flare with his exhale as he balls his fists, and I know he feels everything I feel. I can see it in his eyes.

  I focus on Perceval. “I’ve been wondering how your daughter is.”

  His stare hardens. “Lauren’s… I mean, she’s better than she was, but you know, it’s tough. She goes to therapy three times a week, doesn’t leave the house unless I’m with her—which, in a way, is good, I guess. At least she trusts me… forgives me.”

  Nodding, I blink back my emotions. “It’s hard to let go of that guilt, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he admits, his eyes red. “It’s definitely hard, and I… I don’t know what I can do to shake it. I try to be a bigger man, but—”

  Neilson interrupts him again, “But we swore to an oath, and we have to abide by the laws,” he says, squeezing Perceval’s shoulder. “There are enough guys in lock-up ready to talk. We just need to find him, and he’ll spend the rest of his days rotting away in a prison cell.”

  “But that’s my little girl, Neilson. My world. And he destroyed her.”

  The tension in the room turns the air thick around us until Dr. Aroma clears her throat.
“Go on, Nate,” she encourages. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

  I blink, try to refocus my thoughts. “My mom—she never wanted this life for me. She wanted me to travel the world, see things that she never got to.” I lick the dryness off my lips. “It’s just hard. For so many years, every time I closed my eyes, I’d see my mother dead in my arms, or I’d picture Ashton as an innocent kid, or I’d see those photos of Bailey that you showed me… the ones of her in that shithole and all I wanted to do was make him hurt as much as he hurt them, as much as he hurt me.” I take a breath, and then another. “My dad once told me that I could be anything in this life as long as I didn’t become him. He wasn’t a bad man. He married into a world that was already created for him, but he did it because he loved my mother and… and I don’t see too much wrong with that. He saw himself a certain way because of how others portrayed him, and he believed that the worst thing I could do in life was be like him.” I shrug. “I guess he didn’t know about the depths of evil that live in men like Franco. I don’t want to be like Franco. And if I go out right now and the first thing I do is kill him, then sure, I might get redemption, but for who? My mom’s dead, Ashton’s doing better than ever, and Bailey—she’s found a way to overcome it all, and I assume she’s happy somewhere, otherwise you all would’ve told me, and so the only reason I’d be doing it is for me. But it’s not going to erase the past, and it sure as shit isn’t going to bring any of them back to me. It’s never going to take away the pain of seeing them when I close my eyes. If anything, doing what I’d planned will just add to the mix, as it did after we did to Benny, and I can’t… my heart can’t take it anymore.”

  Dr. Aroma’s smiling as if she’d just won a prize.

  “So, what are your plans now?” Neilson asks.

  “I don’t really know,” I tell him. “I’m going to head to New York, lay low, hang with my uncle for a bit, and decide where to go from there. But I promise you, I’m done with that life, agents. I want the same thing Bailey wanted for so long. I want normal.”