She swallowed audibly and started again. "My mother—my birth mother—and Aileen Doyle met back in college. They'd been roommates their freshman year, and they mildly stayed in touch through social media."
So, Tierney had come to stay with the Doyles when she'd gotten pregnant, as if it were some kind of family secret. But what family worried about a pregnant teenager these days? He wanted to ask all the questions swirling in his head, but so far, the name change didn't make any sense. He knew he wasn't holding all the cards ... yet. It was difficult to keep his mouth shut and wait for her to get the story out. But he tried.
"My mom came from a nice middle-class family but then she married my dad, Adam Gallagher, and dad started his own company and made a mint. Mom began to work the charity circuit. By the time I was five ... it was a lonely only child."
Ronan was still trying to wrap his head around it. If he was following correctly, then she and Siorse weren't actually sisters. Maybe they were of no relation at all. He was struggling to hold all the pieces to keep the balls juggling and moving smoothly in the air. But Tierney wasn't done throwing little bombs at his feet.
"By the time I was fourteen, I was already treated as my mother's showpiece. And expected to play assistant to her charity work, despite being in a difficult private school and prepping for college. Elliot Vander clef took a shine to me."
Interesting term, Ronan thought.
"Elliot was twenty."
Oh, hell no. His mouth did not stay shut this time. "That's not dating. You know that, right?"
She tipped her head one way or another. "Yeah, I see that now. But at the time, I was fourteen. I thought I was an adult. I was treated like one in a lot of ways, and I was lonely. This very, very wealthy, very well-connected man told me that I was beautiful and that I was mature for my age.”
"You are beautiful." The words were out before he thought about what he was admitting, and that he'd left the insult hanging.
Ouch.
Ronan had seen that situation more than once just doing house calls. Girls needed to understand that there was basically no such thing as dating up. Girls—actual minor females—couldn't consent to these things. He knew the stats on teen pregnancy, that well over half of pregnancies in girls under seventeen were fathered by men over twenty. It wasn't love.
Tierney—Emily he corrected himself in his thoughts—seemed to realize that now at least.
"He swept me off my feet. Dressed me up and took me to lavish parties. He introduced me to everyone as his beautiful and amazing girlfriend—"
"And no one noticed you were a kid?" He was stunned when she shook her head no.
"No one asked. Then he started saying he was going to marry me."
Ronan tried not to let the internal cringe show in his expression. His insides were knotted. Tierney—Emily!—had arrived in Redemption at sixteen, already pregnant, and he believed he was starting to put the story together.
"What people didn't know, and what I didn't acknowledge, was that Elliot very quickly became very abusive."
So, he wasn't just dating an underage girl, he was abusive to her too? It did seem to make the final pieces snap into place. The hasty exit, the name change, all of it.
Tierney was still talking. "At first, it was little things. He'd berate me, tell me I didn't remember correctly. Then he threatened to hit me. He didn't hit me ... not at first.”
"That's verbal abuse and gaslighting," Ronan told her. The station did training on this. The police weren't the only ones who wound up dealing with domestic violence calls.
"I didn't even know at the time those things had names, or that they were things. I thought they were just Elliot. And I didn't think it was anything other than me just being stupid. I mean, I was young. Everything he said made sense. He was much older, he knew more, and was very clearly in charge. I was along for the ride. At first, much of the ride was amazing and beautiful. He told me wonderful things and he shone this intense attention on me."
She'd needed it, Ronan thought. The story had started with her parents neglecting her. No wonder she'd fallen for it.
"I did try to leave." She looked up at him when she said that. It was important to her that he understand that she figured it out on her own and she'd done her best. Then her breathing grew ragged and her eyes darted away. "He didn't want me to leave. That's when he became physically abusive. I got bruises where no one would see. I had to change a gala dress at the last moment to hide the handprints he left on my arm."
Even now, she didn't say that this Elliot asshole had done it to her. She said it as though it was a thing that happened.
"The other problem was his father—Alder Vander clef."
Why did Ronan think he knew that name?
"Alder is richer than God and thinks his son is perfect. Elliot can do no wrong. So when I left him, both Alder and Elliot persuaded me to come back." She'd used air quotes around persuaded.
Ronan had thought his stomach couldn't sink more with the telling of this story. But there it went.
"I left more than once. They would hire PIs to trail me. Men threatened me if I tried to date anyone else. My date would get harassed—"
"For one date? Not a new boyfriend?" Some of the puzzle pieces were fitting together, but others were virtually unimaginable.
"He was possessive. So yes, one date, and this guy would get a brick through his window. One guy was shot at in a seemingly random drive by. One guy was in a car accident that he didn't think was coincidental." She paused as though there were something else she wasn’t telling, then she sucked in a breath. "It was made very clear to me that, for my safety and the safety of those around me, I needed to be with Elliot."
"What did you do?" The words came out in a whisper, and Ronan knew he didn't want to know.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tierney hated this part worst of all. It was bad enough that the story detailed just how stupid and naive she had been. She'd forgiven herself years ago, because she was young and ultimately all she'd been through had brought her Sean. She loved Sean with everything she had, but it had cost her everything else.
There was no medical school like she'd always dreamed, because Tierney Doyle's records weren't legal. It was part of the reason she continued to work at the pub, where she could be charted as a family member and no one would worry that her social security number didn't quite match up with her story.
She didn't tell that to Ronan. It would just incriminate the Doyles and she couldn't stand to do that. But this part, this part was worse. There was no excuse like she was young or dumb. It simply made it clear that she hadn't been of any value to her own family and that was still a hard thing to bear.
"The fifth time I left—"
"Wait, you dated him and left him multiple times? During which you dated other people? Before you were sixteen?" Ronan was scrambling. She let him get all his questions out. "Wait. Were you actually sixteen when you arrived here?"
At last, he paused and she shook her head no in response. "But ..." she didn't want to tell him about her stolen and forged paperwork. "I had been in a private school. I was supposed to be a freshman, but my entry test here moved me into tenth grade. We took it because it would help hide me better."
"It helped hide you," he repeated his eyes looking into the distance. She could tell he was starting to get a full picture. If he was going to have it, because surely Elliot was here, or at least someone connected with Elliot was sending information back, that meant Ronan needed the full picture to stay safe.
There was no way around confessing the thing that made her most ashamed. She took a deep breath and tried again. "So, the fifth time I left him, he threatened my mom. My Dad brought me into his office and sat me down ..."
The tickle started at the back of her throat, the pressure pushed at the back of her eyes. All her stupid fantasies about Ronan—imagining that she was the sister who wasn't the refugee from upstate New York, that she was the sister who wasn't pregnant, that she
was the one that Ronan had loved and wanted from the very start—fled like dandelion tufts on the wind. There was no way to sustain a fantasy like that once he knew the truth.
"They sat me down and told me to go back to Elliot."
"What?" Ronan almost flew out of his chair. The small back office at the bar couldn't contain his reaction.
"Be quiet!" she motioned. She couldn't blame him for being stunned. How awful was she that her parents didn't trust her or even listen. That they thought so little of her as to send her back to some other man just because he wanted her. Siorse had been awful sometimes. She'd lied to her parents, cheated on her tests, cheated on ...
Tierney couldn't even bear to think it.
But the Doyles had always treated Siorse with more respect than her own parents had treated her.
"At the time it was the easier option."
"To throw their child to a monster?"
Why did she defend them? But she did. "They didn't think he was, and Dad didn't want my mom threatened. Honestly, if I was making most of it up—"
"You had bruises!"
"Yes, but hadn't I just gotten them being klutzy or—?"
"Are you shitting me?"
It felt good that he was outraged on her behalf, but it didn't erase the shame that her own family thought so little of her as to barter her away so easily. She shook her head—she’d lived through all of it.
With a deep breath in, he tried to put her back on her story. "How did you get away?"
"I didn't. I gave up and went back. I did what I was told but ... I got pregnant. That's when I tried to go back and explain again to my parents what was happening. They didn't want to have anything to do with it. But I'd brought a gun I took from one of Elliot's friends, and when they said I had to go back, I pulled it out and threatened them."
She'd probably waved it around the room like a madman. She'd been so distraught. It wasn't her steely resolve that had convinced her parents to do the right thing, it had been fear that she'd just randomly pull the trigger and kill one of them. Either way, it had worked at the time.
"I held them at gunpoint." Not her finest moment, she knew. "I told them I was leaving, and they could help me fake my death or I could kill them and use it as cover to fake it myself."
Even as she said it, she felt her eyes dart to the floor. She couldn't look up and see what he thought of her. The whole scene would have been comical if it weren't so terrifying that she'd actually done it.
"I said that I would kill them and make it look like I was kidnapped. I kind of hoped the world would blame Elliot for it. But the problem is: No one blames Elliot for anything. His father buys his way out of everything he does. He gets pulled over for DUIs all the time. He shot his friend while they were hunting, but that got brushed off, too. He doesn't have a single mark on his record. Alder cleans all of it up for him."
Ronan's eyes grew wider as she spoke. She whispered, "They have enough money to make it all disappear."
"So, you disappeared."
Tierney only nodded. "My mom did not like me pointing a gun at her, certainly not while she was wearing a Dior from the charity event she'd been at that night."
Ronan's eyebrows climbed further. But there wasn't much she could do about where she had come from. It had taken her parents several hours of her holding them at gunpoint, several hours of debating and planning to get rid of her safely. Tierney had done it because there'd been a baby to think about, a baby who absolutely could not ever be exposed to Elliot. She'd had to get away before she showed or he figured it out. He had to never know about Sean.
"My mom checked her social media for friends she trusted but didn't contact. And she called Aileen. The link between the two of them was tenuous. I made her use a burner phone—Elliot or Alder would have tracked my family's phone records. The women worked together and set up this drop in the middle of the night. Looking back, I'll bet Aileen figured out most of it."
Ronan was leaning forward, but this time he had no outbursts. He was waiting. So she told him.
"They gave the maid a bin of laundry with me inside of it. I had only the clothes I was wearing. If I took anything, phone, ID, identifying jacket even, it might be recognized as mine. The maid wheeled me out to the van for the 'new' laundry service. Honestly, she had to suspect something. That had to have been the heaviest laundry she'd ever dealt with. My mom had hired a driver, too, so no one ever saw her and Aileen together. The driver drove me twenty minutes out of town, at which point he traded the laundry basket to Aileen and left."
It had been a harrowing night. She'd been certain that Elliot would show up at any moment and kill her or, worse, force her to go back with him.
She paused then, thinking through it. Ronan knew everything now. No, not everything, but everything important.
"So the Doyles settled you in as their younger daughter?"
"They were amazing." She smiled as she said it. Disappearing had been a last-ditch effort, but it had changed everything. The Doyles had not only given her a safe home, they'd loved her in a way she'd been needing all her life. "They were moving anyway. It was the perfect timing. We all came here as a family and they've been wonderful to me and to Sean."
Her voice cracked on the last sentence. Mom Doyle had said to her more than once in the past several years that taking in Tierney had been the best thing they'd ever done. If they hadn't, when Siorse had died, they would have had no daughters and no grandchildren left to love. Having seen all the devastation when Siorse died, Tierney had been glad to be here for them. She'd missed her sister, too, despite all the secrets between them.
She didn't say any of that now, not to the man who'd married Siorse. Not to the man she still wanted. Not to the man who still didn't know everything.
"I'm sorry," she said, and sniffled. She needed to stop whining over her own shitty circumstances, ones that she herself was responsible for. And Ronan wasn't. "I have all of you messed up in this, too, now. Elliot's found me. I don't know if he's here or if he's hired someone to do this and report back. But he obviously knows where I am. Which means he knows about you."
She was crying as she said the last part, hating that she'd done this to him. He'd been so kind to her for a decade, in fact, that she'd harbored fantasies about him the whole time.
"I'll be fine." He said it with a hard stop, as if trying to reassure her.
As he shook his head to ward off any concern she had, his hand moved up to his side, grabbing at his torso. Maybe he didn't even realize he'd done it. But she guessed he'd been sitting too still, too tense, and he'd twitched something from his healing injury from his accident.
If Elliot found Ronan, he wasn't going to be fine.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ronan fidgeted like it was going out of style. With everything Tierney had told him, he'd not been surprised by the fierce and overwhelming need to defend her.
He'd been ready to pick up arms or, hell, maybe a good high-pressure firehose. People didn't know the damage those could do. Keeping her and Sean safe was the only thing that mattered to him right now. Though Tierney being Tierney, she'd already taken care of Sean. She'd done the same thing her family had done for her: ported her child off with a loose connection that should be untraceable.
Still, despite his zeal, there was nothing he could do.
Tierney had set him free for the afternoon. She'd caught him up to speed and there wasn't much more to say until her parents were able to get away and they could make a game plan. They had to keep the bar appearing normal. Ronan wasn't sure what normal was anymore. He hadn't had a good normal in years, and whatever had been twisting or changing over the past few weeks, it had culminated today in blowing normal out of the water.
"You should go. It's unusual for you to be here." She looked at him as she stood up and headed out the door of the tiny back office.
She was right, it wasn't normal for him to be here. "What are you going to do?"
"Help with lunch." Then she'd bee
n gone, leaving him with thoughts and fears and anger for her swirling through his head.
He'd headed out the back door, trying to do "normal," but it would take several hours for the lunch rush to die down.
Not wanting to bother them any more than he already had, he’d climbed into his increasingly uncomfortable sports car and headed to the fire station, supposedly just to say hi. At least he was always welcome there ... if they were in. But everyone had noticed he was off kilter and they immediately crowded to ask if he was okay.
So he did what Tierney had done for a decade and lied straight to their faces. "Yeah, man, I'm fine."
He'd slapped Jordan on the back in a hearty way, as if he always did that. As if the lie needed physical punctuation.
"You sure?" His brother Aidan looked up from the recliner, a disbelieving look across his face. It didn't help that Aidan knew him better than anyone, and that he'd been subbing for Ronan during his time off. Aidan subtly gave him the stink eye, silently calling him on his bullshit.
"Okay, fine!" Ronan threw his hands up. "I'm not fine. I haven't been to work in weeks. I’m going stir crazy!"
At least that worked, but not in the way he wanted.
"You can clean the kitchen for us, bro." Aidan grinned at him, tipping his head to the cabinets, sink, and cooktop that lined the far wall.
"I've not gone that crazy yet. Clean your own damn kitchen."
They'd watched a show together until the phone rang in the Chief's office. Aidan stood up first, typical. It was clear right away the alarm was about to ring and his time was up. He could hang out at the station, but it wasn't quite legal to be the only one there when he was on medical leave. And what would he do besides clean the damned kitchen?
A few minutes later, the engines were gone. Ronan left the empty building, heading into the back lot to his car. At least the visit had burned some time.
Ronan drove through the sub shop and took the food to a park. The parking lot where he'd sat faced a playground area, volleyball courts, and a small pond that was now frozen over. Had it been warmer weather he would have looked like a stalker himself. But with no one there, it was just a safe place to hang out and enjoy the scenery. Or look like he was enjoying it. His brain was going twenty different directions.
Down in Flames (Wildfire Hearts Book 5) Page 8
