“No, Dean! You spend the last ten years beating the living hell out of me because you didn’t like the way your life turned out. You made me think everything was my fucking fault! You don’t get to sit here and lie to her face. She deserves better. You don’t give a shit, so stop pretending you do!”
His arms fall away from my body and I watch as he storms toward the door, his stance hard, his face angry and I jump to my feet, moving around the table in an effort to follow after him. Before I can get very far, Dean reaches out and stops me.
“I can’t take back everything I did with him, but with me in here, he’s safe. I want to keep it that way. Take care of him, Belle. Don’t let Daphne hurt him again. He barely came back when she left the last time. I don’t think he’ll come back at all if it happens again.”
Kayden
I knew coming here and doing this was a mistake. Sitting in front of Dean, even before Belle came into the room, I knew it was going to blow up in my face. Belle might believe in taking a risk to get a reward, but knowing what I do now, the reward wasn’t worth it.
Storming out of there, leaving her behind, that’s something the old Kayden would have done. Everything Dean said, especially near the end with his fake fucking concern, was too much. I saw myself changing and the only way to stop it was to get the hell out of there and away from her.
Even if it meant leaving her alone with the enemy.
It’s gotten easier now, being able to breathe in the fresh air, but it’s still not perfect.
I never should have come here and even worse, I never should have brought her along.
I saw the way she looked at him before I stormed out. Belle is sympathetic to my brother now and it sickens me. Dean shouldn’t get to sit with her for a few minutes and erase everything that happened last year, but I get the feeling that when she finally gets out here, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.
Everything that happened a year ago will cease to exist.
“Kay,” she says before placing her hand on my shoulder, the small touch forcing me to turn around and face her. “Talk to me.”
It’s funny. Last year, Belle didn’t speak at all. Everything was written on paper or in text message, no sound able to escape from that pretty little mouth of hers and all I wanted was to hear her. Having her stand here now wanting me to talk, it’s like our roles are reversed.
I’ve become a whole lot like her and she’s become me. The stronger one.
Who am I kidding? She’s always been the stronger one.
“What did he say to you after I left?”
Moving in closer until her arms are sliding around my back, she hugs me tightly.
“He wanted me to take care of you.”
I want to laugh. Be snarky and tell her that he doesn’t have the right to ask anything of her, but I can’t do it. Dean asking her to take care of me, it’s something she does already. She’s always done it.
“He wanted you to do something you’ve already been doing?”
She laughs, but it’s tight. “Yeah I guess.”
“I hate him, Belle. I hate that you had to be in the same room with him. I hate that he said things about your mom when I know her and I don’t think she has it in her to keep something like that a secret.”
Where I expect her to agree with me, knowing her own mom even better than I do, she doesn’t. Her body tenses the same way it did when I told her my mom was back and just like then, I get the feeling she knows something she’s not saying.
“Dean’s full of shit right? Your mom wouldn’t keep that from you.”
“Kay…”
No way. I don’t like the way she’s saying my name right now. She does know something or at least she suspects and that’s enough to make the already overwhelming nosedive my mood is taking even worse.
“I think she did it.”
“How?”
I legitimately want to know how she can think her mom would do this. Sure, I can remember being in their house and my brother telling me that my mom was gone, but that could have happened for a million different reasons that have nothing to do with my mom dropping us off there.
Dean’s the liar. Not Grace.
“She used to get on the phone. I thought it was because she was talking to my dad and she didn’t want me to hear, but he never used to come around. He’d completely given up on me. I think that maybe she was talking to your mom.”
“Wait,” I say, holding up my hand and taking a step back, separating her arms from around me so I can look at her while I piece this all together. “You think they were in contact even after Daphne took off?”
She nods and my heart, I’m pretty sure it falls deep into the confines of my stomach. There’s one thing I know for sure. Belle wouldn’t lie to me. She wouldn’t bring something like this up unless there was no doubt about what she saw.
Grace really did have a hand in this, maybe an even bigger one than Dean thought.
This is too much. My head is clogged from all the crap it’s had to come to terms with over the last twenty-four hours. First, finding out about my mom, then the way it looked seeing Belle and Isaac together and now the bombshell Dean saw fit to throw on the both of us. I can’t take much more. It’s too much all at once and I just want to get in my car and drive away until all of it is just a distant fucking memory.
“I need to get out of here.”
“Okay.” She says and I pull her back to me, the sadness I hear in that one word enough to remind me that I’m not alone in this.
“We’re gonna go home, spend the rest of the night together and I’ll drive back to school in the morning.”
“Kay,”
“What?”
“We need to talk about this. What your brother said.”
“No Belle, we don’t. I got what I came for. The rest of it is just Dean pulling the same old shit. What we need to do is go home, curl up and just be together. Can you do that for me? Can we spend the rest of the night just existing?”
I know it’s not what she wants and maybe she’s right and we do need to talk about everything, but with as ripped and torn apart as I feel, it’s the last thing I want. Talking about this right now, it’s just going to make everything worse.
For once I want to forget the rest of the world exists.
“Okay.” She says, letting a tiny sigh escape before gripping onto my hand, ready to follow my lead. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Fourteen
Belle
It’s been three days since our visit with Dean and despite getting back to my life, letting Kayden leave and head back to Toronto, I haven’t been able to let go of any of it.
What he wanted to do that night when we got home is exactly what we did. There was no talking, no going over everything we found out. It was just quiet.
After curling up on the sofa together when we got in, he asked me to do something that even with all the time I’ve stayed here, we’ve never done. He didn’t want to go to bed alone. He wanted me there with him.
For the first time in a long time, the way he asked me, his eyes sad and his voice deflated and weak, I was getting to see the boy that lives inside the rough exterior of the man he’s becoming. He wasn’t Kayden the tough guy anymore. He was Kayden the timid boy.
Laying with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, at first feeling it beat so rapidly it was out of sync with mine and then slowed to a dull crawl, it eased the worry I had over everything we’d been through. I finally closed my eyes and fell asleep, only waking when I heard a sound I wasn’t familiar with.
I’m not sure what time it was, but waking and hearing him cry, it hurt. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s always been this strong guy, with walls up so high not even the toughest monster can break through them. Yet there he was in bed, walls completely stripped and his soul open, doing the one thing I didn’t even think he was capable of.
I could easily tell he was doing his best to mask it, but he wasn’t good enough. I heard
every bit before he eventually fell back to sleep.
Seeing him like that is what brought me to what I knew I had to do next. Before going back to school, I needed to talk to the only other person besides Dean that could give me answers about everything I learned.
I needed to talk to my mom.
After saying goodbye to Kayden, his familiar smile earning my entire focus as he pulled out of the driveway, I ran back inside the house and made quick work of showering and dressing before making my way across the street.
The smart thing would have been to wait for him so we could do it together, but with the way he was in the middle of the night still crystal clear in my head, I knew he wouldn’t be ready to take on more right now. This was going to have to be something I did on my own and when he was ready, we could face it together.
I needed to know if the way I remembered things was really the way they happened. I needed to know if Dean was right and my mother did this. Despite understanding why she would, it still didn’t change the fact that ten years went by that she may have had answers for Kayden and not once in that time did she ever bring it up to me or him.
She needed to do that. It had been long enough.
~*~*~
“Well this is a surprise! I was wondering when I’d get to see you again.”
She’s joking. When I moved into Kayden’s house I agreed to spend at least one night a week at home with her and Tristan. It was a way for us to stay connected, but still have enough leeway to face the world on my own. It had only been a few days since she saw me last, but the same way it is with my little brother, it is with her. A few days can feel like a lifetime.
It’s definitely a routine that had taken a lot of getting used to.
Moving out of the way of the door, she follows me the minute I step inside and we move along silently until we’re both seated in the living room. The one room in the house that reminds me so completely of Kayden. The place where he asked me to go to homecoming and also gave me his letterman jacket.
“What brings my beautiful daughter over here so early?”
The way she smiles makes me want to stop what I’m about to do. She’s not going to see any of this coming and the last thing I want to do after everything she’s done for me, is come at her with accusations.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about, Mom.”
“Well, what’s on your mind?”
Her voice doesn’t waver. She’s not concerned at all. I’ve always been able to talk to her about anything I’ve thought or felt before. For her right now, it’s just more of the same.
“Mom,” I start, sucking in a deep breath. “How long have you known that Daphne Walker is back in town?”
Her eyes go wide, which tells me a lot. She’s either shocked that I’m talking about Kayden’s mom with her, or she’s shocked that I know she knows all about it. Whatever the reason, it’s telling and puts me on edge.
“Isabelle, what are you talking about?”
“She went to see Dean, Mom. He sent Kayden a letter about it and we ended up at Donwood to see him. He said some things and a lot were about you. I need to know how long you knew that she was back and why you kept it from me.”
“I had no idea she was back.”
Again, not what I was expecting her to say. She’s not admitting or denying knowledge of any of the other stuff I said. Only the present. She might not know that Kayden’s mom is back but not answering anything else makes the uneasy feeling I have worse.
“Dean said that she didn’t just take off ten years ago. He said she ran and that you helped her do it. Mom—is it true?”
Despite knowing in my heart that it’s true, piecing together the memories I can remember from her on the phone along with what Kayden remembers, I still manage to break before I can get the question out. I don’t want to believe she could hide this, especially from Kayden.
I get why she wouldn’t sit me down and tell me. I was a kid, but didn’t she ever think Kayden deserved to know the truth, especially when he was a little older?
Her head lowers and again, her body language says more than words ever could. It’s exactly like I thought. It’s all true.
“I didn’t help her take off. I was against her running. I told her that I would help her in any way that I could, but that I truly believed for the sake of those boys that she needed to go to the police about Aaron and the threats he was making.”
“Why did you take Dean and Kayden in when she came over that day?”
“I would think the reason for that is obvious. Those boys didn’t do anything wrong and they needed to be kept safe. I may not have agreed with the way she wanted to do things, but there was no way I was letting those two suffer for her bad choices.”
“How long did they stay here?”
It’s a question that Dean already answered, but I need to know if he was lying to me. I might have felt sympathy for him, but I wasn’t totally naïve. I know how easily he could twist things around.
“A few days. They went back over the next day, but something didn’t feel right to me so I asked them to come back here. Dean sat Kayden down and told him about their mom leaving and that he was gonna take care of him, but that I was going to help.”
I’ve always been so open, believing that secrets never solved anything. What my mom did was a good thing and despite knowing that she kept all of this from Kayden, I love her even more for taking them in. For keeping them safe, especially now with what Kayden means to me.
It feels like I’m being disloyal to him, feeling this way about my mom, but I can’t help it. With the way she’s telling it, I think Daphne would have taken off regardless. As much as I want to be upset for Kayden, I can’t be. If my mom didn’t take them in, there’s no telling what would have happened.
The Kayden I know might not have been here at all. I would have lost him ten years sooner; before I ever had the chance to really have him.
“Why did you let them go back if Aaron was really a threat?”
“Daphne, for the first little while kept in touch. As suspected, he followed her out of town and as long as she kept moving, he would continue doing it and leave the boys alone.”
This is where I’m confused. What was stopping Kayden’s dad from coming back to town at any time? She couldn’t have known for certain that he would chase her around.
“What if Aaron came back, Mom?”
“He didn’t.”
“Okay, but what if he did? Her taking off, I can see how she might have thought she was doing the right thing, but there’s no way she knew for sure that he would follow her. He could have easily given up and come back for Dean and Kayden.”
“Isabelle, I can’t speak about what was going through Daphne’s mind at the time. All I can tell you is that I tried to get her to think this through and do things differently. When I realized that she wasn’t going to do it, I did the only thing I could and kept those two boys safe with me for a few days until Dean said it was time for them to go home.”
Her face is a mask of pain and regret and I know why. She’s sitting here putting the blame for what Kayden endured afterward on herself. The way Dean treated him, she sees it as her fault.
“It’s not your fault, Mom. You didn’t turn Dean into a monster. He did that all on his own.”
“How did you know that’s what I was thinking?”
“It’s written all over your face and you’re a lot like me. Do you remember what you told me last year after the football game?”
“Yes, but I hardly see that as the same thing.”
“It’s not the same, but it’s similar. You said that I was wrong then and I’m telling you that you’re wrong now.”
“You really believe that, don’t you?”
“I do. You wanted me to see past my own doubts to what was really there underneath and now you need to do it.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Mom,” I say, remembering the one final question I have for h
er and not wanting to lose it. I might not entirely understand everything that happened, but that wasn’t on my mom to answer. It was on Daphne. This question though, it’s one I know she can answer. “Why didn’t you tell Kayden? I get why you didn’t do it when he was like ten or eleven, but why didn’t you do it later? Why keep it a secret when what you did wasn’t bad?”
“A couple of years after she took off, I got a phone call. She was updating me on the situation and we spoke about this very thing. I wanted to tell Kayden days after she left. He might not have been old enough to understand, but I did feel he deserved to know. I didn’t then and it’s a regret I will have to live with for the rest of my life.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“She asked me not to tell him, Belle. We argued about it, but in the end I went along with her wishes. She felt that it was better that he believe she’d ditched him then know the real reason.”
“Even though you knew what Dean was doing to him all these years?”
“Yes, even then. There is so much that happened that you don’t know, Belle. I promise that I will explain all of it to you someday, but I think when I do, Kayden needs to be there. All you need to know is that after that phone call, we didn’t speak again. I couldn’t. I had no idea she was back. If you don’t believe anything else I’ve said, believe that.”
~*~*~
Hearing everything she had to say, knowing there was a lot more to the story that we hadn’t even gotten into, it was all I could think about.
It made going back to school easy and difficult at the same time. I could tell Isaac sensed something was off, but he never pushed me to talk about it and I didn’t even know where to begin even if I did want to open up. We just did the same routine we’d been doing for weeks, the only difference being that when we weren’t in class, we were spending time outside together.
With Eric still in high school, the routine of sitting outside at lunch and on breaks was something I never thought I would have again, so I enjoyed it. The added bonus of the silence did wonders for me. It gave me time to think about everything. Not just the stuff with Kayden and his family, but about me too.
All My Heart (Count On Me Book 4) Page 13
