by Lili Valente
“Because I know it’s my fault,” she says, her face crumpling. “And I’m so sorry.”
I blink in shock, but I don’t have time to speak before Aoife continues in a teary voice—
“I know how hard it was just looking after the boys without Mom around, and I left you with the boys and a newborn and nobody in the world to help you.” She releases my hand to swipe the tears from her cheeks. “At first I was so fucked up I didn’t even think about what I’d done, but then I talked myself into believing it was okay. You’ve always been so much stronger than me. I told myself you could handle it and—”
“But I’m not…I wasn’t,” I say, the words bursting from my chest though I know I don’t have time to hash through our family drama right now. “You were always the one I turned to, Aoife. Always. Ever since I was a baby. I would have died without you. I loved you and counted on you and I….” I press my lips together, but I can’t seem to stop myself from finishing my sentence. “I fucking worshipped you, Aoife, and you left me.”
I fight through the wave of emotion, refusing to cry, or let her see just how deep this goes. This is a wound that cuts through flesh and bone, slicing straight into the soft center of my heart, where all my feelings for the big sister I once loved so much have been locked away.
“I know,” she says, fresh tears spilling from her blue eyes. “I’m so sorry. I know it’s my fault that you had to start stealing. I know if I’d stayed, or at least sent money home when I could, you might not have had to do what you did. You were right today, I can’t erase the past, no matter how much I want to.”
“Me either,” I say in a soft voice. “I can’t go back and undo what I did last summer, but I promise you it isn’t as bad as it looks. I did steal things, but I stole from criminals Gabe’s dad helped keep out of jail. That doesn’t excuse it, but I want you to know I wasn’t hurting innocent people. That’s not who I am.”
She nods. “I’m not here to judge what you did. I’m here to say I’m sorry, and to warn you that Gabe’s dad is going to turn the footage over to the police tomorrow morning.”
My breath rushes out. “Why? I thought you said he didn’t want to risk me testifying against Gabe.”
“He gave me today to convince you to give me Emmie, break things off with Gabe, and leave town,” she says. “If Gabe isn’t home, and you on a plane to somewhere else by tomorrow morning, Mr. Alexander is going to the police. I think he thinks you and Gabe might run if he gives you too much time.”
He thinks right. And we might still escape if I can find Gabe, and get to the airport before it’s too late.
“He’s scared of his son ending up in jail,” Aoife continues, “but he seems more scared of losing him.”
“He’s scared of losing control,” I say bitterly. “That’s all he’s ever wanted.”
Aoife casts a glance over her shoulder before turning back to me. “You may be right, but whether he’s motivated by love, or something else, he seems determined. You and the kids should get out of here as soon as you can.”
My chest loosens, but I’m afraid to trust that I understand what she’s saying. “But what about the court date on Friday?”
“I’m dropping my suit,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t want to hurt Emmie. It’s going to kill me, but at least I’ll know I did what’s best for my daughter. She loves you. You’re her real mother. I’m just an egg donor, like you said.”
I wouldn’t have believed it possible an hour ago, but at that moment, all the love I ever felt for my big sister, my protector, my friend, comes rushing back, so big and strong, I can’t keep myself from leaning in and wrapping my arms around her. “You don’t have to lose her,” I say. “We can work something out. You can come see her; you can be close. Maybe…we can be close again, too.”
“I would like that.” Aoife’s arms go around me. She hugs me and her baby bump presses against my stomach, reminding me I have another niece on the way.
“The baby is going to be her half sister,” I say. “They should be close, too.”
“No, the baby will be her cousin,” Aoife says, smiling when I pull back to look in her eyes. “And I’ll be Aunt Aoife.”
I nod, but the smile teasing at my lips vanishes before it can fully form. “I have to go. I’m sorry, but I really do.”
Aoife gives my shoulders a squeeze before she steps back. “Okay. Call me when you can, and let me know when you get settled.”
“We aren’t going back to Hawaii,” I say, reaching for the door, knowing I need to go, but feeling I should at least give Aoife a heads up. “We can’t. Not with Gabe’s dad determined to do what he’s going to do.”
Aoife smiles that savvy, been-around-the-block smile I remember so well. “I figured. Just don’t go to Mexico. The actually do extradite people every now and then, if someone slips the police enough money.”
“Got it.” I capture her hand for one last squeeze. “And thank you. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says, voice trembling. “Now get going, before I start crying again.”
I get into the van and start it up. Aoife moves to stand in the grass on the parking median, watching me go with a peaceful expression on her face. I never expected her to do the right thing, but she did. It gives me hope that maybe—once I find Isaac and Gabe—it won’t be as bad a scene as I’m fearing.
Maybe Isaac just wanted to talk to Gabe. Or to apologize. I listened to all the messages he left. He seemed truly sorry, devastated that he’d hurt me, and willing to do whatever it takes to make things better. Maybe he wanted to make things better with Gabe, too.
“And maybe my dad’s going to come back as a leprechaun and tell me where he’s hidden his pot of gold,” I mutter to myself as I drive up and down the streets of downtown, hunting for some sign of Isaac and Gabe, and coming up empty.
Isaac doesn’t want to make nice with Gabe. Isaac is jealous of Gabe. He hates Gabe. He blames him for turning sweet, pliable Caitlin into a stubborn woman with hard edges, and no mercy for her enemies.
But Isaac hasn’t begun to see my merciless side. If he’s hurt Gabe, he’s going to get a very close, very personal introduction.
I drive past Isaac’s dad’s pizza place, but there’s no sign of him or Gabe through the front windows, or in the alley behind the restaurant. I drive by Isaac’s parents’ house and his old apartment, but the windows are dark at the house and the apartment is occupied by a young couple I can see watching television on the couch through the window. I drive by every other old stomping ground I can think of, until it’s after eight, and I’m genuinely starting to freak out that I won’t find Gabe in time.
Finally, I steer the van back toward my old side of town, on the off chance that Isaac has decided to take Gabe to his piece of shit brother’s house on Cooper Street, but I’m not optimistic about my chances of finding him there. Isaac hates Gabe, but I’m pretty sure he hates his brother, Ian, more. Ian did time in prison, and has mooched off their parents ever since he got out, not even making an effort to find a job. He’s stolen money from Isaac, wrecked Isaac’s first car that he worked an entire summer to buy, and refused to go to his own grandmother’s funeral because he was too hungover.
I feel pretty confident saying that Isaac would rather ask for help from the devil himself than his little brother, but when I pull up in front of the dingy duplex on Cooper Street, the lights are on inside, and two shadows are moving back and forth behind the curtained windows.
One of them is tall and broad, and the other is even taller and broader because the Ronconis make big, meaty boys.
I slow the van. I don’t see a Gabe-shaped shadow, but something instinctive tells me he’s inside. All the hairs on my arms stand on end, my heart starts beating faster, and I just know he’s close.
And that he’s in trouble.
I continue down the street for another two blocks before I pull over and cut the engine. Ian doesn’t live in the best neighborhood, but
I decide to leave the keys in the ignition, anyway. Hopefully, I won’t be away from the car very long, and I may need to make a swift getaway. If Ian and Isaac both try to stop me, my only advantage will be speed. They’re both big enough to lift me over their heads with one arm tied behind their backs.
I hurry down the street, clinging to the shadows, wishing I were wearing my blacks. My tee shirt is black, but I’m sure my pale hair is glowing in the soft moonlight and my bare legs stand out in the darkness, despite my tan. But hopefully Ian and Isaac won’t be looking out any of the windows when I creep by.
When I reach the yard, I bend over, moving quickly and quietly past the window, and the front porch, where a collection of empty beer bottles litters the stoop. I figure it’s best to be careful though, from the looks of things, Isaac and Ian are still standing with their backs to the window, in the middle of an animated discussion. Now that I’m closer, I hear raised voices, though I can’t make out what they’re saying. But Ian doesn’t sound happy, and neither does Isaac.
Still, that’s nothing new. Ian and Isaac have been arguing since the day Ian learned to talk. It doesn’t mean that Isaac has brought a hostage to Ian’s house, and asked his brother to help him pound his girlfriend’s ex into a bloody lump of flesh. This could be a normal Ronconi brother fight, and I could have misjudged the entire situation.
I let the thought temper my nerves, but I don’t believe it, and when I reach the side of the duplex and stand on tiptoe to gaze through the window above the kitchen sink, I’m not surprised to see Gabe sitting in one of Ian’s kitchen chairs, with his hands tied behind him. His back is to me, so I can’t see his face, but he’s sitting up straight, and his shoulders are square. It looks like he’s still okay. For now.
My heart does a giddy flip in my chest. I want to call out to him so badly it hurts, but I don’t say a word. I can’t risk attracting Ian’s or Isaac’s attention until I have a plan for getting Gabe out.
I let my eyes trail back and forth from one end of the dingy kitchen to the other, and into what I can see of the living room beyond. It looks like the front door must open into the living room, but there is a hall leading out of the kitchen to the left. I suspect it leads to the bedroom and bathroom, and that there must be a back door somewhere. I’m about to go hunting for it, when Ian strides into the kitchen, a furious look on his face, and a gun in his hand.
Heart pounding, I spin to my right, gluing my back against the side of the house and peering into the kitchen over my shoulder. But I can’t see much from this angle, and all I can think about is that gun in Ian’s hand. That gun, Gabe tied up and helpless, and Ian and Isaac free to do whatever they want to the man I love.
I would never in a million years have dreamed that Isaac would try to kill Gabe—threaten him, beat him up, throw our relationship in his face, yes, but not kill him. I don’t know if the gun is Ian’s and things have gotten out of hand, or if Isaac planned to bring Gabe here and eliminate his competition forever, but I know that I can’t wait for the ideal moment to present itself. I have to act fast and think even faster, if I’m going to be sure Gabe leaves this house in one piece.
Remembering the collection of beer bottles on the stoop, I move swiftly away from the window, adrenaline dumping into my veins as I put my barely formed plan into motion.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Gabe
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together:
our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipp’d them not;
and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherish’d by our virtues.”
-Shakespeare
Once, when I was a little boy, so young I probably shouldn’t be able to remember anything about this particular incident, I wet my pants while my mother and I were at a rare play date at our closest neighbors’ house. I don’t remember what the other little boy and I were playing, only that it was fascinating and I didn’t want to stop playing it, and so I kept putting off going to the bathroom until it was too late.
My mother was horribly embarrassed. She apologized a hundred times, all while dragging me, in my soggy pants, out the door. We arrived home in a few minutes, but instead of sending for my nanny to give me a bath the way she normally would, my mother took me around the house to the garden and sat me down in one of the wrought iron chairs near her rose bushes. She told me I was going to sit in that chair for a time out until my pants were dry, extra time in my wet britches being my punishment for having an accident in public.
Even though I wasn’t even four years old, I remember that it was the “in public” part that seemed to bother my mother the most. She felt that I’d made a fool of her in front of her friend. I’d put a crack in the Alexander family image, and she was angry and ashamed and willing to make a three-year-old sit in his urine-soaked clothes for over an hour to teach me a lesson about what was expected of me when I was in front of other people.
I know that’s why she and my father did what they did last summer.
Why they hired a private detective to follow me when I started acting out of character, going against my many years of Alexander training. I was too old to sit in a chair, but they weren’t willing to risk leaving me to my own devices. They were afraid their terminally ill, unstable son might do something to embarrass them, and they wanted to be prepared to run damage control.
They never imagined the PI would bring back footage of me, and my new girlfriend, breaking into the houses of Dad’s former clients and stealing things. They blamed Caitlin, of course. Mom said she was trash, Dad said she was a criminal like her grandfather, who was relatively famous around Giffney for petty theft. I insisted that I was the one who had seduced Caitlin into breaking the rules, but they wouldn’t believe me. They were going to take the footage of Caitlin to the police, unless I agreed to the surgery.
I made them swear they would destroy it. I swore I would come back from the grave, and haunt them if they broke the promise. Then I got on the fucking plane to Michigan. I couldn’t see any other choice that wouldn’t result in Caitlin and me both ending up in jail. While that wouldn’t have meant much to a man with a brain tumor, Caitlin had her whole life in front of her. I only had a few weeks, at best.
The memories all came back to me in a heady rush, while I was walking away from Harry’s diner with a gun pressed against my side. I remembered everything about that last day in Giffney, right down to the way I’d cried as the plane took off, even though my father was sitting next to me.
I wasn’t in any shape to fight for Caitlin then, but I am now, and I have given myself permission to do whatever I have to do to get out of this kitchen alive. I’m going to bide my time, get my hands on the gun the younger brother keeps shifting from hand to hand, and make sure neither one of these Neanderthals can follow me when I leave this house.
I’ll try to let them live if I can, but if I can’t…
Isaac said he isn’t planning to kill me, as long as I cooperate, but I saw his finger whiten on the trigger when I reached for the door handle a little too quickly when we pulled up in his brother’s driveway. He’s looking for an excuse. I’m not sure even he’s aware of it, but I see the blood lust in his eyes.
He hates me for winning the heart of the girl he says he’s loved since he was a child, but what he feels for Caitlin isn’t love. He would destroy every beautiful, fierce, passionate thing about her. Caitlin isn’t a woman you fence in; she’s a woman you set free, and run like hell to keep up with her.
But Isaac doesn’t understand. He’s insisting on “protecting” Caitlin from the big bad rich boy who led her down the garden path. The same way my parents have insisted on moving heaven and earth to protect me from the “trash,” who they believe tempted me into a life of crime. What none of them realize is that there is no one to blame. There is just Caitlin and me, two people who made some brave choices, and some bad choices, and fell in love along the way. Neither of us is perfect or blameless, but sometimes two imperfec
t people can make one perfect love.
Since Caitlin walked back into my life, I don’t hate myself anymore. I’m not the man my parents want me to be, or the type of guy who will ever be embraced by people who see the world in black and white. But for people who see the shades of gray, and who understand that there is comfort to be found in the shadows, I have something to give.
I helped Caitlin get a fair shot for the first time in her life, and she paid it forward in her life without me. We’ve helped people, and will continue to help people, and along the way we’re going to raise some kids together. We’re going to love them and listen to them and let them make mistakes—in public, and in private—and we will try to help them grow up the best we can.
That future is all I want, all I will ever want, and no one is going to take it—or Caitlin—away from me.
Moments after the thought flickers through my head, the younger brother, Ian—a seemingly perpetually irritated man dressed in threadbare jeans, a Mountain Dew tee shirt, with oily brown hair, and small, angry eyes that make him look like an uglier, near-sighted version of his older brother—comes storming into the kitchen, waving his gun.
“You haven’t thought this shit through,” he says in a low rumble, his voice deeper than Isaac’s due to the pack a day habit that has helped make his house smell like a garlic-and-ash scented armpit.
“I have,” Isaac says from the living room. “I’m telling you, this is going to be fine. They’d do anything for him. They bought Caitlin a house in Maui just to get her out of town, for God’s sake.”
“You should get them to buy you a house,” Ian says, scowling around the kitchen, looking anywhere but directly at me.
No matter how big and bad he is, when I walked inside, he took one look into my eyes, and hasn’t made eye contact since. He’s a fool, but he’s smarter than his brother. Isaac doesn’t have the sense to know when he’s caught a shark with his minnow net.
