Cutting Ties (Book 2) (Piper Anderson Series)

by Danielle Stewart

  “Adopting Jedda was a serious decision but an easy one for my parents and even easier for Jedda. He’d found a place he’d belonged and people who loved him so much that, when given the chance to get rid of him, they’d chosen not to.”

  “I know how he must have felt,” Piper said, speaking into the night, letting her words carry away on the wind.

  “I really wanted Jedda to be my brother. I did a project about him in my first grade class, and brought him in for show and tell. All of my parents’ friends got together and threw a party for us, celebrating the addition to our family. It was the happiest time of my life. The process of adoption can be long. I think it was nearly a year before the paperwork was final. My parents ran into a snag at some point with his biological parents not wanting to give up their parental rights. They’d both spent time in prison and were deemed unfit, but the courts had been trying to give them an opportunity to make some changes. Those changes never happened. Eventually he was free.

  “The day we all walked into court together to become a family, the weather was beautiful and warm that I thought God had turned up the brightness of the sun just for us. We were a family. I had a brother.” The word stuck on his tongue, thick in his mouth like peanut butter. Having a brother had made him feel whole, and the joy it brought to his parents was apparent.

  “Eleven months,” Bobby said, turning himself away from Piper and looking up at the stars. There were hardly any stars to be seen from his home in New Jersey. He stared up at them now to remind himself he was here, not there. He had to assure himself that as painful as this was to recount, as real as it felt, it was only a memory. “Jedda was my brother for eleven months, then something changed. He started to slip back into his old ways. It was subtle at first, but as he approached his fifteenth birthday he was almost unrecognizable. He was caught breaking into the high school, he started a fire behind our house that caused a lot of damage, and he began stealing money. My parents tried to be patient and understanding, but they were at a loss. Something had changed in Jedda, and no matter how many times they asked, he wouldn’t tell them what.

  “I wanted to know what he was doing, so I followed him one day. I was nine now, and every day after school when he was supposed to be home watching me he would disappear. In my childish mind I had dreamed up all the places he could be going. Maybe he was a superhero and he needed to slip away to save someone. What if he was a spy and he had to check in with his boss?

  My mind never traveled to a place as dark as the reality of where he was headed. He walked for forty-five minutes in a direction I had never been before—toward the place where he was born, a place we never really talked about. I can’t imagine I was stealthy enough to avoid being seen. I think he knew I was there, and maybe on some level he wanted me to see it. I watched him enter a four-story apartment building with bars on the windows and broken toys strewn carelessly over the lawn. I remember thinking that they must have the coolest mom to let them leave their toys out like this.” Bobby smirked as he recounted his naïve impression of the world at age nine.

  “It’s amazing how our minds work when we’re little,” Piper said, rubbing a hand down his back. Couldn’t this be the same as when Piper opened up to him? Couldn’t this bring them closer?

  “I went in behind him and followed the sound of his squeaky shoes up the dirty stairs. When he pulled a card from his pocket and started to jimmy the lock, I couldn’t stay quiet. I told him to stop, he couldn’t steal anymore or he’d get in big trouble. He told me to shut up and come inside as he pushed his shoulder into the door. We walked quietly through the unfamiliar apartment, stepping over piles of clothes and bottles. It was filthy and the whole place smelled like stale smoke.”

  This description took Piper right back to her own hell. There wasn’t a day of her life that her hair hadn’t smelled of cigarettes and her clothes weren’t pulled out of a wrinkled pile. Her mind raced with what they were heading toward. Was Jedda planning to rob the place? Was he buying drugs?

  “He took me to a back bedroom where there was a little girl about my age sleeping on a dirty flattened mattress. She startled awake when she heard our footsteps. She had sores on her arms and legs, and her bones seemed like they were just under her skin. She was so skinny and so dirty that for a second I thought maybe she wasn’t a little girl, but an animal. He pulled a sandwich from his pocket, the sandwich my mother had packed him for lunch. The girl moved toward us as if she had forgotten about the chains on her legs that trailed back to the large radiator. I never moved. I watched her eat her sandwich like it was the first thing she’d eaten in months. She didn’t speak, not to him, not to me. She ate, and then drank from the soda bottle he’d brought in his other pocket—and then we left.

  “The whole thing made no sense to me but it was made more confusing that no words passed between any of us. It was like being part of a well-practiced play only I hadn’t read the script. We’d walked halfway back to our house before he spoke. He told me that little girl was his sister and that was where he lived before he came to us. His sister had been put in foster care, just as he had been, but at some point his parents had gotten her back. I don’t know if he meant legally, if they had snatched her back, or if she’d just fallen through the cracks. He had found her months ago when he went back to his old house to see if anything had changed. She was being treated very badly, he said, and the only food she seemed to be getting was what he was bringing her.

  “I listened to the whole story before I thought of what to say. Then it hit me. It was all okay. We’d tell my mom and dad when we got back to the house, and they’d go get his sister. They’d rescue her and she could live with us, too. I thought that everything would be better by morning and Jedda would be back to his normal self again—back to being my big brother.

  “He turned around quickly and shocked me with his anger. He told me we couldn’t tell anyone. That it didn’t work like that. He made me promise not to say anything to anyone. He warned me that in the real world, the world he was from, his sister would be as good as dead before the system could get it right and get her out of there. Not to mention my parents wouldn’t be safe for sticking their nose into something like this. He asked me if I wanted my parents to get hurt or killed. Did I want my house burned down? I didn’t, I didn’t want any of that. Jedda was so smart.

  “I had no reason to doubt he knew what was best. He told me he had a plan and all we needed to do was keep quiet and he’d get his sister safe soon. I asked him three more times on the way home if he thought the police would help us. I told him one time in school an officer had come to visit and told us if we ever needed help we should find a person in uniform and they would take care of it. He didn’t react as harshly to these requests, but he just kept telling me it didn’t work like that in his neighborhood.”

  Piper wanted to interject that she could attest to that fact first hand. She had seen plenty of kids ignored by the people sworn to protect them. Even if help was found, sometimes it just didn’t happen fast enough. There were plenty of families like Bobby’s who created safe havens and new starts for people like Jedda and Piper, but not enough to save all the kids who were abused or neglected, beaten or starved. She wanted to speak up, but Bobby had let her bare her wounds with little interruption, she owed him the same.

  “We went home that day and I never said a word to my parents. They’d asked about my day and I told them it was fine. I dreamed about that little girl for the next two weeks. I watched Jedda leave every day with a drink and a sandwich, worrying he’d never come back. Everybody up until this point had always told me the same thing. If you are in trouble, tell a grown-up you trust. I let Jedda convince me that wasn’t the case. He came home one day from his long walk to see his sister and he was furious. Something had changed; they had hurt her worse than usual. He told me they’d had a party and hadn’t protected his sister from the men there. I didn’t understand what that meant at the time but as I got older I realized his sister had
probably been raped. He raided our house for any bit of money he could find, even broke my piggy bank and rummaged through my mother’s jewelry. I thought maybe he was going to take the money to them and try to buy his sister. Maybe that was how it worked. He disappeared and never returned that night.

  “My parents were frantic, asking me if I knew where he was, if he had said anything to me when he took the money. Did I think it was drugs, was Jedda in trouble? I had the answer, but Jedda’s warning kept running through my mind. If my parents were involved our house might be burned down, they might come and hurt us. I convinced myself that Jedda would take the money and get his sister. He would bring her home with him and my parents would make it all better.

  “The next morning I lay awake in the bottom bunk, waiting for my brother to come fill the top bunk, I realized something must be wrong. He hadn’t come back. My parents hadn’t heard from him. I dragged my worried self down to breakfast where my mother sat crying and my father was white with fear. A man I had never seen before sat at our kitchen table with a pad in his hand. My mother asked me to sit down, this man had some questions for us.

  “I can’t remember exactly how he told us, I get mixed up with what I found out that day and what I later heard on the news or from the taunts of classmates. But Jedda had taken the money he had stolen and bought a gun from someone in his neighborhood. He waited until the dead of night and broke into his old house. He shot his parents to death, reloading the gun twice. He freed his sister and called the police. His only request was his sister be placed with his adoptive parents so she could have a good life.”

  Piper made a mental note that Bobby had never mentioned a sister, and it likely hadn’t worked out the way Jedda had hoped.

  “Because the investigation was still active, my parents couldn’t be granted guardianship of his sister. Everything from that moment on was a downward spiral for everyone involved. My parents were torn to pieces by the investigators and our community. Everyone wondered why they didn’t know where Jedda was going, how they’d let him get his hands on so much money. How could they be so blind? Jedda was arrested and arraigned, no bail granted. It was determined he’d be tried as an adult. He pleaded guilty in order to avoid a trial. He knew it wouldn’t just be him on trial—it would be all of us, including his sister. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. We never had the chance to see him again. I never got to hug him goodbye, he was just gone one day.

  “My parents fought to gain custody of Jedda’s sister, but they’d been persecuted so publicly the courts would not allow it. There were times they thought they might even lose me. Six months went by, and as much as we tried to lay low, things kept getting worse. I hadn’t told my parents all the things I knew about Jedda and why he went there that day. Because there was no trial, the heinous things they’d done to that little girl would never be brought to light. Jedda refused to see my parents. I like to believe he did that for their sake, but it broke their hearts. There was no closure, not for any of us.

  “I started to fall apart under the weight of keeping secrets. I was wetting the bed, fighting at school with anyone who spoke against my family, and I had started to set fires, immediately causing my parents to panic. They didn’t want what happened to Jedda to happen to me. They intended to nip it in the bud. They took me to a therapist who spent hours trying to teach me healthy ways to cope with my confusion and sadness, but ultimately it wasn’t either of those two things that were driving me. It was my guilt. My lack of action to prevent this, to tell my parents, was crushing me.

  “One day a letter came in the mail from Jedda. My father opened it, and my mother and I sat down next to him as he read it out loud. It was an explanation, an apology, but for me it was a dagger to the chest. He made mention of me, asking them not to be upset that I had kept this from them. He took full blame for that, and hoped they understood.

  “He unwittingly spilled my secret and, in turn, splintered my family almost into disrepair. My mother cried for hours. My father was too hurt to even be in the same room with me. I had known where Jedda was going, I had known about his sister and I had been told countless times to seek help when I needed it. I knew better. I was selfish; I could have stopped all of this.

  “The only thing I could do was promise myself that I would never make that mistake again. I wouldn’t allow anyone, even someone I loved, to tell me that doing the wrong thing for the right reason was ever justifiable. I tested that when I met you, you tested me. But I never had any intention of allowing Judge Lions to be killed. I would have done anything to make sure that didn’t happen.” Bobby felt himself trailing off. He realized he was angry with Piper, which wasn’t what he wanted. He tried to refocus on his story, letting her know through his retelling of history why he couldn’t come to terms with what he’d done.

  “When the school year finished and we had all but destroyed each other emotionally, my father made an announcement. He’d be taking a job down South, and we’d be moving to a new place. A fresh start. Edenville was going to be our salvation. To a certain degree, it was. But all my father did was work, and my mother was painfully depressed. Betty and Stan practically adopted me. You’re not the only one who was lost and then saved. The difference is, you’re free now. I’m not.”

  “You were a child, Bobby. You didn’t know the repercussions. You were doing what you thought was right.” Piper reached for his face as he turned back toward her, but he pulled her hand down and let it go.

  “Two people died that day. My parents have never been the same. Who knows what happened to Jedda’s sister. And he’ll be in jail for the rest of his life. You’re right. I was a child. I didn’t realize I had the power to intervene and speak up. But in the cabin, I was a man—a police officer. Do you know what my job tells me I’m supposed to do in that situation? Shoot Chris. He was the threat at that moment. Do you know what I did? I lowered my weapon and might as well have given him permission to end someone’s life. I don’t know how to go to work tomorrow. I don’t know how to look at myself in the mirror. And I don’t know how to love you, because you think what happened was the only solution. I don’t like what loving you makes me. It wouldn’t have been easy for you to let him live, but it would have been right.”

  Piper was furious, though she didn’t know exactly why. Was she mad at Bobby’s parents for abandoning him to the point that he would shape his whole life around trying to make it right? Was she mad at herself for the selfishness she’d shown that day, the way she’d left him with no options? “So what, Bobby, do you think you have to spend the rest of your life never stepping a toe out of line to make up for a mistake you made as a child?”

  “It’s not just atonement for a mistake, it was meant to make sure I never made it again. Now we’re all at risk. Chris could be found out and lose his son, lose his new life. Lindsey and I could be prosecuted for conspiracy after the fact, falsifying a police report—trust me the list goes on. And there’s a damn good chance you and I will never be the same. Knowing all that, was it still the right thing?”

  “Yes,” Piper said without hesitation, solidifying the distance between their hearts. “I thought this would free us to be together without history getting in our way, but I didn’t know about your history. You never told me.”

  “Would it have stopped you? If you knew you’d lose me to kill him, would you have stopped Chris?” Bobby didn’t need to hear her answer, his heart already knew.

  “Why can’t we just start over right now? There isn’t anything else, it isn’t like we’re going to ever be in this position again. Do you still love me?”

  “I love you in a way that petrifies me. I love you so much that I cut out the best parts of me to make room for you, and now I don’t recognize myself.”

  Piper stood and stepped back from him, fighting tears. His words hit her harder than any punch she’d ever sustained. His sadness was as raw as hers. Neither wanted to say out loud what they both knew was inevitable, but
it couldn’t be avoided now. “I think we’re both saying the same thing here. Love is supposed to be easier than this. I think maybe I need to just move on from here.”

  Bobby wasn’t trying to send Piper away. “You need these people, you need Edenville, Piper. Don’t leave just because—”

  She waved her hand, not wanting him to say something as trivial as we’re breaking up, because it was more than that to her. “What, Bobby, don’t leave just because we’re ripping each other’s hearts out? Don’t overreact to the worst pain I’ve ever felt? I love you. And it’s killing me that it’s not enough. I’m not saying we have other options, I’m just saying don’t you dare minimize this. Don’t ask me to sit across from you at dinner next week and expect me not to cry my eyes out. I can’t be next to you and not love you, you can’t ask me to do that.” She felt the tears streaming down her cheeks, almost freezing in the air. “I have to go back to New York. Maybe we should just take that time to try—I don’t know. Maybe we should get away from each other and see what it’s like to be… apart.” The word came out as a cough, a cry. She never wanted to say apart ever again when it came to them. This was his chance—the moment he’d need to fight for her if he was ever going to.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he whispered, the words too large to say in his normal voice. And with that, Piper felt a piece of her rip. She stormed away—past the house, past the porch where they’d fallen in love, and to her car.

  “Piper!” Bobby called, wanting to hold her one last time. He didn’t understand how he could love her so deeply and yet need her gone.

  As Piper put her car in reverse she saw Jules step out onto the porch, a look of shock spreading on her face illuminated by the yellow porch light. Betty and Michael stepped out behind her and, like sad statues, watched in silence as she drove away. Betty didn’t wave this time, she wasn’t standing in her normal spot, saying farewell. Instead, one hand was over her mouth, the other over her heart.