Liberty At Last (The Liberty Series)

by James, Leigh

  Alex came in as Billy was packing up. “I need a minute with her,” she said, “and then we can go.” She closed the door behind him. “Eric wanted me to give you this,” she said, handing me a sealed letter. “Read it whenever you want. Whenever you’re ready,” she added, gently.

  “I told you that I was the only one he’d confided in about you, before he died,” she continued. “The others know now, of course, because we’ve all gone throughout the estate and Billy’s done all the disbursements. Except for this one,” she said, and slid a black velvet box across the table to me.

  I looked up at her, questioningly, and she nodded at me. I opened the box and heard myself gasp at what was inside. I looked up at her, stunned.

  “He wanted you to have this,” she said. “He’d bought it some time ago and put it aside — for a rainy day, I guess. Or a hot new girlfriend. He didn’t want Wife Number Three getting her hands on it, so he’d kept it in a safe in his office for years. But he wanted to give it to you,” she said, and smiled at me. “Off the books. So the other kids didn’t know and come after you, tearing you limb from limb and trying to get their grubby hands on it. I was the only one he trusted to deliver it,” she said, and I heard a trace of good-girl pride in her voice.

  I looked back down at the enormous emerald and diamond necklace in the box. It was like something Elizabeth Taylor would have worn, I thought, irrationally thinking of her wearing it in a perfume commercial. “It’s stunning,” I said, finally finding my voice.

  “It’s worth over a million dollars,” Alexandra said, matter-of-factly. “Read the letter. He had a lot to make up for, and this doesn’t take away everything he didn’t do for you,” she said, her voice trailing off. “But it’s something. He wasn’t a bad person. He didn’t know you, but he did love you. As crazy as that sounds.” She put her hand on my shoulder and bent down to hug me.

  “Lock that up,” she said. “Tonight. There’s insurance for it. The information’s in the envelope I gave you.”

  I stood up and hugged her. “Thank you for coming,” I said. “I’m so happy I got to meet you. I’d love to see you again. If you wanted to.” This came out sounding like I was begging, and I felt myself began to redden.

  “Liberty, of course I want to,” she said, and hugged me again. “Would you want to meet my girls?” she asked, and she sounded nervous, too.

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said, immediately.

  “Then let’s do it soon,” she said.

  Later, after we’d cleaned up, John asked me what I thought of Alexandra.

  “I love her,” I said, blurting it out before I could even think about it. “She was so sweet. And nice and normal. And clean and pretty. She’s basically the perfect relative.”

  “I thought she seemed lovely, too,” John said, smiling at me. “Worthy of you. Like she’s someone who’d be worth getting to know better.”

  “I think so, too,” I said. “Wait — she gave me this. Let me show you.”

  I showed John the necklace. He gave out a low, long whistle. “Holy cow,” he said, touching it lightly.

  “Alexandra said it’s worth a lot of money,” I said, looking at it nervously. What the hell was I ever going to do with it?

  “You think?” John asked, sarcastically. “Let’s put it in the safe.”

  I took out the check and the letter from my father; I looked briefly at the check and promptly dropped the glass of water I was holding, shattering the glass and spilling water everywhere.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” John asked, bending down and picking up the pieces.

  I just looked at the numbers on the check. “Was Eric very wealthy?” I asked, unable to fathom what I was seeing.

  “I don’t think so,” John said. “Didn’t Ian tell you how much you were getting? I thought he said it was a couple of thousand.”

  I nodded, still standing there in a puddle of water, like an idiot, letting John clean everything up. “A couple of hundred thousand,” I said, gulping for air. “Like, nine hundred thousand.”

  “Sweet!” John said, popping up and smiling at me. “Not only are you smoking hot, but you come with a dowry!”

  “Sweet!” I said, slapping his face lightly with the check. “Now I can finally pay you back for everything.”

  “Oh, you’re gonna pay,” John said, finishing cleaning up the mess I’d made. He carefully put down the check and the jewelry box and suddenly picked me up in a fireman’s carry, throwing me over his shoulder, and I screamed in surprise and delight.

  “You are gonna pay every day for the rest of your life,” he said, and slapped me on the ass.

  “Thank God,” I said, finally feeling a little more normal, as he carried me off.

  Early, early the next morning, feeling deliciously sore for a number of reasons, I opened the letter from my father. My palms were sweating and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

  Dear Liberty,

  If you are reading this, it means I’m gone and that I was too late to meet you. I’m so sorry for that. And for a lot of other things, as you might imagine.

  I trusted your sister Alexandra to deliver the necklace to you, and this letter. She is someone you can trust. Your other brothers and sisters, unfortunately, are not as reliable. They are, in fact, scheming and desperate. They won’t be happy that you were included in their inheritance. To a certain extent, I can understand what they’ll think — you didn’t have to put up with me for all these years, so why should you get as much money? They’ll think you had it “easy.” Clearly, you didn’t get the same benefits that they did — i.e., paid-for private schools, colleges, weddings, cars, apartments, etc. You didn’t get anything at all. But like I said, they’re greedy and monomaniacal, like their father, so they won’t want to hear all that.

  That’s why I set the necklace aside for you. What you’ve gotten now, between the value of the necklace and your share of my estate, will never be equal to what my other children had. But at least it’s something.

  The reason I’m writing this letter is to explain myself, but more than anything, it’s an apology. You deserved better. It’s too late for me to give you better now. I can never tell you how sorry I am that I wasn’t there for you growing up. I’d be lying if I told you I was completely ignorant of your mother’s problems. I wasn’t, even though I only knew her briefly. She was so beautiful. But even being that beautiful couldn't hide the amount of pain she was in. So I’m an even worse man than you might have imagined, because I knew. I just used her for what I wanted and then I left her alone. Troubled as she was, I didn’t ever want to see her again. And then she told me she was pregnant, and I made her take a test. And you were mine, but I never came to claim you.

  I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me: But. Can you imagine how I slept at night? If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t sleep much. I knew what I’d done was wrong. I left you with her. I’d never been a good husband, but I did pride myself on being a halfway decent father, so I knew what I was doing to you by never reaching out. Never insisting. I sent your mother plenty of money, and letters, but if I’m being honest, I knew in my heart that she never told you that I wanted to be a father to you. And I did, at least in the beginning. Then time passed, I started sleeping again, got married again…and I let myself wipe you from my conscious mind. You were always with me, in the background, and I still hated myself for abandoning you, but I just put you out of my mind. Doesn’t it seem impossible to do that? To a child? Forget all about your own child?

  It should be impossible, Liberty. But I am here to tell you, my own daughter, that it was not.

  I didn’t know until too late the extent of her substance abuse. By then, by the time Ian found you, your mother was dead and you were gone. I am glad to hear that you made it out. I can only hope that a better fate awaits you than hers. Or mine, for that matter.

  Please know in your heart that if I could take it back and do it all over again, I would. But that’s the thing about being
close to the end of your life. You see it all so clearly. I can’t go back, I know I can’t. And I will die knowing that I failed you.

  I can understand it if you never forgive me. But please know that I love you, and I always loved you, even though it was a coward’s love.

  Your Father,

  Eric Kingston

  I sat there for a long time, watching the sun come up. Then John started to stir and I got up quickly and went down to the kitchen. I took a lighter out of the drawer and ran down to the beach in my bare feet. Then I took the letter my father had written me and I lit it on fire. And watched it burn.

  “You’re up early,” John said, coming into the kitchen a little while later. I was already dressed in my running clothes, drinking my second cup of coffee. I was all keyed up.

  “Everything okay?” John asked, eyeing me warily.

  “Fine,” I said, but I could hear the tension in my own voice.

  “You read the letter from your father?” he asked, leaning back against the counter and watching me.

  “I did,” I said. “It was fine,” I said, in answer to his questioning stare. “I burnt it down on the beach this morning.”

  “So you got up before five, read the letter, burned it, and you’re on your second cup of coffee?” he asked, still watching me, my knees bouncing with a nervous energy I rarely had.

  “And it was fine?”

  “It was fine. Fineish,” I admitted.

  “Fineish,” John said. He sighed and sat down. “Liberty, we’re getting married. You have to be able to talk to me, to tell me how you feel.”

  We looked at each other. I wanted to tell him how I felt; there was nothing I wanted more. There was no one I trusted like I trusted him. No one who understood me as perfectly as he did. My knee-jerk reaction was to run to him. To tell him everything, and to have him make it all better. But would he really want to hear how angry I was? How disappointed? In a father who was never there for me?

  I had to be strong now. Not just for me. For him, too.

  Even though John wasn’t like Eric — he’d had a relationship with his daughter, he’d seen her every year — it would still be too close a comparison for him. It would send him on a downward spiral about Catherine. I couldn’t do that to him, or to me. We had too much to do, and not enough time.

  “I think he had good intentions,” I said carefully, trying to sound like I wasn’t being careful. “He gave me the necklace to make up for some of the money I didn’t get over the years. I don’t really care about that, but I appreciate his point of view.”

  “Why did you burn the letter?” he asked, searching my face.

  Because I didn’t realize that I was angry at him until I read it, I thought. I didn’t realize that I’d been abandoned, even though that fact had been as plain as day my whole life. I just never considered it.

  “He asked me to forgive him,” I said. “And I do. I forgive him. So I just wanted to let that be it.” I got up and went to him, hugging him to me fiercely. He looked up at me and I lovingly stroked his stubbly face.

  “I just want to start our life together,” I said. “I want to move forward. I don’t want to make the same mistakes my parents made, or that I’ve made in the past.”

  “We’re always going to make mistakes,” he said, crushing me against his powerful chest. “But I agree: it’ll be a relief to make different ones. We’ll be helicopter parents — I’ll be a soccer dad, or whatever they call it these days. We won’t spend a night away from them.”

  I sat on his lap and he wrapped his arms around me, cradling me. “I don’t know what a soccer dad is, but do you promise you’ll be one?”

  “I promise,” he said. “We’ll be home every day to get the kids off the bus, and they’ll only eat organic food and watch Sesame Street. None of that G.I. Joe crap that I watched. It gave me all sorts of crazy ideas.”

  “And no slutty Barbies,”I said. “My sister had a slutty Barbie. I think that was part of her problem.”

  Just then Ian came in, wearing a silk paisley robe, striped pajamas, and a worried expression on his face. “What’s wrong?” John asked, alerted to trouble immediately.

  Ian stepped over to the coffee maker and started pouring himself a cup. “Eva texted me just now,” he said, and we all looked at the clock on the wall. It was six-thirty here — three-thirty in the morning in Los Angeles. My heart rate sped up, and I felt John tense beneath me.

  “Catherine’s gone,” Ian said. He took and a long sip of coffee.

  “Eva got up in the middle of the night Catherine had left. She left her mother a note. She said she’d be in touch when she could.”

  “Eva’s not taking it well?” John asked, evenly.

  “She’s hysterical,” Ian said.

  “You need to go out there,” John said. “Could you do that?”

  Ian nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

  “Ethan’s already there doing surveillance. He probably followed Catherine last night. I haven’t heard from him,” he said, and checked his phone.

  “Ethan’s in California?” I asked.

  “He’s probably in Mexico now,” John said, and grimaced a little, like the mention of the country itself brought back bad memories. “I sent him as soon as they left. Just to watch the house, make sure that they were safe. My orders were to follow Catherine everywhere she went.

  “So we probably know where she is,” he said, hesitating. “That is, if Ethan’s still alive.” He checked his phone again.

  Ian took his glasses off and wiped them on the sleeve of his robe. He suddenly looked very, very tired and old to me. It made my heart lurch. “I’ll get a flight later this morning,” he said. “Eva’s husband’s on location. She shouldn’t be alone right now.” He came over and hugged me. “I’m going to miss you,” he said. “You, too, even though you’re not as sweet,” he said to John, patting him on the back. John nodded at him as he left the room. “I’ll keep you posted,” he called as he walked out.

  “Are you sure this isn’t too much on him?” I asked John. I was worried about how strained his father looked. The situation with Catherine had been difficult for him.

  “It’s too much on all of us,” John said, playing with my hair absentmindedly. “He can handle it as well as anybody else. And Eva loves him. It’ll be a comfort to her now, and that’s the best we can do.” He looked out past me, through the window, lost in his own thoughts.

  We both knew that she’d gone back to Angel. She’d never once veered from that course. She’d said from the beginning that she loved Angel and wanted to be with him. She’d also said that he demanded her complete loyalty. If she wanted to be with him, she didn’t have a choice; she couldn’t stay in America to visit with her family. Angel would not tolerate that — he’d made her make a clean break.

  So it had only been a matter of time before she went running back. In fact, we’d probably gotten more time with her than we could have expected. I’d secretly been hoping that she’d be locked up in a psych ward indefinitely, but you can’t always get what you want.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, a knot forming in my stomach as I considered the possibilities.

  He sighed and looked back at me. “I’m going to have her followed. And leave her alone,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose as if the decision pained him. “For now.”

  For now. The words sent shivers down my spine. “You know you can’t make her do what you want,” I said, the words coming out before I had a chance to stop them. “You can’t make her change her mind.”

  He looked at me evenly. “I know,” he said. “But I can’t just let her go, Liberty. She’s my daughter.”

  I grabbed his hands and held them. “It’s going to be okay,” I said. “Somehow. Maybe she’ll come around.” I said it, but I believed anything but. This was one of the things I was learning about loving someone: part of what was necessary was loyalty to the other person’s feelings. You had to guard your partne
r’s frame of mind. You had to protect it.

  I had to protect him. I pulled him to me and held him tightly. “We’re going to get though it — all of it,” I said, suddenly feeling overwhelmed. “Together.”

  Just then Matthew burst into the kitchen. “Busy morning,” John muttered, under his breath. “What’s up, Matthew?”

  “Updates,” Matthew said, making himself a cup of coffee and sitting down.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” John said and laughed.

  “I am comfortable,” Matthew said, and by the way he was oblivious to John’s joking, I knew that something important had happened.

  “What is it?” I asked. The knot that had been forming in my stomach proceeded to double knot itself.

  “We need to get going to Brazil,” he said. “Our source told me this morning that Darius has made contact again, so we have an idea of his general vicinity.”

  “Are we ready?” John asked.

  “We are ready to go,” Matthew said, looking at him seriously. “She,” he said, jerking his thumb at me, “is not.”

  I started protesting and John held up his hand. I shut my mouth immediately, not wanting to get even a teensy bit on his bad side. “How long do you think?” John asked.

  “We’re out of time,” Matthew said, shrugging.

  “What do you need me to do?” I asked, my panic rising.

  “Run ten miles and then walk ten miles with a backpack on. Run over roots and tree limbs and through thick underbrush. Climb up onto a roof,” Matthew said, looking at me in a challenging way. “You can’t do any of that.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, desperately. “I’ll do it all today.” I looked at John, pleading. “Please,” I said. “I promised you I’d work hard. I’ve been doing everything you asked. I even set my alarm and got up and drank protein shakes last night,” I said, looking at Matthew. “I’ve held up my end of the bargain. You can’t leave me behind, just because the timeframe’s changed.”