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With our hands still locked, he slowly revealed, “My dad, he, uh, knows what it was like for me that day in Thailand.” Eyes lifting to meet mine, he added in a hoarse voice, “Only he wasn’t given the chance to save my mom the way I was able to help you.”
22
OLIVER
“Do you want me to keep going?” I loosened my hold of her hand.
Mya’s wide-eyed, devastated expression had me worried I’d made a mistake in following my father’s advice.
“Please do.” She gave me a nod, her eyes glossy.
Shit, can I? I supposed backing out now wasn’t really an option. Squeezing down the lump in my throat, I tried to be in the here-and-now instead of boxed inside those past memories that kept sucking me down to a dark place every night in my dreams.
“Take your time,” she whispered, and I gulped and pulled myself together.
“Three guys broke into our house,” I rushed out, anxious to get this over with. “Tucker was already in the military. I was seventeen, and at a party two streets over in our neighborhood. My dad had just come home from dinner with a friend of his, and he found my mother already, um . . .”
Mya closed her eyes.
I did the same.
Fuck.
But when she set her other hand on top of our clasped ones, I managed to remember how to speak again, and braced myself to get through this.
“They were waiting for him to come home before they . . .” I can’t do this. The only time I’d spoken these words out loud were to Tucker almost twenty years ago. This wasn’t my story to tell, a story that should never have happened. “They knocked my dad out, tied him up, then once he came to, they forced him to watch.”
I didn’t need to fill in the blanks. Mya would know. She’d know what happened to my mother while my dad had to sit there helpless and powerless to save her.
“After,” I went on, my voice trembling as much as my hands, “they told my father if he didn’t shut his mouth, back off at work and leave town, the next time they’d come and kill her and me.”
The few tears that escaped disappeared into my beard as I did my best not to choke on emotions pushing up in physical form in my throat. “Police and ambulances were everywhere when I came home.”
The fucking chills. Dammit, they wouldn’t stop. They never did when I remembered that night. Teeth chattering and nearly painful goose bumps covered my skin.
“Two broken ribs and a black eye on top of what she’d gone through.” I shook my head. “As the doors to the ambulance shut, taking my mom away, I overheard my father telling a detective what happened.”
I opened my eyes, stunned to see Mya wordlessly climbing onto my lap, straddling me without hesitation. She hooked her legs around my back and hugged me, burying her face against my chest, her fingertips in my back as she cried.
I sat there as she held me, replaying the scene from that night, finding myself frozen in time before I wound up back in that room in Thailand, living that hell all over again, too.
A shuddery feeling in my chest was the only warning I had before I completely broke down. Lost it. And I finally let go.
Quietly cried. No sounds. Just throbbing, unbearable pain.
“If I’d just come home fifteen minutes sooner, maybe I could’ve saved her. Kept my family whole. Maybe Tucker would still be alive. He’d been wracked with guilt for being away when Mom needed him. I shouldn’t have told him what happened. Mom didn’t want him or anyone to know, but I wanted him to be there for her. Talk to her. Help her, too. They were even closer than we were. Firstborn son and all.”
A new kind of guilt struck me. Was I partly responsible for his death? Did telling him fuck with his head more than serving did? Was that my fault, too? If only I could rewrite the past. Reinvent history.
“I’m so sorry, Oliver.” She was shaking against me but not letting go.
I brought my hands to her arms and gently massaged her, trying to help ease her tension. Somehow, making her feel better helped calm me down, too.
“My mother refused to speak about what happened after that night. She also couldn’t look my father in the eyes again. He blamed himself and couldn’t . . .” I thought back to the day of their fight before he took off, then skipped in time to when he came home. He was too late to make it right with my mom, though. Divorce papers had already been served and signed. She’d moved on, but Dad never did. He’d also had a blowout fight with Tucker, and my brother told him never to show his face again.
“That’s why he left,” she murmured. But she didn’t have the whole story yet, and I’d have to get through this for her. Maybe for myself, too.
I eased her back so I could see her face. Her mascara streaked down her cheeks, and her sad eyes were as much of a gut punch as her trembling bottom lip, catching the tears that continued to flow.
