Page 78 of Finding Noah

But despite the time it took for me to get through uttering the words aloud, Meg listened to every word without interruption. Silently, she encouraged me with soft gestures on my back or squeezes of my hand, but never once did she hurry me along, and every so often, I had to stop talking to take a moment and think, And yet, despite all of this, despite everything, she loves me.

Seth had never been lucky.

Nobody had ever loved him.

And that fact alone set me so far apart from the man who'd given me life, and I knew I was nothing like him. Everything in me was all Rain, and the parts that weren't had come from the man deserving of the name Dad.

But Seth had given me these memories, the nightmares, and the guilt. And even twenty years later, I couldn't figure out how to live with them.

“I feel like a part of me lives in that house … on that stoop,” I confessed, relieved that this story was coming to an end. “Constantly replaying those events on an endless loop, over and over and over again.”

“You were only six,” Meg whispered, the first words she’d spoken in … I couldn't tell you.

I nodded. “Six years old. It's been twenty years. God …” I scrubbed the palm of my hand over my mouth. “Twenty fucking years, and—”

“You never told anyone,” she finished softly, sadly.

“Nope. Nobody until you.”

“We've been together for five years, Noah. You could've … God, you could've told me sooner. You could've told someone, even if it wasn't me. I can't believe you didn't even tell your dad.”

Fight or flight was set alight in my bones, and I was desperate to make her understand.

“But he said he'd kill me, Meghan,” I pressed. “I was six years old. I was this scared little fucking kid, and he looked me right in the eye and said, ‘If you tell anyone, I will kill you and your whore mother.’ So, I never … I couldn't …”

“But he's dead,” she reminded me, as if I'd forgotten—and, hell, maybe I had.

Maybe I did forget, constantly, that the son of a bitch had been burned down to ash and tossed somewhere undisclosed because nobody on the face of this planet gave a single fuck about him.

“But he said he'd kill me,” I repeated.

“But he can't.”

He can't. He can't.

But he tried.

A thought crossed my mind as I slowly turned my head to look at her, my mouth agape. “D-do you think … do you think that's why … holy fuck, do you think he thought I’d told Dad? And that's why he …”

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “That isn't at all in the police report. He never said that to your dad.”

“Maybe he was waiting for Dad to say it to him,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe he didn't want to be the one to—”

“Noah, think about this for a second. Seth probably killed a lot of people in his life, right? He probably got away with murder more times than any of us can even imagine. Why would this be different than the rest?”

“Because …”

My words died in my throat as I furrowed my brow because she'd made a good point. Think, Mason. Think. The gears in my head creaked to life, my thoughts buzzing a mile a minute.

“Come on, Detective,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around mine and tugging me back down to lay at her side.

A flicker of an idea was brought to life as my head hit the pillow. “What if …”

“Mmhmm?” She laid her cheek on my shoulder and stretched her arm across my chest.

“What if … what if he'd never killed a kid before?”

Meg hummed thoughtfully into the darkness of our bedroom as her fingers traced circles through my chest hair, nodding softly. “You think that could've messed him up? Like, maybe he had some guilt over it?”