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Chapter Nine

Yuri

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Grazing the door withmy knuckles, I opened it up and stuck my head inside. “Mom, can I come in?”

My mother was sitting on the couch reading the paper. She kept her eyes on the page, not bothering to look up at me. “You're halfway there, might as well go the rest of the way.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said, taking a seat in the recliner across from her.

“Is it? Is it really merry, Yuri?” Her voice was hard and angry.

She's never going to forgive me if I don't tell her the truth.

Gwen had really gotten to me yesterday. I couldn't stop thinking about what she had said. She felt like I never loved her, she thought I gave up on us just to make a quick buck.

She was wrong.

It just didn't feel right telling her the truth before telling the one person that deserved to know first—my mother.

I lived with this secret, this burden for all these years, carrying it like a boulder on my shoulders. Not once had I told the truth, I kept my mouth shut because I thought it would save someone else.

But in the end, it changed nothing.

“Can we talk?” I asked her, leaning forward and folding my hands together.

“About what? You need money? Because I don't have any to give you, you should know that.”

“No, I'm not looking for money.”

The ripple effect that happened from that horrible night was more of a tsunami. Not only had I lost the only person I ever loved, but it destroyed my parents life.

My father did everything he could to get me off with as little time as possible. He sold his business to hire me the best attorney, he took out a second mortgage on their home to help pay all the legal bills.

By the time it was all said and done, my family went from living in a huge house in a new plat, to a small two bedroom apartment on the lower end of town. A year into my sentence, my father had a heart attack, which my mother blamed on the stress I caused, and he died in his sleep.