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“You didn’t have to know!” I shout, unable to control myself any longer. My throat feels raw as the words are ripped from me, screaming up my chest. “She wasn’t innocent.” I take a step toward my father and grab the edge of the desk to keep from gripping his collar and say, “But she didn’t deserve to die.”
“She did.” My father’s voice is hard, his back straight and his gaze full of confidence.
“She was pregnant!” I tell him. Hating how he could so easily dismiss her existence. He had her murdered. He didn’t even think twice about ending her life.
“With a married man’s child!” my father sneers, his face turning red as he leans in closer to me and I can’t take it any longer.
I can’t take the arrogance and justification of ending a person’s life so easily. I clench my fist until my knuckles are white and punch my father in the jaw. His teeth crack from the weight of the blow. His head whips to the side as he falls to the floor, limp and shocked. My arm stings with the pain of impact.
It feels so fucking good to finally give him a piece of what he deserves.
He lays there for a moment, his hand over his mouth as a trickle of blood leaks from the corner of his lips. I shake out my hand, adrenaline rushing through my veins. I just barely restrain myself from kicking him in the ribs, from letting all this anger and pent-up guilt out on him.
“You ungrateful prick.” He spits blood onto the floor and looks up at me with a menacing glare. “You chose some whore over your own family.”
No, I’m choosing what’s right. I’m choosing to be better than this life I was born into.
My father doesn’t quit with his justification. “Anderson didn’t want that kid. Think about what she would have done to him!”
The mention of Jace Anderson makes my gaze break from my father’s. The memories come back and make my tense muscles spasm. I can’t hear whatever my father’s yelling at me. It’s all white noise.
I may have been born a Thatcher and I’ll die a Thatcher, but I refuse to be anything like my father. Not today, not ever.
“I won’t forgive you.” I force my body to relax. I’ve said what I came to say. This ends now. “I never will.” I start to walk out, accompanied by the sound of my heart racing.
Just as my hand grips the doorknob, I finally get the balls to ask him.
One last thing to say. One final question.
Walking back to his desk with confident steps, I imagine his answer as if I already know it. He turns slightly from facing the window, still curled up on the floor behind his desk, looking at me as if he doesn’t trust me. He shouldn’t. Not with how I’m feeling at this moment.
I stop on the opposite side of the desk, my mind racing as I go back years and years. Back to only a boy who lost his mother. Scared, confused … and angry.
“Mom didn’t die from an overdose.” The statement comes out accusatory and it’s meant to. He wipes the blood from his mouth with the bright white sleeve of his dress shirt. He doesn’t look me in the eye, doesn’t acknowledge what I said in the least.
I take one step toward him, a large step that gets his attention. His gaze whips up to me. “Did you have her killed too?”
“How dare you!” His nostrils flare as he pins me with his gaze. “How dare you, you fucking …” he trails off and doesn’t finish. His shoulders are hunched forward as he grips his desk chair for balance to stand.
I’m struck by the powerful way he’s affected. I’ve wondered for so long, months now. If he had Avery killed, maybe he did the same with my mother.
I flex my hand and swallow thickly, feeling the need to explain. My question was prompted by a gut feeling more than anything else. I don’t remember much from around the time she died, but I remember how I felt. How the air between them was tense. How scared my mother was that he would find out her dirty little secret. “I know she was cheating?—”
“Get out!” My father shouts at me, not holding anything back as he throws his chair to the side, putting all of his weight into it.It crashes against the bookshelf, several of the books tumbling to the floor as he slams his fists against his desk.
I turn my back on him, my fist pulsing in agony from the punch and my chest hurting with a pain I can’t explain.
He pounds his fists again and again on the maple desk as I force myself to walk away from him.
Leaving my father alone in his office and promising myself never to see him again, never to speak to him, never to trust him. And never to be like him.
Never again.
JULIA
Istare down at the neat piles of papers to my right in the dining room. My back is killing me and my shoulders are screaming in pain. It’s so wrong that now that these contracts and files are sorted out, my first thought is to call Mason, to see if he’s free and tell him that I miss him.
God, do I miss him.