Page 9

Exactly one hour later, Meg was standing on Gramps’ front porch, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else.

That made two of us.

“Hey, Kylene,” she said, forcing herself to meet my gaze. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

She stood there for a moment in silence, looking at me expectantly, then finally broke. “You wanna let me in, or should we have this conversation right here?”

“Sorry,” I replied, stepping out of her way. She came inside and took off her coat while I walked over to the kitchen table and hunkered down for a conversation I never thought I’d be having.

To say the mood was tense when she sat down across from me would have been an understatement.

“I’d prefer you have this conversation with your mother,” she said, just jumping right in. I opened my mouth to argue, but she raised her palms in surrender before I could even start. “But I know that you two are in a bad place, and you deserve answers, so I’m here. Where do you want me to start?”

“I don’t know…the beginning, maybe?”

She took a deep breath and leaned her elbows on the table to prop her head in her hands. “Your mother was always one of the most beautiful and popular girls at school. Head cheerleader. Student Council president. Head of the yearbook committee. Everyone loved her—even kids that didn’t like anyone. And everyone wanted to date her,” she explained with a slight smile on her face as she reminisced. “She was, for all intents and purposes, the quintessential ‘it girl’—at least until our senior year.

“There was a change in her that summer. It was subtle at first, but she started to pull away from people. Even me. Your grandparents began to worry when she quit her receptionist job at the rec department down at City Hall and lied about it for weeks until someone from payroll called about a paycheck she hadn’t picked up—back in the stone age before automatic deposit was a thing. It was only after your Gramps confronted her about it that she admitted she hadn’t been working. When he demanded to know what she’d been doing when she was supposed to be at work, she wouldn’t say.”

“Red flag number one,” I said, leaning in closer.

“Exactly. Gramps actually asked me to stay close to her because he was worried I was her only tether left to the life she normally had, at least until school started again, so I did. I made sure that no matter how many times she turned me down or lied to my face, I remained steadfast in our friendship.”

“Did it work?”

She exhaled hard and leaned back in her seat. “To a point, yes. Once school started, she seemed a bit more herself. The cheer squad, in particular, seemed to help, until she got injured. Once that happened and she couldn’t really participate, she quit.”

“And the behavior started up again.”

“It did, and worse than before. She began dressing differently and acting out of character. She’d skip class. Her grades plummeted. I’m sure it was her parents’ worst nightmare, because their daughter was disappearing before their very eyes.”

“So what happened? How did she go from that to Winter Festival Queen?”

“It stayed like that for a couple of months, getting worse and worse by the day, until she came to me after school out of the blue and asked to hang out. By then, she was a shell of the girl I’d known. She slept over that night, and I tried to determine what was going on. She looked like she was really grappling with something, so I just let her talk. But you know your mother—she’s cagey, at best. What I was able to glean was that she had concerns about the guy she was dating and wondered if she should break it off. I didn’t need much information to know that the answer was yes. So, after a long night of talking and ice cream, she made the decision. After she cut ties, she was back to herself in no time, and just in time to enter the pageant—which she, of course, won. Your grandparents couldn’t have been happier.”

“Until it all went to shit.”

Meg nodded. “Until it all went to shit.” She stood and began to pace the tiny space between the kitchen and the living room. “I don’t know how anyone found out about her pregnancy, especially not when they did. She wasn’t showing yet and didn’t have any obvious brow-raisers like vomiting every morning at school, but someone down at City Hall caught wind of it, and that was the end of her reign. A week or two later, she lost the baby.”

“Did Gramps and Gram know about the pregnancy?” I asked, thinking that news would have devastated them both.

“Gramps did,” she said, placing her hand atop mine. “Your mother went to him about it when she first found out. She knew Gram would never have survived having the news dropped on her, and she wanted to figure out how to tell her.”

“Surely Gram wondered why her crown had been taken.”

“No,” Meg replied with a look of admiration in her eyes, “your grandfather took care of all that. Once the pregnancy was over, he told her some elaborate story about a judging error that had to be righted. Until the day she died, I don’t think your Gram ever knew.”

What a beautiful and tragic tale that had turned out to be.

“How did the rumor get started in the first place?” Meg pinned her lawyerly stare on me, and I nodded in realization. “The boyfriend did it to get back at her. Man, the boys of southern Ohio have a mean streak when a girl gets the better of them, don’t they?”

“Sure seems that way.”

“So, who was this gem that knocked Mom up, then brought a shitstorm down on her from the shadows because his little ego got bruised?”

She let out a heavy sigh. “The truth is, I still don’t know. Your mother wouldn't tell me then, or even years later. At some point, I just stopped asking because it didn’t seem pertinent any more. It was in the past. Then she married your father, who is the most amazing man ever, and she had you. There was no reason to dwell on the dark season of her life.”

“And now she’s in another one,” I muttered under my breath.

“She’s definitely not her best self at the moment, you’re right on that front, but it’s still different. This feels more like a midlife meltdown brought on by extremely stressful circumstances. Back in school…she just changed , and it was all because of that guy.”

“And you really never knew who it was? Or had guesses?”

“I think I lack your burning desire to get to the bottom of things.”

“But you’re a lawyer.”

“A lawyer, not a detective,” she said with a sly smile. “I did know that he wasn’t a student at JHS—that much I managed to weasel out of her—but beyond that, nothing. But he was poison,” she said with a faraway look in her eyes. “I thought he’d be the death of her.”

“Are we sure this guy was to blame for everything?” I asked. “I mean, couldn’t it have been mental health issues, like depression or something, that would have explained it if anyone had cared about that stuff back then?”

“Mental health could have played a role, but I don’t think it was the inciting piece. She changed in a way that typically comes from emotional manipulation. I’m just grateful she snapped out of it when she did.”

“I wish she’d snap out of whatever it is she’s going through now…”

Meg slipped into the seat next to mine and leveled her gaze on me. “Agreed. I don’t know what’s gotten into her, and I’m not saying her behavior is right, but I’m begging you to hear her out—eventually—before you shut her down.”

“Have you talked to her since I first moved back?” I asked, having never considered the possibility. Gramps hadn’t; I knew that much. But it had never, until that moment, dawned on me that Mom might have reached out to her bestie—or vice versa.

She nodded slowly, confirming that harsh truth.

“Of course you have,” I all but scoffed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I knew it wouldn’t make anything better,” she said plainly.

“Well, this sure as hell didn’t either.”

“Kylene, please try to understand the impossible situation I’m in here. I love you, but I love your mother too. I don’t want to hurt either of you.”

“So you settled for just hurting me. Got it.”

“Ky—”

“No, it’s fine, Meg. Really. She’s your best friend. I get it. I’m just tired and overwhelmed with all of this,” I said as I made my way to the front door. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow about it.”

Meg didn’t move. Instead, her shrewd courtroom stare assessed me from across the tiny space. “Why don’t I believe you?”

“Because you’re smart and I’m a shit liar when I’m exhausted.”

“We have other things we need to talk about.”

“Yeah, I know. But not now, Meg. I just can’t.”

Silence permeated the room, filling it with a tension I wasn’t sure would ever leave. For what felt like an eternity, Meg just stood and stared, unmoving. Then, like a switch had flipped in her mind, she grabbed her leather tote and jacket off the chair and headed toward the door. But she hesitated as she passed me.

Unable to fully meet my gaze, she looked at me from the corner of her eye. “If it’s any consolation, when I called her, I yelled at her for abandoning you to deal with everything on your own,” she said softly. “Then I told her she needed to pull her head out of her ass and come home.”

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t perk up a bit at her words. “What did she say to that?” I asked, taking the bait.

Meg turned to me with a mischievous smile. “Nothing I can repeat. But maybe I’ll cave and tell you tomorrow—when you call me .”

She stepped through the door and down the stairs to the driveway without another word or look back. She knew me as well as anyone. Pushing would never work, so she’d made her closing argument and left it for the jury to decide. And I would…tomorrow.

With that in mind, I closed the door, locked it, and made my way to my room. I flopped backward onto the bed and pulled out my phone. Multiple texts from Garrett and Tabby had me feeling guilty, so I sent a quick ‘had to bail…will explain tomorrow’ response so they at least knew I was okay. I was really filling up my docket for the next day.

And then there was Dawson.

As bone-tired as I felt, I really did want to hear what he thought he’d found in those case files, so I pushed myself up, shook my head a few times, then dialed his number. And got dismissed immediately.

“What the…”

I was composing a strongly worded text about not telling me to call if he was just going to blow me off when one came in from him.

I stared at the phone, awaiting his glib response, but it never came. Instead, his call did—three minutes early.

“I do not punctuate like a Boomer.”

“The trail of evidence in my phone suggests otherwise, my friend,” I countered, “but forget about that. What’s the deal with Agent Franklin?”

“He’s working Barratta hard now. Hopefully we’ll have something by tomorrow.”

“And he’s being guarded to the nines, right? No accidental murders in the middle of the night?”

“That’s the plan.”

I smiled at the phone. “Let’s hope it’s a successful one.”

“How was your conversation with Meg?”

“Less successful than I hope your buddy’s turns out to be.” I quickly rehashed the story and its few details for the young fed, since I knew not elaborating wasn’t really an option. I’d roped him into that mess—the least I could do was explain. “So, yeah…turns out I don’t know a lot about my mom’s past. Or her present, for that matter. Fun times.”

Dawson didn’t react to my dry humor, which meant only one thing: he was deep in thought. “Meg said the guy didn’t go to their school, right?”

“Yes. I mean, I think she’d have noticed my mom all over some guy in the halls if he had—”

“My guess is he didn’t go to school at all,” he said, cutting me off.

I blinked repeatedly at his random outburst. “Like a dropout? That doesn’t seem like someone my mom would go for, but since I apparently don’t really know her, maybe that’s her type to a tee—”

“No, not a dropout,” he said, trying to get me back on track. “Like someone who was older than she was…old enough to not want anyone to know about their relationship, and old enough to be able to emotionally manipulate someone young and impressionable into such a drastic change over such a short time.”

Interesting . Though it gave me the creeps on a massive scale, his logic was sound, and at least he was capable of being objective about the situation. God knows I couldn’t. “I’m not sure he would have had to be older to emotionally manipulate her.”

“No, but it would be much easier for someone with a fully functioning frontal lobe to mold one that isn’t.”

Shots fired . “Um, I don’t have a fully formed frontal lobe, and you aren’t emotionally manipulating me,” I argued.

“Because I’m not trying to.” He left the ‘but I could if I wanted to’ hang in the silence between us.

“You’re not trying to date me either, so that makes sense.” His lack of immediate response made me nervous. “So, you think some older guy isolated my mother, turned her into someone else altogether, then turned on her once she left him, using the pregnancy to get revenge publicly?”

“It’s the most logical explanation I can think of, given the lack of information.”

“Well, older or not, he dicked her over hard, and if I ever find out who it was, I’ll be driving my knee into his balls equally hard, consequences be damned. I might not be on the best terms with my mom, but she’s still my mom, and she sure as hell didn’t deserve what he did to her and my family.”

“No, she didn’t…just like you didn’t deserve what happened to you with the photo scandal. Maybe you should try calling her about it. Maybe you could find some common ground to start from.”

“I’ll take ‘things that are never going to fucking happen’ for five hundred, Alex.”

“All right, all right. Point made, Danners. Go get some schoolwork done while you have the time. I’ll be in touch soon.”

Having been dismissed, I tossed my phone on the floor and lay back on my bed. As much as I hated to admit it, maybe Dawson was right. Maybe I not only had more in common with my estranged mother than I wanted to admit, but I also needed to consider reaching out to her. The thought of it made me shudder.

But not even the night’s horrible revelations could darken the blinding ray of possibility that was Jimmy “the Snake” Barratta’s potential unmasking of the AD. In truth, I could hardly believe it—it seemed too good to be true. So I lay there restless for hours because all I could think about was how badly I wanted to wake up the next day in a new reality—one where the AD had been identified and was already in custody. One where my father had been exonerated and freed. One where I was safe.

But my life wasn’t a fairytale.

So I didn’t.