Page 147 of Protecting What's Mine

“We promised to stay out of it,” Gloria added.

“This is you staying out of it?”

“Can we go back to the part whereyoubroke up withher?” Jillian asked.

“Look. It doesn’t matter. It was always going to happen. She was always going to pull away. She was always going to leave. I’m the idiot that got hopeful that she’d change her mind.”

Harper pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and blew out a breath. “Okay. Let’s break this down. Soph, man the whiteboard.”

As the women diagramed the timeline of his relationship with Mackenzie, Linc wished desperately that he’d kept a bottle of whiskey in a desk drawer like his predecessor.

“So she flies home unexpectedly from a trip to visit a mother that she never talks about?” Sophie clarified.

“She’s mentioned foster parents, but her going to Chicago was for her mother,” Christa said.

“Foster parents mean that there’s some…at the very leastinconsistencyin her childhood,” Harper said. She knew from experience. “It could be worse. A lot worse.”

“She was removed from the home at age six for parental neglect,” Sophie announced, drawing an arrow behind the timeline and wrote the wordsshitty childhoodin red.

Everyone froze. Linc came halfway out of his chair. “What?”

Sophie pointed to the Benevolence Police Department sweatshirt she was wearing. “You guys do know I’m married to Ty, right?”

“Did she ever talk to you about it? About growing up?” Harper asked him.

“Or were you too busy constructing a self-fulfilling time bomb?” Rebecca demanded. “What? Come on. You got yourself all tangled up over Karen Aucker and then convinced yourself that you were never going to be worth taking a chance on for a long-term relationship.”

Linc’s sisters nodded in annoying agreement.

“Karen?” Harper’s gray eyes widened. “Oh, Linc. I’m so sorry. That must have been awful for you.”

He waved it away. Wished they would all just go. “Can you all please get the hell out of my office and leave me alone?”

“Absolutely not,” Gloria said firmly. “We’re not leaving until you’ve earned this pie back.”

“The point is she didn’t trust me to tell me about any of this. She didn’t tell me she was home. She didn’t need me.”

Everyone started speaking at once. The sympathetic vibe in the room was fading and being replaced with the sharp edges of accusations.

“Hang on, ladies. I’ve got this,” Gloria said. “Linc, let me explain to you what shame feels like.”

“Gloria, you don’t have to—”

“No. I’m talking. You’re listening. I wasted a decade of my life on a man who was little more than a monster. I was ashamed. Ashamed that I stayed. That I thought he would change. I felt like his bad tainted me somehow.”

“We don’t know that Mackenzie has some deep-seated childhood trauma.”

“She broke her fucking leg jumping out of a second-story window, you idiot,” Christa snapped. “Yeah, Samantha told me. And now we know she was removed from her home around the same time. That’snotanormal upbringing.”

“Something had to happen when she went back,” Harper guessed, staring at the whiteboard as if it held the answers to the feminine mystery.

“Something bad enough that she flew back the same day she left and called Dr. Robinson to pick her up instead of Linc,” Sophie mused.

“My money is on some kind of emotional falling out with her mother. Something that shook her up and made her want to shut down. She wouldn’t want Linc to see her like that,” Gloria said.

Linc couldn’t help it. He reached out and laid a hand on Gloria’s shoulder. A sign of support.

She reached up and squeezed his hand back.