Page 31

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CELINE

That night, the boys are at my parents’ house, safe and sound, and I’m pacing the floor of the living room, trying to decide if I’ve just made the worst decision of my life.

I contemplated telling my parents everything, but I didn’t. I still don’t know why. Maybe because I didn’t think they’d believe me. Maybe I thought they’d believe I was having a mental breakdown and needed the boys taken away. Or maybe…just maybe, I still want to protect him.

Does that make me a monster or a fool? Even knowing all he’s done, I also know the man he’s been to me. That man isn’t capable of hurting anyone. Not anymore. Maybe that makes me the most gullible fool in the world.

When I spot a pair of headlights driving down the road of our subdivision, my heart races in my chest. There are knives in the kitchen. Lamps all around. A few of the boys’ soccer and T-ball trophies. Heavy objects, but could I use them if I needed to? Would I be willing to hurt him if it came down to it?

A truck pulls into the driveway, and my brain begins to short-circuit as panic races through me. Why did I agree to this? Why didn’t I tell anyone my plan? Why was I so, so stupid?

I think back over the expressions on my in-laws’ faces as they looked at the photo I’d shown them. Their sons. Their sons that they loved and protected. Perhaps now their son is coming to protect them, and more importantly, their secret…from me.

But I would never tell. He has to know that. I would keep his secret with everything in me. I always would have. He only killed because he had to. He took a monster out of this world. I couldn’t hate him for that. I can only sympathize with him and wish he’d trusted me enough to tell me the truth years ago.

A dark figure walks across the porch, and I recognize the shape of his body. It’s the same one that has slipped across our bedroom in the dark after locking the door. The same one that has held me when I cried or when I was sick. The same one I’ve leaned on or snuggled up next to so many times over the last decade.

When his face comes into view in the porch light, tears blur my vision. He’s here. He’s real. He’s alive.

I pull the door open and step back. “Tate…”

I don’t know whether to tell him what I know or keep it in—whether being honest will put me in more danger or if I can reassure him that I will protect his secret with my life, that all is forgiven. That I love him enough to look past all of this.

His eyes are stony and distant as he stares at me. “Are the boys…”

“At my parents’.”

He shuts the door behind him, keeping his distance from me when all I want to do is hold him. “No one else is here?”

The question douses my skin with ice water as I remember Aaron’s warning. My eyes flick toward the door, and I can’t help thinking about the fact that he’s blocking the exit. “No. Just us.” Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

He clasps his hands in front of him. “I have so much to explain and probably not a lot of time.”

I nod. “I know.”

He puffs a breath of air through his nose. “I’m sorry about all of this, Celine. I’m sorry I disappeared. I’m sorry about the money. I’m sorry if I ever put you in danger.”

“Tell me everything,” I beg. “I’m here to listen and to help you. I love you.”

We’re feet apart, and all I want to do is run to him and hug him, to know that we can get through this no matter what, but I can’t move. I don’t. I need to understand first.

He looks down, pacing listlessly. “The first thing you should know is that I’m not…my name isn’t…”

“I know.” I don’t mean to say it, but I need to have it out there. He’s struggling. He’s scared. I can see it in his eyes. I need him to know I’m not running away.

His eyes go wide. “You do?”

“I know your name is Matteo.”

Tears flood his cold eyes, and he blinks them away, looking out of the room. “I didn’t lie to you when we met. When I told you my name is Tate. There have been so many lies over the years, but that wasn’t one of them. My parents used to call me Tate, before they…” He sniffles. “My real parents, my birth parents, died when I was six. A drunk driver ran a stoplight, and just like that, they were gone. I don’t remember much about them, but I remember that they called me Tate. I didn’t lie to you when we met. Even though I couldn’t tell you the truth, I tried not to lie.”

I nod, chewing my lip. “I know. I know why you did what you did. I know what happened the night the real Tatum died.”

He opens his mouth, trying to say something, but tears choke out his words. “When I got put into foster care, Tatum was there. And Dakota. And Aaron and Bradley. We were brothers. They moved us from home to home, and sometimes I was alone and sometimes one or two of them were there, but the best homes…the best ones were when it was all of us.” He pauses, composing himself by swiping his hand over his face. “I loved him. Despite everything he did, despite the monster they made him into, I loved him, Celine. What I did that night…I wasn’t myself. I was so angry with him, and I just wanted it to stop. I knew it wouldn’t stop. It doesn’t make it okay. It doesn’t make me any better than him.”

I can’t stop myself. I step forward, trying to hug him, but he puts his hands up, stopping me from getting any closer.

“I need to finish telling you the rest,” he says.

“Okay.” Feeling a bit like a scolded child, I step back.

“We lost touch after everything. Dakota tried. He wanted to get us back together, but…I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at them and see the way they looked at me. I took him away from them, too. I killed their brother, too.” His voice cracks. “I’ll never understand why Daphne and Lane helped me, why they protected me, but I’ll forever be thankful because it meant I got you. And the boys. And you guys are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

Tears pour down my cheeks at his words. Why does this feel like goodbye? Why is he saying it like this is over? Like he’s still planning to leave?

“And so when Aaron called me and told me Bradley was going to tell his fiancée the truth, and then I eventually heard from Bradley about it too, I went to Mom in a panic. She’d always made things better. I wasn’t afraid of the truth coming out. I wasn’t afraid of going to jail. I was…I was afraid of losing you. I was afraid that you’d hate me. That you’d see me as a monster.”

My heart aches for him, for this truth that he’s kept buried for so long. For there being so much he had to keep hidden from me. “I know why you did it. Tatum was the monster. Aaron told me everything.”

He shakes his head. “No. We shouldn’t have let it happen. We should’ve told the truth back then and taken the consequences. Then your life wouldn’t be messed up, too. Then you wouldn’t be in the middle of this.”

“The middle of what? Whatever happens, we can face it together,” I promise him. “I love you.”

“Not this. I can’t put you in the middle of this. I have to fix it somehow.”

“Fix what?” I demand, staring at his face in the glow of the lamp. I don’t understand.

He takes a deep breath, running a thumb over his opposite palm. “Mom promised me it would be okay. That she and Dad would handle it. And then…Bradley died.”

My skin goes cold. “What are you saying?”

“And when I asked her about it, she said it was awful. She sounded genuinely upset. I wanted to believe she wasn’t involved, that she could never hurt us, but…I don’t know. And then Dakota told me he was being followed. That someone was trying to scare him by following him around, and that they’d left a burned book at his house. A burned copy of The Catcher in the Rye , which was the book Aubrey had in her bag that night, the book that we left with her body. No one would know about that except us. And my parents. I thought he was being paranoid at first, until…until I saw the car that was following him. And I recognized it.”

I wait, silently begging him to go on as he pauses.

“It was my dad.” He looks up at me, tears glimmering in his eyes. “My dad was following him, and I worried he was going to do to him what he’d done to Bradley. So, I took the money from our account to split it between the two brothers I had left. I was going to give it to Dakota and Aaron. To tell them to run, to beg them to go. To hide. And then, on the day we went to move the body, to protect our secret from even my parents, I traded vehicles with Dakota, thinking my dad would follow me and I could confront him. But he must’ve seen us trade places. I have no idea where he was, but the next thing I knew, Dakota had been run off the road, and I was hiding out in a hotel room trying to get to Aaron to warn him without getting caught.”

“Your dad is the one doing this?”

He nods slowly. “And I don’t know if he’s trying to protect me…or himself.”

“Perhaps I can give you an answer to that.” I jerk my head around to see my in-laws standing in the hallway. In Lane’s hand, he has a gun.