Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-One
S ix weeks after the arrival of her first letter, Lilah knocked on the door of their apartment.
Mia had just enough time to regret her recent life choices in the brief moment between opening the door to find her standing on their welcome mat looking every inch a US senator in a cream-colored suit and hearing Gabriel suck in a furious breath as he appeared at her elbow and found his mother waiting for him. They should have sent a letter back telling Lilah to leave them alone, or she could have called to request it personally. Anything to keep her from showing up unexpectedly and pulling all of Gabriel’s issues to the surface with no warning.
Her fingers tightened on the doorknob, and she wondered for one wild second if she could simply close the door in Lilah’s face and act like it hadn’t happened, simply turn to Gabriel and pretend she hadn’t recognized his mother from all the news articles and TV stories. Panicked laughter caught in her throat at the thought of trying to convince him that it had been nothing more than an overly dressed saleswoman.
“Hello Mia,” Lilah said, and then, her gaze sliding over Mia’s shoulder, “Gabriel.”
There was a beat of unbearable silence.
“Senator Miller,” Mia said through stiff lips. Her hands were cold and her head was buzzing as she tried to ignore how absolutely rigid and still Gabriel was as he stood behind her. “What a surprise.”
“Is it?” Lilah asked. “I sent letters.”
“I didn’t open them,” Gabriel said, his voice this dark and dangerous. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“No? Perhaps you might be willing to just listen,” Lilah said, and Mia was too stunned to stop her as she brushed both of them aside and stepped into the living room, followed closely by two imposing bodyguards that must have been standing just out of sight outside.
“Please,” Mia said dryly, “come in.”
If Lilah noticed the sarcasm, she didn’t give any indication as she looked around the small living room and the dining room table piled high with Mia’s various textbooks and notebooks. She picked an invisible piece of lint from her sleeve as she surveyed the mess, but Mia refused to apologize for the state of the apartment. The new semester was already in full swing, and she had papers to write and exams to study for—if Lilah wanted to visit when things were tidy, she should have waited for an invitation.
“I was afraid you might not be here,” Lilah said, turning away from her inspection of her son’s home and facing him directly. “I assumed you’d move into something a little more appropriate once you had access to your trust fund.”
“It’s more appropriate than a prison cell,” he said pointedly.
“You intend to stay here indefinitely then?”
“That’s none of your business,” Gabriel said. Every line of his body was taut with barely controlled rage. The truth was that they were waiting to move until Mia had been accepted into a law school, but he clearly didn’t want his mother to know she’d be able to find them here.
“Gabriel, please,” his mother said, her tone maternal and condescending and her grip in her purse straps turning her knuckles white. “I don’t understand this hostility. Didn’t I pay for your lawyers? Made sure you had access to the money your grandfather set aside for you?”
“Did you ever call? Write to me? Do anything to make sure I was okay at all? You’ve always been this way, thinking money was enough to fix everything and it never was, not once.”
Lilah took a deep breath, her smile tight. “I did not,” she admitted. “I was angry about … about what happened with your father.”
“And you blamed me,” Gabriel said. “I was so young …”
“You stabbed him,” Lilah said, the last word catching on a sob that she struggled to swallow down. “He was my husband and I lost him.”
“He was my father,” Gabriel reminded her. “I lost him, too.”
“You didn’t lose him! You were the one that took him away from me!” Lilah wiped furiously at her cheeks as the tears began to flow. “I had to bury him knowing it was because of our own child.”
“And you never bothered to ask why,” Gabriel said. He was pacing now, his fingers digging groves in the dark waves of his hair. “Didn’t you care? Didn’t you ever wonder what had happened that could cause someone to do that to their own father?”
“You were always an angry child …” Lilah began but Gabriel’s harsh laugh cut her off.
“So you sent me to Richard,” he reminded her. “Did you read the reports, Mother? Did you see what he did to us?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I didn’t know about any of that.”
“How could you not have known? How could you have been so eager to blame me and so willing to look the other way for him?”
Lilah rubbed her temples and looked at Mia with beseeching eyes. “Richard always presented himself as a good man, a Godly man, someone that you could trust. You know what it’s like, don’t you? There are certain people in your life that you should be able to trust. Doctors, teachers, preachers … and Richard, he was so much more than that.”
“He was a monster hiding behind a mask of faith.”
“He lost his way.”
“Lost his way?” Gabriel asked bitterly. “You know what he did to me, what he did to all the other kids that were forced to stay with him.”
“Yes,” Lilah said, “and instead of telling us what was happening or coming home when you ran away, you lived on the streets. Was that any better?”
“No,” he said, his hands curling and uncurling at his sides as Lilah’s bodyguards shifted restlessly. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? You read those reports, too.”
“You should have come home,” she said. “If you had come home—”
“What? I wouldn’t have been sold to the person with the most money in their pocket? I wouldn’t have killed Hugh?”
“If you had let me help you, if you had told me what Richard was doing …”
“That’s bullshit,” he snarled. “Fuck that. If I had told you what was happening, ran home to you expecting you to save me, you would have sent me back.”
“Gabriel—”
“Don’ t lie,” he said. “For once in your life, be honest with yourself. You know how much shit I lied about before you sent me away—the drinking and the drugs and the partying. Richard knew it, too. If I’d come to you then and told you what was happening, if it came down to my word against Richard Miller’s, who would you have believed?”
Lilah sighed wordlessly and fresh tears sparkled on her lashes, but Gabriel made no move to comfort her. She looked suddenly small and frail, much older than she’d been when she’d arrived as though she’d lost control unexpectedly and it had aged her. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, and Mia thought that the admission had cost her a great deal. She didn’t seem like the kind of person to whom an apology would come easily.
“That’s not enough,” Gabriel said. “Do you think an apology is enough for everything that happened to me?”
Lilah tipped her chin up, her lips trembling. “Have you ever done even that much for killing your father?”
“Get out,” Gabriel said flatly. “Get out and don’t come back.”
For a moment Mia thought Lilah might break, that the sadness in her eyes might be enough for her to let go of her grip on her pride and beg for forgiveness, but whatever emotion had been on her face was soon wrestled into submission. “Very well,” she said crisply. “I had hoped … Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter what I’d hoped.”
“No,” Gabriel agreed. “It doesn’t.”
Lilah paused in the doorway. “Have a good life, Gabriel. I wish you happiness and whatever peace you can find.”
He followed her out, watching as she began to descend the stairs with her bodyguards close behind and then slamming the door and turning on Mia where she still stood at the edge of the dining room.
“I can’t believe she had the nerve to come here after everything,” he said. His eyes were wild, a lifetime of hurt and anger suddenly pulled from the depths with nowhere to go. “What the fuck did she expect was going to happen? That I’d just pretend all these years hadn’t happened?”
“I don’t know what she expected,” Mia said. “I know you’re upset but—”
“She just shows up here, pushes her way into my home, and tells me I’m the one that needs to apologize.”
“Gabriel,” Mia said, trying to get close enough to pull him into a calming embrace. “She’s gone now.”
“She’s always been gone.” He brushed by Mia and pushed both hands through his hair. “I wanted her to leave and now I’m pissed that she left. She can’t just do this to me god damn it,” he growled, his fury exploding as his fist darted out and smashed through the dining room wall.
Mia jumped at the sound and took a few quick steps back, her back bumping against the front door as she stared at him with wide eyes. He’d been on edge since Lilah’s first letter had arrived and she’d seen him lost in his nightmares before, but she’d never feared what he might do until this moment.
He swung around to face her, knuckles scraped and bloody, and paled when he saw her face and her hand gripping the door. He held his hands up, palms facing her in a gesture of surrender and shook his head helplessly, as though he was trying to clear it of whatever emotions had taken him over or deny the brief flare of fear she knew he’d been able to read in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Damn it, Mia, I’m so sorry. I didn’t … I would never scare you, not on purpose.”
“I know.” Her legs shook beneath her, and she sank to the floor, her back pressed against the door and her forehead pressed to her knees.
“Mia?”
The first sob wrenched itself from her chest, deep and agonized as she curled around herself, tightened herself into a protective ball with her arms wrapped around her torso. There was no way to hide it now, no way to tuck it away and keep the smile pasted on her face. She’d sworn to herself she’d never give up on him, but neither could she watch him continue to go on as he was. They had both done their best, but they didn’t have the tools they needed to overcome all their challenges alone.
She heard him hit his knees beside her, his touch hesitant as he pushed her hair out of the way and tried to peer under her arms to her face. “Mia?” He was a supplicant, tears clogging his voice as he waited for her to respond. “I’m so sorry, please, I didn’t—”
He opened his arms, his words faltering, and she crawled into his lap. They sat together on the floor, both of them crying as the tension that had accumulated over the weeks since his release finally became more than they could handle. So many things had come between them, and it was more than they could bear.
“I love you,” he said when her tears had finally exhausted themselves and she sat quietly hiccupping with her face pressed into his neck.
“I know,” she promised. The skin beneath her lips tasted of her own salty tears when she pressed a soft reassuring kiss there, his muscles jumping beneath her touch. “I can’t do this anymore.”
He froze, unnatural stillness followed by gentle quivering. “Please—”
“No,” she hurried, pulling him in for a kiss. “I don’t mean like that. I just mean, we need help. We don’t know what we’re doing, and we need someone to help us figure it out.”
He relaxed again, buried his face in her hair. “I can’t lose you. I’ll do whatever you want, whatever you think we need to do.”