Chapter 22 Maisie
Maisie
My fingers sweat around Knox’s cell phone as it rings.
I stare out into the distance from my perch on the back porch step. Metal rings out from Wyatt’s workshop, and the distant hum of music drifts from the house where I left Elias, Hunter, and Knox hanging out in the living room.
The phone clicks.
“Hello?”
My heart hammers against my chest, and I curl my bare toes on the wooden porch steps. I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t think of what to say.
“Hello? Who is this?”
Missy’s voice is the same. I don’t know why I thought it would be different. Still a little husky and slightly impatient. When our parents died, and Grandma followed a year later, Missy became a mother to me, and I turned my back on her.
“It’s me,” I say quietly.
I’d have believed she hung up if it weren’t for the lack of a dial tone blaring in my ear.
“Maisie?” Her voice is soft, trembling slightly.
The impatience is gone as if it never existed. This is the voice of someone holding their breath, too scared to hope for a thing they desperately want.
“Yeah.” My eyes fill with tears. I’ve barely said a word, and I’m already two seconds away from falling apart. Clearing my throat, I stare down at a patch of dirt at the bottom of the porch steps. “I know I disappeared on you when I said I’d call. But it wasn’t because I don’t love you.”
“I thought you were dead. I went to the cops to file a missing person’s report.”
Hot tears slide down my cheeks. My fingers tighten around the cell phone in my hand, and the lump in my throat is so big I choke on it. I swallow and swallow again, but it doesn’t budge.
“Things were…” I flashback to all the beatings in Oregon before Derek went to jail for vehicular manslaughter.
After a skip jump, I’m walking into Derek’s fist in my motel room in Nevada.
Yet another skip through time and I’m fighting my way out of my smoky apartment after Derek set fire to it.
“Things were a bit challenging for a while, and it wasn’t always easy to get to a phone. ”
Because I was weak. One phone call to my sister and I’d miss her so much that I’d go see her in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t inflict Derek on her family.
“Bull-fucking-shit,” she snaps.
Startled, I jerk my head up from my listless stare at the ground.
“You have always been the worst fucking liar in the world,” she rages. “You paste that stupid fake-ass smile on your face and clam up, or you dodge me because you know I have always been able to see right through you. What the fuck has been going on with you?”
“Derek would hit me,” I blurt out. “Less when you would visit me in Oregon, and always below my neck, but he would always find a reason to beat me up, and I didn’t want you to know, okay.
” More tears slide down my cheeks. “That’s why I divorced him before he went to jail.
I knew he was going to come after me when he got out, and he would hurt me and whoever I was with.
I couldn’t let it be you, Trey, or the kids. ”
She’s silent.
A soft thump and a wooden creak drift down the phone. I picture my beautiful, redheaded sister gripping her kitchen table and dropping heavily onto a dining chair.
Her breathing is shallow and fast.
“Missy?”
“And you couldn’t tell me this?” Her voice cracks on the last word. “My little sister went through literal hell, and I didn’t know.”
Knowing she’s pissed, I don’t know what compels me to say, “It technically wasn’t literal hell.”
“Don’t you dare downplay this, Maisie Eloise Lucas. Don’t you fucking dare.”
And this is exactly why I didn’t tell her what was going on.
Missy is my big sister. Five years older, but you’d think it was ten.
When our parents died, our grandma took over raising us, only to die not a year later; Missy became a mom to me.
I’d have gone to stay with her in a heartbeat if she’d ever gotten the truth out of me, and her family would have paid the price for it.
Missy would have paid the price because she’d have gone to her husband’s garage, picked up his baseball bat, and tried to use it on Derek’s head for putting a hand on me.
The operative word being tried.
Missy is four-eight, and Derek, nearly six-two, would have taken the bat from her and killed her with it.
I couldn’t let that happen.
“It was my mess, Missy,” I whisper. “Not yours. You have kids and a family—”
“I have a little sister who is also part of my family.” Wood creaks. She breathes out, and she must be holding a hand over her face because her next words emerge slightly muffled. “My God.”
“Do you want me to hang up?”
“No, I don’t want you to hang up. I want to drive a tank over that piece of shit’s head, reverse, and do it all over again. No, I want to feed him dick first through a meat grinder.”
I smile with tears filling my eyes. “You were always the strong one in the family.”
I run or hide. My sister fights.
When an alpha and an omega have a child, no one ever knows whether the child will be an alpha or an omega, dominant or submissive. I was born an omega, and Missy surprised everyone by being a scentless beta with the dominance of an alpha.
She lets out a tired sigh. “No. I was just the loud one. You were the strong one.”
“I was not.”
“You grieved for Mom and Dad in a way I never did. You got up, and you started living again, and you didn’t let Grandma’s death shatter you the way it did me,” she tells me quietly.
“I bottled everything up, tried to control everything around me, and when I couldn’t, I fell apart.
There are different kinds of strength, Maisie. Yours is quiet, but it is there.”
“You fell apart?”
“Very messy. Lots of booze and screaming and stuff I hid from you. What happened? I thought everything was okay until he went to jail for killing someone with his car, then you said you were divorcing and traveling.”
Wyatt wanders out from his workshop, thankfully saving my hormones and ability to focus by wearing a t-shirt. He wipes his hands on a cloth and shuts the door behind him, then walks toward me.
He says nothing. Just pulls a clean cloth from his sweatpants pocket and hands it to me, then sits on the porch step beside me and wraps one arm around my shoulder, leaning his head against mine.
Missy was wrong. I’m not strong. Wyatt’s presence gives me the strength to tell my sister everything.
All the hurt and the pain, and just how long it had been going on. The fear that I was to blame for it. The shame that I didn’t want anyone to know in case it was all my fault, and for a long time, I believed I deserved those punches and kicks, that I was the one failing Derek, not him failing me.
I tell her about starting over in Rios, and about the four alphas I’ve fallen in love with and who have made me feel like me again when I wasn’t sure I remembered who I even was anymore.
“I’m coming to see you,” she declares once I’ve run out of things to tell her.
My ear is sweaty from having a phone pressed against it for over an hour, but I’ve told her everything, including my new pie business. “I’d like that a lot.”
I glance up at Wyatt, who has his eyes closed.
He opens them as if he feels me watching and nods.
It’s okay for my sister to come visit. Pittsburgh isn’t a million miles away from Iowa, but she has two kids in school, and her husband is a college math professor.
She can’t pack up the car or get the first flight out here, as much as she might want to. This visit is going to take planning.
She sniffs. “I’ll bring the kids and Trey. We’ll talk and find a therapist for you because you need one. I don’t want to hear a word about you paying for it. I will pay for it because it is the absolute least I can do for not being there for you.”
I brush tears away. “You’re not to blame, Missy.”
“I should have known something was wrong. That feeling is not going away soon, which means I need to talk to my therapist about it. And I want to see your pie business and meet your alphas. You have to call it Maisie’s or Maisie’s Pies if you don’t have a name already, but I can brainstorm names and packaging ideas with you.
And your alphas sound nice, but if they lay a fingernail on you, I’ll feed their dicks through the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid. I am being serious.”
Wyatt gives my shoulder a squeeze, raising his voice to say, “Noted. I will feed myself through a grinder before I ever hurt Maisie.”
My sister has never been quiet. Wyatt would have heard every word out of her mouth sitting this close to me.
I can tell my sister is smiling when she says, “I think I like that one. Where’d you say he was from again?”
Wyatt grins at me.
“New Orleans,” I say with a smile. “He inherited a bunch of Southern charm from his mom, Leticia. He’ll wrap you around his finger in under two minutes. His mom would do it in one.”
I’ve spoken to Wyatt’s family a couple more times since that first terrifying phone call when I was afraid they would pry into my past. His family treats me like the daughter they always had, and I let slip more and more personal things about myself to Wyatt’s mom.
That woman is dangerously good at encouraging a person to open up.
“I’m a tough nut to crack,” Missy says.
“You haven’t met a Comeaux.” I look at Wyatt and smile. “This guy has serious skill in making a woman fall in love with him. You already like him, and you haven’t even met him yet.”
My sister curses, and Wyatt and I laugh.
After telling my sister I love her three times and her saying it back, I promise Missy can always reach me if she calls back this same number. We make plans to speak again once she’s spoken to her husband and figured out the best time to come visit.
I hang up the phone in a happy daze, relieved the call with my sister went so well.
He presses a kiss on my forehead. “Okay, darlin’?”
I sniff. “She doesn’t hate me.”
“She was never going to hate you,” he says.
“The only one who didn’t know it was you.”