Chapter Eleven
Charlie
Ileft the Sinclair team at work securing my house. Lucas went home to check in on a new job, and I was headed to Winters House to ransack my storage bins in the attic.
We'd finished with the fireplace mantle, and it was as gorgeous as I thought it would be, but I'd underestimated exactly how messy stripping paint could be.
I'd spent the last few years wearing mostly suits and dresses. I didn't have a large collection of clothes I was happy ruining while I worked. I was pretty sure that after college, I'd thrown a bunch of old jeans and T-shirts into a storage bin and hauled them up to the attic.
Assuming they still fit, they'd be exactly what I needed. I'd already dropped a bunch of money on the futon, the mini-fridge and the coffeemaker. The idea of a newish truck to replace my ancient sedan hovered in the back of my mind.
If I decided to trade my car for a truck, I didn't want to have wasted money on new clothes I was just going to end up ruining.
I let myself in the front door and locked it behind me. Footsteps echoed through the front hall, too heavy to be Mrs. Williamson. Still edgy after being jumped the night before, I spun around and froze.
Aiden loomed in front of me. When his eyes landed on my bruised, scraped face, they went white-hot with rage.
"What the fuck happened?"
Aiden took my face in his hands, his touch gentle in contrast to his furious voice. He tilted my cheek to the light and gritted his teeth.
"Are you okay? Did Lucas Jackson do this?"
"Why does everyone think Lucas would hurt me?" I asked, stepping back and jerking my face out of Aiden's hold.
A thought occurred to me. "How do you know about Lucas? Did Evers call you?"
"How does Evers know about Lucas?" Aiden asked with a raised eyebrow.
"To answer your question, I know about Lucas Jackson because my sister bought the house next door to his and I make it my business to know who her neighbors are.
He helped out Jacob with Big John, but that doesn't mean he isn't a dangerous man, Charlie. "
"Well, he didn't do this. I got jumped in my front yard last night and Lucas happened to be sitting in his truck next door. He ran the guy off. Lucas would've had him but I tripped and he let the guy go so he could make sure I was okay."
"Fuck," Aiden ground out.
"He called a police detective he knows so I could make a statement without it getting out to the media. He may be dangerous, Aiden, but he took care of me."
Aiden's jaw clenched.
"And how does Evers know about Lucas?"
I shrugged one shoulder and studied the crown molding in the entrance hall, suddenly feeling like a teenager getting the third degree after missing curfew.
"Lucas was at my house this morning when Evers got there to start working on my security system," I said, trying to sound innocent.
Aiden let out a harrumph that let me know he wasn't buying it.
"Charlie," he said on a growl.
I pinned him with a glare.
"Not your business, Aiden."
Aiden matched my glare for a long moment before he let out a long, resigned sigh.
"You're right, it's not my business," he said, the growl still in his voice. "And you're wrong because everything about my baby sister is my business."
I let out a growl of my own and started past Aiden toward the stairs, saying over my shoulder, "You're annoying. I'm going up into the attic to grab some stuff. You're working from home?"
"Just for a little while," he called after me. "Stop into my office before you leave. And give a shout if you have anything heavy to bring down. I'll get it."
I shook my head at him as I climbed the second flight of stairs up to the attic. Aiden, for all of his alpha-male bossiness, had his mother-hen act down to an art.
The attic was not as creepy as it sounded. Our house was old, but not ancient. It'd been built at the end of an era in which families like ours had live-in staff. What we now used as the attic used to be staff quarters and the nursery.
These days, the only live-in staff were Mrs. Williamson and the gardener, both of whom had small private cottages on the grounds.
In the years since we'd downsized, these rooms had been taken over by a disorganized array of old furniture, unused artwork, unlabeled boxes, and plastic storage bins.
At some point in the last five or six years, Mrs. Williamson had taken a stab at bringing order to the chaos, but she didn't get very far before deciding it was a waste of time. Running Winters House was a full-time job and organizing the attic was a massive project.
She'd settled for making sense of a single room, the one that used to be the nursery. Now, it was lined with custom-built shelves filled with neatly stacked bins, all meticulously labeled.
This was where Mrs. Williamson stored holiday decorations, extra linens, and anything else she deemed important for the proper management of Winters House and the Winters family members in her charge.
The other rooms remained a mess. I picked my way through the room where I thought I'd dumped my stuff from college.
Hands on my hips, I surveyed the hodgepodge of boxes, bins, and loose junk strewn around the room. We really needed to do something about this. The problem was that sorting through old dusty boxes of stuff wasn't anyone's idea of fun. It definitely wasn't mine.
I opened the first bin that looked like it could've been a few years old. Baby clothes, whose I don't know. Maybe mine or Annalise's based on all the pink. I refastened the lid and shoved it aside, reaching for a dusty green plastic bin.
Papers and manila envelopes. A quick glance through the contents told me this was decades worth of report cards. I was not going through those.
The next bin had clothes, but not mine. These were for a boy, bigger than baby but not an adult.
Why did we save all the stuff?
As I realized the answer, tears filled my eyes. My mother had been a packrat. I'd forgotten that.
Surrounded by storage bins she'd probably packed herself, I remembered my father teasing her about her need to hold on to every scrap of our childhoods.
She always smiled at him and said, "Someday, you'll thank me." I rested my forehead on the side of the bin and let out a sigh.
I wished I had more of her than this. We had pictures, and somewhere up here, someone had probably packed up their clothes and things for us to deal with later. I wasn't sure if I wanted to find them or not.
Either way, they were both gone. Both my parents and my aunt and uncle. All of them gone. I dragged in a ragged breath, scrubbing my wet cheeks with the heel of my hand.
Crying about it wasn't going to do anyone any good.
I stood up and picked my way through the stacks of bins on the floor, looking for a new section to try out. I saw a bin that looked newer than the others, closer to the door. That could be it.
Peeling back the lid, I spotted a faded Emory Athletics T-shirt I remembered caging off an old boyfriend.
Jackpot.
I tossed the lid on the floor and rummaged through the neatly folded clothes. Jeans, cut off shorts, piles of T-shirts. Exactly what I was looking for.
I checked the sizes on the jeans and was relieved to see most of them would still fit. That was something, but I'd thought there was more than one bin.
Putting the top back on, I shoved it through the door and out into the hall. There'd been another bin next to it. Same color, looked to be the same relative age. I was pretty sure I'd filled one with sandals and sneakers and a few sweatshirts.
I tugged at the lid and pulled it back to find a pile of papers. I almost closed it up and moved on but my aunt's name on the label of a file folder, yellowed and curled with age, caught my eye. Why were my aunt's papers in one of the newer storage bins?
I pulled out the file folder and flipped it open. Medical bills. Not that interesting. The folder beneath had the record of her stay in the hospital when Tate had been born. The one under that was from Vance and Annalise, the next from Gage.
I gathered the files together and moved to put them back in the bin when I realized there was one more folder like the others.
Older. Opening it, I looked for the date. July 6, 1981. Before Gage was born. Before she married Uncle James.
A fine tremor shook my hand as I reached for the sealed manila envelope that had been beneath the mysterious hospital bill in the folder. I worked one finger beneath the seal and carefully opened the envelope.
What the hell?
Adoption papers?
Aunt Anna had a baby she gave up for adoption? I had a cousin—my cousins had a sibling—that none of us knew about. Unless they did know and just hadn't told me.
I knew Aiden didn't tell me everything, but this was too big to keep a secret, wasn't it? I stacked the folders with the hospital records in the envelope with the adoption papers and shot to my feet, running for the stairs.
I had to know.
The tread of my sneakers skidded across the polished hardwood floors as I raced down the staircase and took a hard right down the hall to Aiden's office. I screeched to a halt in his doorway, the stack of papers clutched to my chest, to find him on the phone.
One look at me and Aiden ended his call, setting his phone down on his desk.
"What is it?" he asked.
All my earlier haste had fled. The carpeted floor between the door and Aiden's desk was a mile wide. I trudged across it, suddenly afraid of what he would say when he saw the papers in my hands.
I couldn't imagine he'd shrug and dismiss them. He couldn't know about this. He couldn't. We'd lost enough family. Aiden wouldn't hide something like this from the rest of us.
Unless they were all hiding it from me. That sounds paranoid, but the boys—the older ones—have always had a tendency to try to keep things from Annalise and me, as if we were too innocent and delicate to handle the uglier aspects of life.