41. Ellie
Ellie
Cyrus opens the gate leading to the mansion remotely and we follow the long curve of the drive past the hedges.
For four years, this place felt like a prison. Now it just looks like a big, cold, empty house full of a dead man's things.
A soon-to-be-dead man, anyway.
Kade gets out first, which is insane, because he should be in a hospital bed with a morphine drip and not here.
But he's as stubborn as I am.
He's got a lanyard around his neck that Cyrus printed an hour ago and his bandages are mostly covered in a pricey suit I'm pretty sure he borrowed from Cyrus, because it's a little snug around the shoulders.
The single remaining staffer, a young guy in a gray vest I half-recognize from family dinners, comes out the side door looking like he's about to piss himself. Cyrus already told us his cameras showed that most of the staff didn't even bother to show up this morning. I duck so he can't see me.
"Sir, I wasn't told anyone was coming."
"Federal investigation into Senator Waterson's financial dealings.
" Kade flashes the lanyard for exactly long enough to look official but not long enough for him to examine it closely.
"You're welcome to stay and be deposed about your role in obstructing the investigation.
Or you can go home and pretend you never saw us. Your call."
The poor kid is gone in under ninety seconds. Doesn't even bother to grab his jacket.
"Subtle," I mutter.
"You know me. Captain Subtle," Kade says with a smirk, opening my door.
Jinx and Cyrus pull up a minute later, followed by Tank on his motorcycle.
Inside the house, we scatter. Cyrus peels off toward Todd's study with Jinx, already talking about where to find the key for the floor safes.
Kade lowers himself onto a chaise in the foyer with a grunt because he is, despite all evidence to the contrary, only human.
Besides, someone needs to keep watch.
Tank stays with me.
Just like old times.
My old room is exactly how I left it, but I don't feel even a tiny bit of nostalgia as I walk past the threshold.
The bed is still made. The pale, tasteful curtains Todd chose hang in their perfect pleats and everything is… beige. The same sad beige people paint their nurseries now, with not an ounce of color on the walls or in the furnishings.
I fucking hated this room.
I painted it pink once. Went to the hardware store, bought the cans and dragged them into my backseat. Spent all night pinking the place up only for Todd to notice a week later, scowl, and wordlessly hire someone to come paint over all my hard work.
Like it would have killed him to have one part of this house be mine. There's not a single thing in here that's mine, not really. I lived in this room for four years and it never once looked like it.
"This is where I slept," I tell Tank, because he's standing in the doorway with a look in his eye that tells me he wants to set the whole place on fire, which would put him in good company. "Sometimes it felt like a holding cell more than a bedroom."
He signs, Doesn't feel like you at all.
"No." I run my hand along the dresser and find it dust-free, of course. "It doesn't. Come on, the good stuff won't be in here."
The master suite is at the end of the hall. There are huge double doors and the soulless decor you'd find in a magazine.
I go through Todd's side first and try to search as methodically as Cyrus would.
Drawers first, then pockets, and I even check the backs of picture frames, as few and far between as those are.
My hands don't shake the way they would have a month ago going through his things.
I've got nothing left in my system but coffee and I've never felt clearer in my life, even before the pills.
I guess it's because now I know what I have to lose.
There are cufflinks and watch boxes along with a humidor that was probably illegally imported, judging from the ivory accents. But there's absolutely nothing in here that gives me a clue about what he's been holding over my mother.
Tank hovers by the closet, tracking my hands as he searches.
"I'm not looking for pills," I say without turning around, because I already know what he's thinking. "I'm done with that shit, Tank. I promise. But I have to know what he's got on her so I can rip it out of his hands."
He studies me a bit before he nods and goes back to checking the closet for false panels. If there's one thing my boys are good at, it's finding out where people hide their sins.
I move to my mother's vanity and in my mind's eye, I can still see her sitting there brushing her hair and humming the song that was playing when she met my dad.
There are lotions and serums in pretty glass bottles all over her vanity, along with a hairbrush that still has strands of pale gold caught in the bristles.
I pick a few out and just hold them, because I'm a weirdo. They still kind of smell like the spray she uses and her shampoo. There's a row of orange prescription bottles sitting right on top of the marble, and I force myself to read the labels.
It's so much worse than I let myself see when I was just as numb as she was. We were both drowning in the same ocean, six feet apart, and neither of us could even reach for the other.
That's going to change. Once she's out, once she's clean, I'm going to drag her back to shore if I have to do it with my teeth.
There, in the top drawer of her vanity, nestled between the pressed powder compacts and a tube of her signature nude lipstick, is my lipstick.
It's the exact shade of pink I wore religiously until they stopped making it, the one I hoarded until the last tube went dry.
I pick it up and turn it over, but for a second, I don't feel anything at all. We borrow each other's things sometimes. It probably got mixed in with hers years ago, I tell myself, some forgotten morning when we still shared a bathroom and a life before this house smothered us both.
Except…
My mother hates pink. It washes me out, Ellie, not everyone can wear it like you. She's said it a hundred times, laughing and brushing it off while she tucked my hair behind my ear.
She has never in her life owned a pink lipstick.
So why is mine in her drawer?
An unwelcome thought tickles the back of my brain.
The lipstick kiss printed at the bottom of that fucking letter. It's my lipstick, and until now, I just assumed Todd had bought a tube to match. He is a thorough monster, after all.
But Todd is not the only person in this house who had access to my handwriting.
Todd is not the person who taught me how to write.
Somehow, without me even hearing him move, Tank ended up beside me. He's not signing, but he's watching me worriedly.
I yank open the next drawer down. It's full of scarves, a jewelry box, nothing of significance.
Then I open the next one. And the next. My hands are moving faster now, way less careful, and they're shaking.
Tank doesn't try to stop me, but he's standing close enough that I can lean on him if my legs give out. They might.
The bottom drawer sticks shut so I yank it.
Letters.
There's a whole stack of them, some still in their envelopes, others banded together, sitting in that drawer.
Most of them have gone soft with handling and age.
The top few are very old, written in my father's unmistakable handwriting.
It's always been sloppy and slanted, and the letters are addressed to my mother at addresses I half-remember from before the trailer park.
All the places we bounced around while hiding from his "real" family.
Most are love letters, if you can call that kind of thing love. Love in the dark, like a dirty secret to hide and be ashamed of was never any love I found worth having. But it kept Mom afloat for years. Longer than I thought if she kept these letters.
There are letters from her, too. A few that were returned to sender, the note written in feminine handwriting I can only imagine belongs to his real wife.
Others were crisp and unfolded, so I guess she never even sent him.
Some are from before I was born, others from just a few years ago.
Letters she wrote long after he stopped answering.
I recognize the desperation in them, because I wrote my own version of them to four boys in a trailer park.
There's one sealed envelope that doesn't look nearly as faded and worn as the rest and when I check the post date, it stops me cold. Another return to sender, this one in my father's handwriting. He got it and didn't even bother to open it before he sent it back.
I crack open the seal and stare at her handwriting and the date. Four years ago. Right around the time she met Todd.
I handled it. You don't have to worry anymore. It's done and the judge won't be a problem. We just have to lie low for a while, then we can be together again. He doesn't have to know, and neither does she.
Love always,
Marney
Handled what? What judge?
Wait, since when was my father in trouble with the law?
I don't understand. I read it five times and I still don't fucking understand. It's vague enough to mean anything but specific enough to fill me with dread.
I keep digging. There's a manila envelope at the very back, soft-cornered, and I open it with fingers that have gone numb and clumsy.
They're drafts.
Page after page of drafts in my handwriting, except it's not.
It's someone practicing it, the loops a little too careful in places, the flourish on the capital E redone over and over until they got it right.
But the forger is good. The very first practice sheet is good and the forged lines only get better as I flip through them. But the similarity isn't what gets me.
It's the words that are written.
I've outgrown all of you.
Crossed out.
I've outgrown the trailer park.
Crossed out.
Some things are better left in the past.
A dozen versions of that awful fucking letter I never wrote, each one inching closer to the letter Jinx pulled from Kade's room, each fucking one building toward the kiss-sealed lie that broke the four men I love.
And me. It fucking broke me, too.
They're not Todd's handwriting attempting to look like mine, I realize.
These are practiced by someone who already knew the shape of my letters by heart. Someone who watched me write them from an early age and sat across a kitchen table and corrected my grip on the pen when I did my homework.
The tears come before I even understand they're there.
They hit the page and bloom the ink outward in soft gray rivers, smearing a draft of my own forged goodbye.
Tank makes a low, worried sound behind me as I sink onto the vanity seat, his hands hovering over my shoulders like he's not sure if he should touch me.
I look up at him. The room is breathing the way the walls used to during my withdrawal when it was at its worst, but I'm not sick this time. I'm hollowed out, scraped clean by the one truth I never had the heart to consider even when it's been staring me right in the fucking face all these years.
"It was her." The words come out broken. "Tank… it wasn't Todd."
His brow furrows in confusion.
"The letter."
I hold up the smeared draft, evidence in a trial only he and I are here to witness. One my mother might never even wake up to attend.
"The one Kade carried for four years. The one that made you all think I left because I wanted to. It wasn't him who forged it, it was her. My mom wrote that letter."