Chapter Twenty-One #2
She had to keep reading. “‘We thought we’d done a good job.
We never knew how, but a few years later Ben found out the baby was alive, told Marie he was going to find him.
Marie believed he would or could. So we had to make the boy disappear before he did.
Really disappear this time, with no connection to us.
Neither one of us could be the one to go to him, take him somewhere new.
Ben was too close to the truth. We managed to have the family caring for him get him on a train, and my cousin Matthew was supposed to pick him up in Omaha.
Take him home, let the boy disappear without a trace.
“‘But something happened on the train ride. I don’t know what. Bo got separated from the people who were supposed to help us. Him. It took some time, but my cousin Matthew finally tracked him down, after all that hubbub about the John Doe child in Iowa, and he and his wife did what Marie and I had initially planned. They adopted him.’”
“I don’t understand,” Bo said. “I don’t…” He looked around the room at the men who looked so much like him. “Why would she send me away if she had you three here?”
“I’m guessing it had something to do with the abusive, murdering asshole our dad is,” Cal said. His hands were shoved into his pockets. He didn’t look pale or like he was falling apart.
He looked grimly resigned to this new truth.
This horrible, horrible new truth.
Grandma took Jill’s arm, made some more signs.
Jill felt like she was existing in another universe. “Um, she’s asking … Bo, who sent you here?”
Bo looked taken aback. “Sent me? N-no one. After Dad died, I … I just thought I’d find my biological family, what happened when I was five. I wanted to find out where I was from. Who … who I was.”
Grandma shook her head, seeming agitated as she signed another question that Jill had to deliver to a very shell-shocked looking Bo.
“Who helped you get here?”
“I…” Bo clenched his hands into fists, let them go, repeated the process a few times.
“I had a cousin who was supportive. Mom … wasn’t.
But Cody was real nice about it. He didn’t help me though.
He just supported me, suggested I follow the Montana leads from when I was a kid.
He helped me cover some expenses so I could come out here for a while. He didn’t send me. He helped me.”
For a few ticking minutes, the room was silent except for the sounds of breathing, some of it more labored than others. Jill felt like crying herself, and she didn’t even know Marie Bennet.
But she knew all that poor woman had left behind.
Bo got to his feet. “I think I better go.”
“Bo.” Sam made a move as if to grab him, but he didn’t stop his forward movement until he made it to the door.
He turned to face her. And Jill noted he looked at only her. Not his brothers. Not Grandma.
“We didn’t even eat,” Sam said, clearly trying to get him to stay, to deal with this.
“No, it’s okay, Sam. I’m just overwhelmed. I want to go back to my hotel and call my mom and just … I don’t know. Figure it out. I’ll … can I come by Honor’s Edge tomorrow?”
“Please do. Call if … if you want to talk before that. You’ve got my number.”
He nodded then was out the door. Sam stood staring at it, Aly and Landon too. Cal was looking at his hands. Nate at the floor between his feet.
But Grandma waved for attention, began frantically signing. Jill couldn’t quite make out what Grandma was signing in her agitated state, so Aly got her pen and paper, and Grandma wrote it out. Handed the paper to Sam.
*
Sam’s heart felt bruised. Par for the course, she supposed. She wasn’t surprised at a Benjamin Bennet connection.
Marie Bennet on the other hand? She didn’t know how to absorb that information. And now Glenda was shoving a piece of paper at her.
Sam sighed and read the unsteady handwriting.
Look into who helped him. And any connection they might have to Benjamin Bennet.
She looked into Glenda’s eerie light green eyes. There was worry there. Fear, maybe. Which put some added fear into Sam. She didn’t think Bo was bad news, but she thought maybe he was in danger. Somehow.
“Okay.” Sam nodded. “Yeah, okay. The cousin Cody. I’ll see if there’s a connection to Benjamin Bennet somehow.” God, what an insane mess.
But if this guy who followed her was informing Benjamin Bennet’s lawyer about Bo, then Benjamin knew about Bo—and a connection to Glenda meant he knew it was his son, and that he was here, and … no, none of that was good or something they could pretend wasn’t a problem.
She glanced at Nate. He hadn’t spoken once. His head was bowed, his hands loosely clasped together in his lap, but his gaze was on the floor, so she couldn’t read his expression. Not that it was likely to be anything but that awful blank.
Glenda signed something to Jill, who frowned, but nodded. “Um, Grandma wants to go home. I’m sorry you went through the trouble of a meal, Aly, and…”
“Don’t be sorry. We got answers. Thank you, Glenda. For some answers.”
Sam watched Aly try to smile. Fail. But Aly ushered Jill and Glenda outside, closing the door behind them then leaning against it.
For a moment, they were all silent. A bruising, aching kind of silence.
Aly was the first to break it. “Why would Glenda have kept it a secret all these years after Marie was gone?” she said, sounding close to tears. “You guys have a brother. A full brother. I know she wanted to protect him from Benjamin, but you’ve all been adults for so long. Why hide it?”
It echoed Sam’s own thoughts. “Poor guy’s been looking for his family since he was a kid. She could have saved him a lot of grief if she’d just…”
“She made a promise not to,” Landon pointed out, his voice gruff.
He was still standing, tense and immovable. Sam supposed he looked a little haunted, but whatever emotions he felt were locked down.
“And she didn’t want us wondering,” Cal added. He sat in a chair, his gaze seemingly on nothing at all. “Glenda made that promise to Mom, because neither of them wanted us to wonder.”
Sam couldn’t make sense of that. “Wonder what?”
“Why Mom saved him,” Landon supplied with enough pain in his tone, Aly crossed to him. Wrapped her arms around his waist.
But it was Nate who spoke the words that hurt the most. “And not us.”