Chapter 2 #2
“You don’t think anybody in the family did this to Timmy, do you?”
There was a moment of silence. “Well, not until you just brought it up,” she muttered, a shudder in her tone. “Thank you for that. Now I’ll have nightmares thinking that somebody in the family was involved.”
“Sorry, it’s just—”
“Look. I don’t even want to think about that. I do not want in any way to consider that somebody in the Beltran family would have done that to one of their own. Yet I get that, from an outsider’s perspective, it probably is a reasonable thing to consider.”
“Well, you’ve got to think about it. I mean, Grandpa Beltran suddenly decides that his youngest grandson Timmy is to inherit everything?
Grandpa Beltran has had generations of family working at that place for a very long time.
Just because their granddad suddenly makes a change like that, you can’t expect a lot of people in that family to be happy about it. ”
“I understand. I get that too, not as a blood relative but as a wife to a blood relative,” she noted. “I hear traffic noise. Where are you?”
“I’m just walking into a coffee shop,” she told her.
“Okay, and who are you meeting?” she asked.
Just enough curiosity filled Selene’s tone that an answer was required.
Otherwise it would only bring more questions.
Yet, if Gail did answer, she would have to listen to Selene’s argument as well.
“You won’t believe it,” she began, “but—” Then she sighed and relented, “You’ll probably hear from whatever grapevine this neck of the world uses anyway. I’m having coffee with Riley.”
A moment or two of silence ensued, and then Selene whispered, “Oh my God.”
“I know, but I need some sort of closure,” Gail explained, “and I never once apologized for all the shit that happened.”
Selene sighed. “Oh God, not again.”
“Yeah, so have a good morning, and I will talk to you afterward.” Then she very carefully disconnected from the call, knowing that her girlfriend was still gasping on the other end, muttering and moaning her Oh my God to anybody close to her.
And yet what else was Gail supposed to do?
Just ignore the fact that this had always been on Gail’s mind and that she always held this problem in her gut?
That some bit of her knew she had done a really shitty thing to somebody she had supposedly cared about?
And, with that, she grabbed her purse, shoved it onto her shoulder, straightened her spine, and walked inside.
Riley had gotten there before Gail, had watched as she had started to get out of her car, then took a phone call.
When she very carefully took her phone from her ear, he wasn’t sure who she’d spoken to, but it seemed she had almost crossed a bridge of some kind.
He had no idea as to that phone call, but he was curious as hell about this face-to-face meeting.
She looked the same, and he couldn’t take his gaze off her.
She was still slim, average height, and she moved with a willowy grace that he’d never really seen on anybody else.
When she stepped inside, she scanned the interior of the restaurant, as if looking for a place to sit. When she saw him, she froze.
He acknowledged her with a tilt of his head.
She frowned, glanced around as if questioning his choice, and then headed toward him and took the empty seat across from him.
He was seated with his back to the wall, facing the door, like always, at least as often as he could. He smiled at her and said, “Hey, long time no see.”
She looked at him in surprise, then slowly nodded. “Agreed.” She frowned at him curiously and stated, “You don’t look like you’re hurt.”
“I’m recovered,” he declared. “It’s been a long road, but thankfully I’m here.”
She smiled. “That’s great news. I highly suspect your mother was responsible for a lot of it.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Well, she’s responsible all right but for a totally different reason,” he clarified.
“I had to kick her out of the hospital, so you can imagine how that went over.” She stared at him in shock, and he nodded.
“She was creating all kinds of chaos and making things difficult for everyone there, including me, plus causing me added stress. So, that’s the short version, and that’s the version I’m sticking to. ”
“Sounds like there’s an awful lot more that would make for an interesting story.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “It definitely caused some issues with my mom.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” she muttered. “Your mom was never somebody to back down from a fight.”
“No, but that was a fight she wasn’t allowed to even participate in,” he stated. “It was needed.”
She nodded. “I’m glad if you are, and hopefully you two are still on speaking terms.”
He smirked, remembering that Gail knew his mother loads better than most people. “We are now. Believe me, at the time, it wasn’t very fun.”
“I’m sorry,” she added, “particularly when you’re already injured and not doing so great. It would be nice to have the family support.”
“Yeah, it would have been,” he added, with a shrug, “but I also didn’t need her reaming out everybody around me and telling them they weren’t looking after me well enough and were expecting too much.
How I was her baby boy and needed a wheelchair for this and assistance for that. It was a nightmare.”
“Oh, ouch,” she muttered, frowning. “All that enabling would just end up slowing down your progress.”
He smiled. Gail had always been easy to talk to. They had the same mind-set in many ways. “Exactly.”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine that she took it very well.”
“Nope, she did not. Yet I had to do it, and it needed to come from me, and it did. However, it took a while for her to begin to accept it,” he noted. “Maybe I could have done that better, explained things better, but I didn’t.”
She stared at him, and her shoulders slumped. “And that’s why I’m here.”
He gave her a questioning gaze.
She cleared her throat. “I never apologized for the way you were treated. I never said anything to you, even after the truth came to light. I did not do well by you at all,” she explained, “and I’m not proud of that.”
Just then the waitress walked over and asked if she wanted coffee. She nodded, ordered a cup, then realized he already had one. The waitress left, and Gail noted, “I guess you were here way before me, huh?”
“We’re not very far away, and I couldn’t see any reason to stay there and wait. I figured I might as well come and wait here.” She didn’t say anything. He watched her and continued. “I don’t know why you set this up, but I sure didn’t expect to hear those words out of your mouth.”
She winced. “That’s another thing. I finally realized that I wasn’t doing very well and not living up to the standard that I would have held myself to under different circumstances.
Come to find out, it takes time to actually see what you did, time to actually understand what you did and why,” she revealed.
“So, from that perspective, I’m really sorry. I should have done so much better.”
He didn’t say anything for the longest time. “I can only imagine what your family was like when your dad found out.”
She shook her head. “You have no idea how ugly that got.” She stared off in the distance.
Then she shook her head. “My sister will never be the same,” she shared.
“That’s a hardship too. I don’t know how much of it she regrets, but I know that her justification for what she did came from the heart.
I just don’t know that she necessarily understands that she had other ways to deal with it. ”
“Did you ever tell her that?”
“Oh, I did. Yes,” she declared, with a wry smile. “I absolutely did. I told her that there had been one million other ways that she could have blown up her world without blowing up mine too.”
Taking a deep breath, she fidgeted with the cup of coffee the waitress had just delivered.
“And she told me that, because I was Daddy’s favorite, that he would forgive me and would help me, and I would get over all this, probably with some mysterious added boon because my life was blowing up.
So, Debbie thought that it would be okay for me, and she didn’t know how else to do it at the time. ”
She stared down at the cup in her hands.
“She essentially told me that she didn’t really mean to do it.
It was just one of those things that, once she mentioned it, all hell blew up and took on a life of its own, and she couldn’t figure out how to get out of it.
” Her face twisted as if hating the memories that she was forced to face.
He stared at her and then dropped his gaze to the table. “Well, Debbie sure blew up my world, and nobody gave a shit from that point of view.”
She went a little red in the face and nodded.
“I only recently realized how really badly done that was on the part of my family, all of us,” she added.
“She blew up your life. She blew up my life. But I had friends and family, and all you had was my father going to town on your career and your job.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re not kidding. He had me sent out to a war zone. You know that, right? He wasn’t happy with just ruining my life. He wanted me dead.”
She froze, staring at him.
He watched the heat rising in her face, then ice-cold pallor setting in.
He nodded. “He hated me so much for what he thought I did that he had me reassigned from what I was doing. Thanks to him, I was deployed to the Middle East, and that’s where I had the accident.
” And he used the term accident with a heavy underscore, as if to make her realize just how damaging her father’s interference had actually been.
Shaking her head, she whispered, “Are you telling me that he had you shipped overseas to a war zone? On purpose?”
“Remember that he has friends in high places?”
Her gulp was audible.
Riley shook his head. “Your father acts more like a mob boss than some squeaky-clean businessman.”