Chapter 13 Lily
“You mean so much to me.” His voice is gruff, the line of his jaw flexing. “Like I have been given a love potion. It claws deeper with every breath out of your mouth. I don’t think I can ever get rid of this love.”
Tears burn in my eyes. My pulse riots. I can’t barely speak through the emotion lodged into my throat.
He loves me. I love him, too. And that means…I have to tell him everything. He doesn’t even know the reason I was running. Suddenly, I can’t stand the lies. They lie between us like a big gaping hole.
“Noah, “
He turns to face me fully, his expression open in a way I haven’t seen before, like he’s bracing himself for whatever I’m about to say. “Whatever it is,” he says, “it doesn’t change anything. You should know that before you say it.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what I’ve done, what my mother’s dragged me into.”
“I don’t care what your mother’s done. I care about you.” He takes my hand, threading our fingers together like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
There’s a loud knock at the door. “Hello?” calls a man’s voice.
Followed by another knock.
I brace to run. It’s an immediate reaction.
I have to flee. They’ve found me. I hear the authority in the man’s voice and I know.
I know the truth has arrived before I could say it out loud.
No, this can’t be happening. Not when he’s just told me he loves me.
Now he’s going to know what happened. He will look at me with disgust, as a burden.
No one wants a family with so many problems, especially ones with loan sharks.
He will think I’m after his money now. Oh God.
My heart climbs into my throat and I choke it down, trying desperately to keep my features schooled. Neither one of us moves for a long, tense moment.
Then he rises, muscles shifting, chasing each other across his shoulders, his ruthlessly tight abdomen. “I’ll go see who it is.” He stops in front of me, tips my chin up. “Wait here. I don’t want another man looking at you.” Then he quickly throws on a pair of jogger pants and he heads to the door.
It’s so much worse than I could have imagined.
The front door of the house creaks open.
“Afternoon. Are you Noah Rickson?”
Noah doesn’t respond, but I picture him nodding.
“I’m Officer Jackson,” the man says. “And this is Melinda Connor. We are looking for a Miss Lily Connor and our investigation lead us to this area where she might have last been seen”
“Hi, Mr. Rickson,” Mom sniffs, sounding sick.
But I bet it’s fake. Everything about her is fake.
“My daughter almost got kidnapped. We’ve been looking for her.
Thank God some teens saw what happened and called it in.
I don’t know if she came your way, but if you’ve seen her, can you let us know? She’s about five four, dark hair, “
Officer Jackson’s pen has gone still against his notepad. He’s looking at Noah the way you look at someone you’re trying to place, some half formed recognition he can’t quite finish assembling out loud.
“What is wrong with you? How can you talk about your own daughter like she’s a stranger on a missing poster?” Noah says, his voice heavy with unmasked anger.
“Rickson,” Officer Jackson says slowly, like the name’s finally clicked into place behind his eyes.
“You’re Marcus Rickson’s boy. Didn’t recognize you without the suit.
” Something passes between the two men that has nothing to do with the missing persons report, some old current of history I’m not part of and won’t be let in on for a long while yet.
Whatever it is, it makes the officer’s posture ease half an inch, like a man remembering there are certain doors he doesn’t particularly want to knock on too hard.
“Are you trying to say that you’ve seen her?” the police officer cast his suspicious gaze on Noah.
Noah sighs. I knew then that he was going to rat me out. He didn’t want me anymore.
“Yes she’s here. I have been keeping her safe after I found her wondering around”
“Do you know that you can be charged with kidnapping Mr. Rickson” I couldn’t bear the thought of them arresting Noah for what he didn’t do.
“I haven’t been kidnapped” I state, having thrown on Noah’s discarded shirt. The knowing look on their face confirms what they thought of the situation, seeing as I am inappropriately dressed.
“Lily, you can go now. There is no danger. I took care of it” Noah whispers into my ears.
“What does that mean?” I whisper back.
“It means I know what happened to you and I took care of the problem. You’ll never have to worry about those loan sharks ever again. There isn’t any reason for you to stay here anymore” I tumble away from him as the true meaning of his words register in my mind.
“You knew? This whole time you knew” my voice raises. I’m shocked. He’s been lying to me the whole time. But why?
“Why Noah, so you could get rid of me when you were tired. Seeing as I would have no reason to stay here anymore. Is that it? That’s why you’re telling me to go home, you’ve had your fill of me and now you’re bored. I’m not woman enough nor experienced enough for you right?”
“Lily it isn’t….” his hands try to circle around me but I take a step back and then another. Putting more distance between us. How could he?
“I’m done. You have what you want. You don’t need me anymore. So I’m getting out of your life.” I don’t bother to change my clothes, but step outside to meet my mother. The devil you know is better than the angel you don’t know. I guess that saying is true after all.
The officers escort me to their vehicle, but as I look back, Noah holds my Mom back. I stop and listen.
The officer lingers by his cruiser instead of climbing in, giving Noah and my mother a wide, deliberate berth.
It strikes me, even through the haze of my own misery, that Officer Jackson doesn’t so much as glance their way, like whatever passes between two adults on a porch isn’t his concern as long as no one’s bleeding on it.
Small towns keep their own kind of peace sometimes.
I’ll learn later that Officer Jackson’s brother in law runs a used car lot that’s been quietly bankrolled by Rickson money for six years, and that half the department owes Noah some favor or another they’d rather not have called in publicly.
I don’t know any of that yet, standing on the porch with my heart in pieces.
All I know is that the law in this town seems to bend around my husband to be in ways that should probably frighten me more than they do.
“If you ever put Lily in this kind of situation again, you’ll have to deal with me”. Mom struggles from his hold before he releases her.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Mom says suddenly, her voice cracking in a way I haven’t heard since Dad left.
“A friend introduced me to a man who said he could help with the bills, just a short term thing, and then the interest kept climbing and I couldn’t, “ She stops herself, jaw tightening like she’s furious at her own honesty.
“You don’t understand what it’s like, being responsible for someone else’s whole life on a receptionist’s salary. ”
“You could have told me,” I say, and it comes out smaller than I mean it to. “I would have helped. I’ve been helping. I’ve been paying half of everything for two years.”
“This wasn’t half of everything, Lily. This was thousands.” She looks away first, toward the street, toward anywhere that isn’t my face.
“Thousands,” I repeat, the number landing heavier than I expect. “And you thought grabbing a loan shark’s collateral fee off my paycheck was going to fix thousands.”
“I didn’t want you to know how bad it got. I told myself I’d fix it before you ever had to find out.”
I think about the envelope I saw in her closet months ago, the soft worn edges of it, and something in my chest goes cold with understanding.
She’s been carrying this alone for longer than tonight.
Maybe longer than I want to know. For one strange, unwelcome moment I feel something almost like sympathy for her, buried underneath years of resentment and bruises she never apologized for.
It doesn’t erase anything. It just makes the whole ugly picture a little more human than I want it to be right now.
“You don’t get to threaten me,” Mom hisses, but there’s no real fight behind it, just the reflex of someone used to having the last word. “She’s my daughter.”
“She stopped being just your daughter the second you let men like that near her,” Noah says, and his voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t need to. “Get your debts sorted. Stay away from her until you have.”
I see the fear and anger on her face but I say nothing. I refuse to think about the meaning of the words he tells my mother. I still don’t look back even as the car drives slowly away. Away from the man I love who doesn’t love me back.