Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
HARPER
Leaving Caleb was difficult this morning.
Especially when he had that devastated look in his eyes that told me he didn’t trust I’d be back again. Which just ended with me throwing my arms around him and promising things would be different this time.
His arms closed around me like a vise. “I don’t know how to let you go now that I’ve got you again.”
But then I felt all his muscles go tight with anxiety, his fingers tapping against my back.
“Do I? Have you back again?”
My forehead dropped against his. “You know you do.”
But wariness in his eyes when he pulled back told me he didn’t trust it—this. Or he didn’t trust me. My chest cracked in two at that.
“Let me come back with you,” he said. “I don’t like you confronting Z alone about this, even if he is your son’s father. I’ll stay in the car. Just let me be there.”
Which just made my guts squeeze. Because now I know Z isn’t Bruiser’s father. But if I told Caleb, he’d only be more insistent about coming along.
Plus, I needed… I don’t know. Time to fucking process?
Either way, Caleb being anywhere within three counties when I finally confronted Zedekiah about his lies would be a very bad idea.
I need to extricate my son from the situation.
Regardless of how it began, I just didn’t believe Z was some evil person the entire time.
We could be mature and have the discussion we clearly ought to have had ten years ago. We could say goodbye. And then Caleb and I can have a future of forever happiness. Even thinking about it makes a zing of hope sing through my chest that I haven’t felt… well, in a really long time.
But still, Z is someone I need to deal with alone.
So here I am, after exchanging phone numbers and addresses and work addresses and giving Caleb Ximena’s numbers and ten different ways to find me, laughing when he asked if he could bug my phone again like Silas asked him to do when we were teenagers.
“I’ll call you as soon as I’ve had it out with Z, okay? Breathe.” I kissed his nose right before climbing back into my car. I had to all but pry his fingers off the hem of my shirt, but he let me go, ultimately trusting me that it wasn’t goodbye this time.
His trust in me to take care of my shit and come back to him meant the world.
And now here I am.
I park in the gravel parking lot in front of my double-wide.
Yes, it’s a trailer, but it’s not in a trailer park.
It’s in a field, and there are horses that graze beyond the fence out back that delight Bruiser every time they come near.
I got a great deal on rent from JD, a rancher who came into my shop for a large backpiece tattoo that took seventeen hours.
You really get to know someone after seventeen hours under the needle with them.
When he heard me and my son were looking for a rental after leaving Z, he offered me this place.
It’s beautiful here, and peaceful, and I love it, even if I have ended up back in a trailer after all.
Z agreed to come stay here with Bruiser while I was out of town because his place is a shit apartment in East Austin with loud neighbors that Bruiser hates.
I turn the key in the front door, take a deep breath, and push it open.
Z’s right there on the other side.
Like he was waiting for me.
I frown. His eyes are bloodshot, and he doesn’t look like he’s showered since I left days ago.
“Where’s Bruiser?” I ask immediately, clocking the wrongness in the air. I might live in a trailer, but Bruiser and I keep it tidy. Right now there are beer cans and pizza boxes everywhere.
But Z just backs up as I pull my rolling suitcase in behind me.
“Bruiser?” I call.
There’s no response, but the kiddo keeps those sound-canceling headphones on 24/7 when he’s on his computer, so it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
I look toward his room. The door is closed.
“How was the conference?” Z asks, pushing off the wall by the front door with manic, nervous energy.
I walk toward Bruiser’s room, dragging my suitcase behind me as I shove open his door.
The lights are off and the room’s empty.
“Z, I’m not playing.” I swing back to him. “Where’s Bruiser?”
“He’s at Ximena’s house.”
“Why? You knew I’d be home today? Did you have an unexpected haul or something?”
But Z’s eyes just narrow, dark and almost beady. “How was the conference? Huh, Harp?”
“It was fine,” I say distractedly, pulling up my phone and clicking Ximena’s number to start a text.
“But you weren’t at the conference. Were you?”
My thumb pauses mid-text.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I look at Z.
“It means you were lying and you didn’t go to a fucking conference,” Z says, and for the first time since I’ve come in, I really get a look at his face and the stubborn tilt of his brow.
He only gets that look when he’s really pissed.
Or when he’s on something.
Or both.
Okay… so somehow he knows I lied about going to the conference. As if that’s anything compared to his lies.
Fine. I guess we’re going to have this out sooner rather than later. It’s good Bruiser’s at Ximena’s after all.
I put my hands on my hips. “Just say what you have to say.”
“I know you went to Dallas,” Z accuses angrily. “I know you saw him.” He all but spits out the last word. “How long have you been having an affair behind my back?”
A loud scoff escapes my throat.
“An affair? You and me are not together. We were just thinking about trying things again. Stupid, considering that even when we were together, we both know out of the two of us, I was the only faithful one.”
Z gets flustered, hands shaking like it’s my fault for confusing things. “You’re changing the subject! You snuck off to Dallas. To see him.”
I am not ashamed. I’m not the liar here.
I hate how he can twist things even when I know I’m not in the wrong. I square my shoulders.
“You’re right. I went to Dallas. They were having a memorial for Helen.”
“You mean he was having a memorial?”
“Yeah. Helen was his mother, and he was having a memorial for her. And you know what? After the memorial, he and I got to chatting. I bet you know what I found out in about three minutes of talking to him.”
I’m carefully watching Z’s face, and even though he’s trying to be stone cold, I see the nervous flicker of fear.
He knows that I know.
“He’s a fucking liar,” Z accusing angrily, whole body twitchy.
He’s definitely on something. His pupils are pinpricks.
Great. He promised me he was done with that shit, but I guess that’s just more proof that he’s a lying liar who lies.
“He always hated me,” Z rants. “He’d say anything to get between us. You never saw it, but I knew it from the second I met him.”
“Oh, cut the shit, Z. I know Helen died that day! She was already gone when you lied and said she didn’t want to see me.
That’s so fucked up! It was in the paper that they had framed as part of the memorial—she died that afternoon—and you lied to me to get me away.
God fucking damn it, Z. How could you do that to me? ” My voice breaks on the last words.
Z’s mouth drops open like he’s about to deny it, but no words come out. All sorts of emotions cross his face.
Terror that I finally know has him stumbling a step backward. Denial follows on its heels, but I toss a hand up because I don’t want to fucking hear it.
“He’s a liar—”
“I know everything,” I yell. “I saw a picture of Helen and Caleb when he was Bruiser’s age. They’re identical. Bruiser isn’t your son! I fucking know.”
Tears choke my throat at the devastation of how deep the betrayal goes. At how the man standing in front of me is nothing like the one I thought I knew.
And then, literally in front of my eyes, I see the change as my words finally register.
All the denial on his face fades.
He knows that I know how deep his lies ran.
For a second, there’s just silence between us.
He stares at me, and I stare back.
Yeah, we were two people who were once lovers, and now… now, I don’t know what we are. Past fucking tense, that’s for damn sure.
“Look,” I breathe out, so done with his ass. “We are over, for good. Me and Bruiser are gone from your life. Meet the consequences of your own Goddamn actions.”
I go to push past him, but he suddenly steps in my path.
“No,” Z says, and his voice is like steel.
I scoff out a laugh and try to push him out of my way. “What the fuck do you mean, no? It was not a question. You don’t get any say in me or Bruiser’s life anymore.”
But when I glance up, it’s only to see his jaw hardening and that dark, almost demonic look of paranoia come back into his eyes like he sometimes gets when he’s on drugs. “You betrayed me. Just like they said you would.”
They? Who the hell are they?
“Get off me.” I shove him, but he grabs me and wrestles me against the wall, his slim body suddenly strong as granite. His jaw tenses as he looks me up and down.
“Did you fuck him?” Then he laughs, a harsh, brutal little sound. “Of course you fucked him. You always were a slut.”
“Stop it, Z,” I snap, shocked at the words coming out of his mouth. “Let me fucking go!”
But his jaw just clenches and then he’s slamming me painfully up against the wall.
“I said no!” he shouts right in my face.
Which is when I realize, far too late, that fuck, I’ve seriously miscalculated all this.
What the actual fuck is he on?
I search his red-rimmed eyes, pupils all but pinpricks. This isn’t weed. Or even coke. Fuck.
“Do you have any idea the sacrifices I’ve made to keep this family together all these years?” he shouts. “Doing what needed to be done. Keeping your little world safe and fucking happy. I protected you and that Goddamn kid—even though he wasn’t even mine! And this is the fucking thanks I get!”
He pounds the wall beside my head with his fist, his knuckles sinking in with a small explosion of paint and drywall chips. I scream and avert my face, genuinely terrified of Z for the first time in my life.
“You’re delusional,” I bite back. “What the hell are you on, Z?”
I pull out my phone to message Elio or Lorenzo or another of the cousins to come by—anyone—but Z suddenly slaps the phone out of my hand, sending it scuttling feet away on the tile of the foyer.
When I try to lunge for it, he grabs me.
“Masks off now, Harp,” he breathes in my face, breath foul. “That’s better. It was always better when we could talk honestly about the ugly things. Like it was when we were kids.”
He reaches out to touch my face, but I pull my head away.
“Z, let me go.” I twist in his punishing grip. “You’re hurting me!”
He chuckles darkly. “Do you know how much you’ve hurt me the past ten years?”
“What the fuck are you doing, Z?” I screech as he finally pulls away from where he’s got me pinned against the wall, but only to hike me over his shoulder, thick sinew of his arm like a shackle pinning my arms at my waist.
“Zedekiah!” I shout again at the top of my lungs. “Put me down this moment. I’m not fucking kidding.”
“I said no,” he barks, and his voice doesn’t sound quite right.
Nothing about him has sounded right since I walked through the door.
I buck wildly and kick my legs. Even though he grunts a couple of times when I land a kick, he doesn’t stop. Like whatever he’s taken stops him from even feeling the pain.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
I can’t believe that Zedekiah—the boy whose window I used to climb in at night to feel safe—is scaring the shit out of me like this.
He throws open the closet at the back of the primary bedroom. He drops me unceremoniously to the carpeted floor, and I scramble for the door, but before I can get to it, he starts to shut it with me on the inside.
I don’t fucking think so.
I haven’t been locked in a closet since I was twelve years old, and Mama learned what a stubborn little bitch she gave birth to.
I scramble to jam my hand between the door and the jamb.
“Z,” I say, using my soft voice—the one I know is good to use around him when his brain starts getting a little mixed up.
A little mixed up.
That was always how I worded it, taking it a little more careful around Z than I ever did other people.
I’d think about my words before I said them aloud, trying them out in my head first. Sometimes I’d step in front of Bruiser to shield him before I gave Z bad news so Bruiser couldn’t see his dad’s face if there was a report from school about how he was getting bullied.
Z had no patience for any of it, and I never wanted any of his bad moods to land in Bruiser’s direction.
I was always the buffer.
I never realized until now that the only reason I put up with it all for so long was because Z was out trucking so much of the time and was barely home. Maybe if he’d been around more often, I would have seen the truth of it sooner.
“Z, remember the woods?” I say softly, peeking up at him through the sliver of open door. Trying to reach him in the way only I ever could. “Remember when we met? We were just two kids. Z, we can get back to that,” I lie through my teeth, voice soothing. “I know we can—just you, me, and Bruiser.”
But Z’s face only hardens.
“You think you can play me?” He gives that dark, disturbing laugh again. “I know who you are, Harp. I’m the only one who could ever play you at poker and see you bluffing.”
He leans in, eyes burning.
“It’s time to learn the hard truth, baby girl. Because you’re right. There are consequences.”
And then he slams the door on my hand.
I hear his heavy footsteps walking away as I scream in pain.