Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
CALEB
I walk the one hundred and forty-three steps from the kitchen to Harper’s bedroom door and back. I know because I counted on the first pass, and every pass since has matched exactly.
Which means I have not varied my path once.
Which means I have been wearing this groove into the floor for long enough that it has become the groove. The default. The thing my body does when my brain won’t shut the fuck up.
Domhnall watches me from the sectional with the patient expression of a man who has personally been talked down from several ledges and now considers himself qualified to staff them. It’s annoying to be on the other side because it’s usually my job.
“She hasn’t left that room in two days,” I bristle.
“She barely eats. When Bruiser goes in she tries—I mean, I can hear her trying from out here— But the kid comes back looking sadder than when he went in because he can tell she’s really off.
Kids can sense that shit. But the doctor didn’t find anything wrong with her. ”
“Some kinds of sickness don’t show up on a stethoscope,” Domhnall says with a small shrug.
Which only frustrates the fuck out of me.
“This isn’t like what Anna went through at all!”
The words leap out before I can stop them, and I immediately hear how they land. Like I’m arguing against Harper’s right to break.
I drag a hand through my hair. “I know, I know. I just heard myself.”
Domhnall doesn’t rush to fill the silence. He’s always had that willingness to let uncomfortable things sit at full size in a room rather than manage them down to something easier for everyone else’s comfort. I’ve valued it in him for our entire friendship.
I just find it particularly maddening right now.
“Walk me through what she actually survived,” he says. “Out loud. All of it.”
“Dom, I don’t need to—”
“Caleb.” His quiet, cool tone silences me. “Walk me through it.”
I put my hands in my pockets because they’ve started doing the four-count thing against my thigh again and I don’t want to watch myself do it.
“Z manipulated her to convince her he was Bruiser’s father,” I say.
“She had no reason to question it. He was her oldest friend and the person she had when she had no one else. Her one constant. She trusted him the way you trust the ground beneath your feet. And he used it against her to build the foundation of her life on a lie.”
The tightness in my jaw spreads up to my temples.
“Then he started controlling her. Not dramatically at first. That’s the way guys like that move.
He probably started in small ways that don’t register as a pattern until you’re already in too deep.
It sounds like he kept her world small and made sure his needs were always the largest thing in every room. Ten years of that.”
Domhnall says nothing.
“And when she tried to leave for good, he locked her in a closet. In her own house. And then he pointed a gun at her and her son.”
The lamp on the end table is within reach.
I’m aware of it the way you’re aware of things you shouldn’t touch.
Because I want to grab it and smash it into the wall, I feel so murderous.
I never knew I was capable of a violent feeling so intense, but here it is.
My hand shakes and I clench it into a fist.
“That’s what was done to her.” My voice shakes with furious restraint. “By her oldest friend. The person she trusted most in the world.”
My other hand squeezes into a fist. “And before him there was her mother, who picked alcohol over her daughter every day of Harper’s childhood.
Not even Silas was there for her since he was in prison pretty much until the last year of high school when she came to live with us.
She never told me the rest of it, because every time she got close…
well, she changed the subject, and I always let her because I was just a dumb kid, too. ”
The thing in my chest has been on a controlled simmer for forty-eight hours. The dam bursts.
I slam my palm down on the end table, and the lamp rattles as the pain travels up my arm.
“I wasn’t there,” I say. “For any of it. She was going through hell, and I was here. Running a stupid club and counting useless stupid numbers in my head. Pretending the hole she left was a wound I was healing from instead of admitting I was just—” I toss my hands up.
“Performing being okay. Meanwhile Harper and my son were alone with him, and I wasn’t there, and I can’t—”
I stop talking.
Domhnall lets the room hold it.
And then I admit the worst of it. “All it took was one fucking conversation for us to realize what he’d done. And I knew where she was.”
I force myself to meet Domhnall’s eyes and register the surprise there. He stays quiet and lets me finish.
“The first few years, there was nothing, but she finally popped up online a few years later when she started tattooing. I’d always been searching for her. But I finally found her. That same day I drove down to Austin to the shop where she worked.”
I sigh.
“And?” Domhn prompts when I’m quiet for too long.
“And I saw Z picking her up, a little toddler bopping along beside them that Harper immediately lifted in her arms. She gave Z a kiss, and they all went and climbed in a car together. And it seemed pretty clear. She’d moved on with him, just like the two of them had always planned.
She’d always been trying to run away to get back to him.
I thought she’d decided he was the better man. ”
My teeth clench so hard it feels like my jaw is going to shatter.
“If only I’d just waited another day to get her alone and tried going up to talk to her.
A single conversation was all it took for us to expose that fucker’s lies.
I could have met my son seven years earlier. And—” I break off, so fucking furious.
After a long moment, he asks, “So she didn’t know? About Bruiser being yours.”
“She only figured it out at the memorial,” I look at him. “She saw photos of me as a kid with Helen and said she did a double-take wondering how there was a picture of Helen with Bruiser before it clicked—” I stop. “Of course it was me as a kid.”
Domhnall nods.
“She didn’t tell me right away.” My chest tightens and I swallow, still not knowing how to feel about it.
“We slept together twice, and she still didn’t tell me.
Not until we were in the shower, and she was just starting to explain how Z switched the paternity results when all hell broke loose—” Another hand toss.
The gunshot. Three words and half a sentence and then running for our lives and then this. Two days of a closed door and a groove worn into the floor by my pacing feet.
“So you don’t have the full picture,” Domhnall says.
“I have the outline and my own brain filling in the rest,” I say. “Which is not an improvement.”
Domhnall is quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: “What is your brain filling in?”
I turn toward the window.
The math isn’t that complicated. I have run it approximately four hundred times in the last forty-eight hours despite trying very hard not to. But my brain never cared what I want from it when there’s a pattern available to obsess over.
Harper left ten years ago when we were both eighteen. Bruiser is nine. She left already pregnant, but thought it plausible enough that it was Z’s baby. Which means—
I stop. I force myself to stop.
I don’t know the actual sequence of events.
I know she didn’t find out until the memorial, which means she genuinely believed Bruiser was Z’s. Which means whatever happened between them happened in a window that made it plausible, and my brain will not stop building the timeline no matter how many times I tell it to fucking stop.
“I don’t have enough information,” I say.
“Which doesn’t stop my brain from spiraling.
Either way it doesn’t fucking matter. He was a lying, manipulative motherfucker who preyed on her own worst thoughts about herself to convince her there was no choice but to leave with him.
God knows what else he did to gaslight her—”
I get sick even thinking about it.
Domhnall absorbs this without commentary, which is the right response and the one I needed without knowing I needed it.
“What about Kira?” I say, at the exact moment Domhnall says the same thing.
Kira was the first therapist we turned to when Domhn realized Anna was dealing with mental health issues beyond anything he was prepared for.
And Kira’s become a good friend, now wife to Isaak, the leader of the commandos who put their lives on the line for us back in Austin.
“Call her,” I press. “Please. See if she has any openings to come talk to Harper.”
He heads out the door. After he leaves, I turn toward Harper’s door and stand there looking at it.
A small noise has me spinning back to the door Domhnall just left through.
Bruiser is standing there now, wet-haired and dripping, a towel around his waist over his swim trunks. He's been at the pool all morning with Anna and her baby.
He’s not looking at me. He is looking at Harper’s door that I was just staring at, with his small hands pressed flat against the doorjamb on either side of him.
His face holds the expression I recognize with a specific cellular knowledge.
I was once a nine-year-old, trying to decode adult voices and silence and the particular quality of a different closed door.
I cross the room and crouch in front of him.
His eyes come to me. Green, like hers. Wide and blinking hard. “What’s wrong with Mom?”
“She went through something really scary.” I keep my voice level because he needs level right now, but also I don’t want to lie to him. I hated it when adults lied to me and said it was going to be okay when I knew what was going on with my mom was actually very, very not okay.