Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 132097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 660(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 660(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this livid, this torn up.
Only, I do—the morning after Taylor.
Dad sucks in a rough breath, his eyes narrowing and his shoulders tense.
“Would you rather I hadn’t, Ethan? I knew full well what happened. I made my choice because I love Elvira, and that’s what you do when you love. You work it out. You forgive. You find a way back home.”
I may be glaring, but it’s hard as hell to argue with any of that sentimental shit.
The thought of Hattie sleeping with another man trips my murder instinct, but that’s different.
She doesn’t have a high-class father, blustering and telling her to run away from me.
I chased her away on my own just fine.
We never agreed to a relationship.
Never committed to being exclusive.
If she wanted, she could choose another cock tomorrow, and I’d have no right to get territorial.
With the big revelation, the thought makes me physically sick. But this isn’t about Hattie right now.
This is about how secret, disloyal, and fucked up this family really is.
Plus, the soul-crushing fact that I’m not who I thought I was.
Everybody knew—everyone I loved—and they smiled to my face like it never happened.
Nausea reaches up from my gut, choking me.
“What did Gramps think?” I ask gruffly. “He knew.”
He knew and he never fucking told me.
The man I trusted more than God.
“When your father took me—and you—back, he realized he’d gone too far. But it was too late for me. That man did damage that could never be repaired,” Mom says, shaking her head. “You don’t heal from something like that. Not completely. I don’t think he ever forgave me for leaving, no matter what he said in that letter you found. I read it once and sent it right back. Why he was stumbling around on the beach and stuffed it away, who knows. He always loved his little puzzles. That was his favorite thing to do with Mom. But he had no right—absolutely no right to treat people’s lives like a game.”
I see it now.
Hell, the few times Gramps ever mentioned Mom was when we sat around by the fire or on the deck of his ship, working these grand thousand-piece puzzles of pretty pictures. And he always carried around this regret that they didn’t have a better relationship. He never pushed for anything.
And whenever my parents asked for money, he never hesitated, as far as I know.
As a kid, I hated him for it a little.
I didn’t want Mom and Dad having all this effortless comfort and money they could throw around on designer condos in cities they only visited twice a year and African safaris and my father’s high-end gallery shows for his highly mediocre paintings.
I wanted a normal family, dammit.
Now, I see why I was robbed.
And my whole childhood with Margot starts making a terrible kind of sense.
Gramps kept the easy money coming out of guilt. He tried to buy his way back into our lives—or he bribed my mother to at least let him spend time with his grandchildren.
Goddamn.
The full horror stabs me then, the whirling black void in this family where love was devoured decades ago.
It mixes with the anger until I don’t know what I’m feeling.
All I know is it’s building with a dangerous pressure.
“…that’s not fair, Elvira,” Dad says quietly.
“No, he should know everything!” She looks at me again. “That’s why he took you and Margot every summer, Ethan. Payback. If he couldn’t have me, he needed you kids for himself, like some stand-in son and daughter. Then he sent you off to the military like some cruel joke—”
“Enough!” I’m roaring, the world red and blurring. “That’s fucking enough.”
“Ethan,” Mom pleads, but I barely hear her as I stagger out of the room, desperate for air.
Margot waits down the hall, curled up against the wall, pretending to stare at her phone as she makes herself as small as she can.
She reaches out for me with both hands, shaking her head.
“I didn’t know,” she says weakly.
Tell me something I don’t know.
No one knew except our parents and Gramps, and none of them bothered telling me until they had no choice.
I’m a grown man and I only found out the wretched truth by accident.
If I hadn’t found that letter, would they have ever come clean?
“Ethan, it doesn’t change anything,” Margot says. Her face is still smudged with tears. It doesn’t look like she’s stopped crying since leaving the room. “You’re still my brother.”
“Half brother,” I correct sharply.
“What? No, it doesn’t matter!”
“It matters a lot,” I say, disentangling myself from her.
I’m not kind, not gentle—I don’t have it in me now.
Right now, I don’t know what to be.
All I know is I need to get away, to think this shit through before I get blackout drunk.
My entire existence is a lie.
That’s not something you just shrug at and go on your merry way.