“Tell me you love me.”
She tightens her grip around me, looking me hard in the eyes. “I love you, Holder. So much,” she says firmly. “And just so you know . . . so did Hope.”
As soon as the words leave her mouth, I’m completely consumed by a sense of peace. For the first time since the second she was taken from me, I finally know what forgiveness feels like. “I wish you could feel what that just did to me.” I claim her mouth with mine at the same time she completely consumes my heart.
Chapter Forty-three
* * *
When I turn my phone on, I’m flooded with texts. Several from Breckin, several from my mother. There are missed calls from Sky’s phone, so I can only assume they’re from Karen. I don’t listen to any of the voicemails, though. I know everyone’s just worried about us, especially Karen. I’m still not sure how what she did fits into the picture, but I find it hard to believe that what she did was done from a place of evil.
Sky rustles in the bed, rolling over. I look down at her and lean forward to kiss her but she turns her face away and I kiss her cheek, instead.
“Morning breath,” she mumbles, sliding off the bed. She heads for the shower and I check the time. Check-out is in an hour, so I decide to gather our things.
After I’ve got most of our things packed, she walks out of the bathroom. “What are you doing?” she asks.
I glance at her. “We can’t stay here forever, Sky. We need to figure out what you want to do.”
She rushes toward me. “But . . . but I don’t know yet. I don’t even have anywhere to go.”
Her voice is full of panic, so I walk to her in order to ease her mind. “You have me, Sky. Calm down. We can go back to my house and figure this out. Besides, we’re both still in school. We can’t just stop going and we definitely can’t live in a hotel forever.”
“One more day,” she says. “Please, let’s just stay one more day, then we’ll go. I need to try to figure this out and in order to do that, I need to go there one more time.”
I don’t know how she can possibly think going back to that house is in any way a good idea. There’s absolutely nothing she needs from there. “No way. I’m not putting you through that again. You’re not going back.”
“I need to, Holder,” she says pleadingly. “I swear I won’t get out of the car this time. I swear. But I need to see the house again before we go. I remembered so much while I was there. I just want a few more memories before you take me back and I have to decide what to do.”
Jesus, she’s relentless. I pace the floor, not knowing how I can get it through her head that she can’t do this.
“Please,” she says again.
Ugh! I can’t say no to that voice.
“Fine,” I groan. “I told you I would do whatever it was you felt you needed to do. But I’m not hanging all of those clothes back up.”
She laughs and rushes to me, throwing her arms around my neck. “You’re the best, most understanding boyfriend in the whole wide world.”
I hug her back and sigh. “No, I’m not. I’m the most whipped boyfriend in the whole wide world.”
• • •
We’re sitting in my car across the street from her old house and I’m gripping the steering wheel so hard I’m afraid I might break it. Her father just pulled up into his driveway, and as mad and outraged as I’ve been in the past, I’ve never had the urge to actually kill someone until now. Just seeing him makes my stomach turn and my blood boil. I lift my hand to the ignition, knowing nothing good can come of this if I don’t drive away right now.
“Don’t leave,” she says, pulling my hand away from the ignition. “I need to see what he looks like.”
I sigh and fall back against the seat. She needs to hurry up and get what she needs because this is bad. This is bad, bad, bad.
“Oh, my God,” she whispers. I turn to her, wanting to know what made her just say that. “It’s nothing,” she says. “He just looks . . . familiar. I haven’t had an image of him in my head at all but if I was to see him walking down the street, I would know him.”
We watch as he ends a conversation on his cell phone and walks to the mailbox.
“Have you had enough?” I ask her. “Because I can’t stay here another second without jumping out of this car and beating his ass.”
“Almost,” she says, leaning across the seat to get a better look. I don’t understand why she would even want to see him. I don’t understand how she’s not jumping out of this car in order to rip his balls off, because that’s the only urge I have right now.
After her father finally disappears inside his house, I turn and look at her.
“Now?”
She nods. “Yeah, we can go now.”
I place my hand on the ignition and crank the car, then watch in horror as she swings open the door and rushes out of the car.
What the fuck?
I turn the car off and swing open my door, running after her. I chase her all the way across the front yard and halfway up the porch steps. I wrap my arms around her and lift her up, then turn back to the car. She’s trying to fight me and kick me and I’m doing everything I can to get her as far away from the house as I can so he doesn’t hear her.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I say through clenched teeth.
“Let go of me right now, Holder, or I’ll scream! I swear to God, I’ll scream!”
I let go of her and spin her around to face me. I grip her shoulders tightly and try to shake some goddamned sense into her.
“Don’t do this, Sky. You don’t need to face him again, not after what he’s done. I want you to give yourself more time.”
She looks at me and begins to shake her head. “I have to know if he’s doing this to anyone else. I need to know if he has more kids. I can’t just let it go, knowing what he’s capable of. I have to see him. I have to talk to him. I need to know that he’s not that man anymore before I can allow myself to get back in that car and just drive away.”
I take her face in my hands and try to reason with her. “Don’t do this. Not yet. We can make a few phone calls. We’ll find out whatever we can online about him first. Please, Sky.” I turn her toward the car and she sighs. She finally relents and begins walking toward the car with me.
“Is there a problem here?”
We both spin around at the sound of his voice. He’s standing at the base of the porch steps, eyeing me carefully. If I wasn’t having to physically prevent Sky from falling to the ground right now, I’d be rushing him.
“Young lady, is this man hurting you?”
She grows limp in my arms the second he speaks to her directly. I pull her against my chest. “Let’s go,” I whisper. I turn her toward the car. I need to get her away from him. I just need to get her to the car.
“Don’t move!” he yells.
Sky freezes at the sound of his voice, but I’m still trying to urge her toward the car.
“Turn around!”
I can’t force Sky forward at this point and there really isn’t a way out of this situation. I begin to turn her around with me and keep my arm wrapped around her. She looks into my eyes and there’s more terror in them than I ever imagined a single person could feel.
“Play it off,” I whisper in her ear. “He might not recognize you.”
She nods and we both face her father now. I’m not concerned with the fact that he may recognize me. Other than the day Hope went missing, he never spoke to me. I’m just hoping to hell he doesn’t recognize her, but I know he will. A parent would recognize his own child, no matter how long it’s been.
He’s making his way toward us, and the closer he gets, the more I see the recognition in his eyes. He knows her.
Shit.
He pauses when he’s several feet from us and tries to look her in the eyes, but she presses herself against me and looks down at the ground.
“Princess?” he says.
She begins to slide out of my arms
and I look down at her. Her eyes have rolled back into her head and she’s falling. I keep a tight grip on her and ease her to the ground completely so that I can get a better grip on her. I need to get her out of here right now.
I slide my hands under her arms and try to pull her up. Her father comes closer and grabs her hands to help me.
“Don’t you fucking touch her!” I scream. He immediately backs away, looking at me in shock.
I look back down at her and grab her head, trying to bring her back to consciousness.
“Baby, open your eyes. Please.”
Her eyelids flutter open and she looks up at me. “It’s okay,” I reassure her. “You just passed out. I need you to stand up. We need to leave.” I pull her to her feet and steady her against me. I give her a second to regain her strength. Her father is right in front of her now.
“It is you,” he says staring at her. He looks at me, then back to Sky. “Hope? Do you remember me?” His eyes are full of tears.
“Let’s go,” I say to her, attempting to pull her with me. She has to know how much I’m trying to refrain from attacking him right now. We. Need. To. Leave.
She resists my pull as her father takes another step toward her, so I pull her a step away from him.
“Do you?” he says again. “Hope, do you remember me?”
Sky’s whole body grows tense. “How could I forget you?” she spits.
He sucks in a breath. “It’s you,” he says, fidgeting his hand down at his side. “You’re alive. You’re okay.” He pulls out his radio, but I take a step forward and knock it out of his hand before he can report it.
“I wouldn’t let anyone know she’s here if I were you,” I say. “I doubt you would want the fact that you’re a fucking pervert to be front-page news.”
The blood drains from his face. “What?” He looks back at Sky and shakes his head. “Hope, whoever took you . . . they lied to you. They told you things about me that weren’t true.” He takes another step forward and I have to pull her back again. “Who took you, Hope? Who was it?”
She begins to shake her head back and forth. “I remember everything you did to me,” she says, taking a confident step toward him. “And if you just give me what I’m here for, I swear I’ll walk away and you’ll never hear from me again.”
He’s shaking his head, not wanting to believe that she remembers. He watches her for a minute. I know he’s just as caught off guard as we are.
“What is it you want?” he asks her.
“Answers,” Sky says. “And I want anything you have that belonged to my mother.”
Sky reaches down to my hand, which is wrapped around her waist, and she squeezes it. She’s scared.
Her father glances at me, then back to Sky. “We can talk inside,” he says quietly. He looks around the neighborhood nervously, making sure there aren’t any witnesses. The fact that he’s even looking for witnesses lights up a huge caution sign. There’s no telling what this man is capable of.
“Leave your gun,” I demand.
He pauses, then removes his gun from his holster. He lays it on the porch.
“Both of them,” I say.
He reaches down and removes the extra gun from his leg, laying it on the porch right before he walks into his house. I spin Sky around to face me before we walk through the door.
“I’m staying right here with the door open. I don’t trust him. Don’t go any farther than the living room.”
She nods and I give her a quick kiss, then watch her turn and step into the living room. She walks to the couch and takes a seat, eyeing him guardedly the entire time.
He raises his eyes to hers. “Before you say anything,” he says. “You need to know that I loved you and I’ve regretted what I did every second of my life.”
“I want to know why you did it,” she says.
He leans back in his seat and rubs his hands over his eyes. “I don’t know,” he says. “After your mother died, I started drinking heavily again. It wasn’t until a year later that I got so drunk one night that I woke up the next morning and knew I had done something terrible. I was hoping it was just a horrible dream, but when I went to wake you up that morning you were . . . different. You weren’t the same happy little girl you used to be. Overnight, you somehow became someone who was terrified of me. I hated myself. I’m not even sure what I did to you because I was too drunk to remember. But I knew it was something awful and I am so, so sorry. It never happened again and I did everything I could to make it up to you. I bought you presents all the time and gave you whatever you wanted. I didn’t want you to remember that night.”
She grips her knees and I can tell by the way she’s struggling for breath that she’s doing everything she can to remain calm.
“It was night . . . after night . . . after night,” she says. I immediately rush to the couch and kneel next to her. I wrap my arm around her back and grip her arm so that she stays put. “I was scared to go to bed and scared to wake up and scared to take a bath and scared to speak to you. I wasn’t a little girl afraid of monsters in her closet or under her bed. I was terrified of the monster that was supposed to love me! You were supposed to be protecting me from the people like you!”
The pain in her voice is heart-wrenching. I want her out of here. I don’t want her to have to hear him speak.
“Do you have any other children?” she asks.
He drops his head and presses a palm to his forehead, but fails to answer her. “Do you?” she screams.
He shakes his head. “No. I never remarried after your mother.”
“Am I the only one you did this to?”
He keeps his eyes trained to the floor, avoiding her question.
“You owe me the truth,” she says, her voice quiet now. “Did you do this to anyone else before you did it to me?”
There’s a long silence. He’s staring at the floor, unable to admit the truth. She’s staring at him, waiting for him to give her what she came here for.
After a long silence, she begins to stand up. I grasp her arm but she looks me in the eyes and shakes her head. “It’s okay,” she says. I don’t want to let her go, but I have to allow her to handle this the way she wants to handle it.
She walks to him and kneels in front of him. “I was sick,” she says. “My mother and I . . . we were in my bed and you came home from work. She had been up with me all night and she was tired, so you told her to go get some rest.”
He’s looking her in the eyes like a regretful father. I don’t know how.
“You held me that night like a father is supposed to hold his daughter. And you sang to me. I remember you used to sing a song to me about your ray of hope. Before my mother died . . . before you had to deal with that heartache . . . you didn’t always do those things to me, did you?”
He shakes his head and touches her face.
I have the urge to rip his hand off, just like all the urges I’ve had to rip Grayson’s hand off. Only this time I don’t want to stop at his hand. I want to rip his head off and his balls off and . . .
“No, Hope,” he says to her. “I loved you so much. I still do. I loved you and your mother more than life itself, but when she died . . . the best parts of me died right along with her.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” she says with little emotion. “I know you loved her. I remember. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to find it in my heart to forgive you for what you did. I don’t know why whatever is inside of you is so different from what’s inside other people . . . to the point that you would allow yourself to do what you did to me. But despite the things you did to me, I know you love me. And as hard as it is to admit . . . I once loved you, too. I loved all the good parts of you.”
She stands up and steps back. “I know you aren’t all bad. I know that. But if you love me like you say you do . . . if you loved my mother at all . . . then you’ll do whatever you can to help me heal. You owe me that much. All I want is for you to be honest so I c
an leave here with some semblance of peace. That’s all I’m here for, okay? I just want peace.”
Her father is crying now. She walks back to me and I can honestly say I’m amazed by her right now. I’m amazed by her resolve. Her strength. Her courage. I slide my hand down her arm until I find her pinky, and I hold it. She wraps her pinky tightly around mine in return.
Her father sighs heavily, then looks back up at her. “When I first started drinking . . . it was only once. I did something to my little sister . . . but it was only one time. It was years before I met your mother.”
She exhales a breath. “What about after me? Have you done it to anyone else since I was taken?” It’s obvious he has by the guilt that consumes his features. “Who?” she asks. “How many?”
He shakes his head slightly. “There was just one more. I stopped drinking a few years ago and haven’t touched anyone since. I swear. There were only three and they were at the lowest points of my life. When I’m sober, I’m able to control my urges. That’s why I don’t drink anymore.”
“Who was she?” Sky asks.
He nudges his head to the right, toward the house next door.
Toward the house I used to live in.