Young Truths (Young Series) (49 page)

Even if we could manage to ignore what happened with Frank and Reilly that night, there’s still so much that needs to be dealt with in the aftermath. Not least of which is my sister Holly. That was an interesting family dinner. I had Claire and Danny
, and Elizabeth and her husband Michael join us one evening when Samantha was feeling a little more up for company, during which Danny and I had to tell them about what Holly had been up to for the last several months. I told my mother privately and watched her heart break once again. Somehow Claire managed to rein in her emotions and only supplied the children with a small handful of new curse words and colorful insults. Elizabeth was stunned into complete silence. None of us had seen this coming and it is a devastating blow to our family.

There are still so many questions surrounding us and today is the day I get some of the answers. I haven’t been to work in a week in a half, haven’t left my wife’s side for more than an hour or two, and I really don’t want to do it today. Especially when I walk down the stairs and find Samantha on the floor with Olivia and Tyler actually laughing. I just stand and watch them as they try to get Olivia to
sit up on her own, then giggle when she teeters over into Tyler’s lap. Samantha’s gaze travels over to me and she smiles, and I fall even deeper in love with her than I was when I woke up this morning.

“I shouldn’t be late tonight,” I say, sitting on the couch beside my family. “Claire and Liz are taking Mom out so
it’ll just be us. Pizza and a movie?”

Samantha grins. “That sounds perfect,” she replies.
A moment later, her expression sobers. “You sure you want to do this?”

I hesitate. No, I’m really not... “It’s not so much a matter of whether I want to at this point; I need to do this.”

Her smile turns sympathetic and understanding. “I’ll be here when you get home,” she promises.

“I know,” I say quietly, leaning forward to kiss her. At the point when I might escalate our activities, Tyler starts making noises of disgust and Olivia fusses. I narrow my eyes at my children while Samantha laughs. Glancing at the clock, I see it really is time to leave and I quickly kiss my family, tell them I love them, and head out to the car.

Forty-five minutes later, I’m walking into a small room inside the same prison where Natalie is being held before her trial which is coming up quickly. I only have to wait a few minutes before the door opposite me opens and Holly is led in. Marcus pulled a few strings to allow me to have this meeting without plastic between us. I’m no threat to her and I seriously doubt she intends to hurt me. I don’t remember the last time I saw her without makeup or her hair done, but I think it might have been when I was about ten years old. She stops when she sees me, watching me warily.

“Hi, Holly,” I say quietly.

‘Hi, Matt,” she responds after her shock fades slightly. She sits down across from me tentatively. “Didn’t expect to see you here...”

“Yeah, well, it’s not every day my big sister is charged with murder and conspiracy, is it?”

She winces. “How’s Mom?”

I shrug. “Better than I thought she’d be,” I answer honestly. “She’s staying with Samantha, the kids, and
me. It’s good for her, I think, not being alone.”

Holly nods. “Should I even say I’m sorry?” she asks meekly.

“Depends. If you said it would you mean it?” I ask bluntly. “Because I’ve come to terms with the fact that you and I are never going to see eye to eye. I came to terms with that when I was a kid. What I don’t understand is why you did all of this. How could you possibly think Frank Marone would be good for you?”

She shakes her head slowly. “I’ve been trying to figure that out since I got here,” she says
, looking genuinely confused. “I won’t sit here and say I’m not guilty for what I’ve done or try to blame Frank or anybody else. I think you’d see through that bullshit in a second.”

“Damn right I would,” I mutter. “You were at my house the night of the fire. Why?”

“Matt...” She shakes her head, shrinking back into her chair and I realize now it wasn’t the coincidence I’d hoped it would be.

“You could have killed my wife and my children,” I growl at her. “Why would you do that?”

Sighing, I see tears welling in her eyes, but I’ve never felt less sympathy for another person in my life. “I didn’t know what they were going to do,” she insists. “My role was to be a distraction, and I’d remembered Tyler’s birthday had recently passed, so that was the perfect excuse. I didn’t even drive my car. I met up with some friend of Frank’s and used his. While I was talking with your security and insisting they didn’t need to tell Samantha I was there, I saw somebody slip out of the trunk of the car. I left Tyler’s present with the security, said I’d call you in the morning, and left. Liz called me and said someone had set your house on fire, and I knew Frank was behind it, but I was in too far at that point. If I tried to back out, he could have ruined me.”

“So why not just go in full bore and murder somebody?” I snap
sarcastically. “Fuck, Holly, you could have come to me! I might not be your favorite person in the world, but you know Goddamn well I’d take care of you. It never had to go this far.”

“You’d take care of me?” she repeats coldly. “Matt, you’re my kid brother. Why do you think I’d come to you for help?”

I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face and it’s a fight to keep myself in this seat rather than walking out and letting her rot. “Did you know about Leo?” I ask just as coldly.

She deflates slightly. “Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Since you went to Omaha for Samantha and Tyler.”

Was I really the only person who had no idea what my supposed best friend was up to behind my back? “Do you know why?” I ask. I don’t know what it is she sees in my expression—maybe the little brother that annoyed her on an hourly basis just because I was bored—but hers softens.

“I think Leo was in the same position I was,” she says quietly, no longer meeting my gaze. “Frank in his ear all the time, plus he had Natalie there
, too. I only saw him a couple times before what happened in November and only then when he was visiting Frank.” I have the sudden desire to shove my index fingers into my ears and sing loudly and off-key “lalalalalala” until I get the visual that pops up into my mind out. Thankfully she doesn’t seem inclined to expand on her time with Frank. “One night, though, I heard him talking to Natalie about how he didn’t want to keep lying to you and how messed up it was that she’d shown up in Samantha’s hospital room in the middle of the night after they sent that video to her and she nearly miscarried. He told her he was sick of lying to you and she kept reminding him about how long he lived in your shadow and needed to make his own way. She said you took advantage of him at every turn and it was finally time to get back what you’d taken from him.”

My brow furrows in genuine confusion. “What did I take from him?” I ask cluelessly. “I helped him at every fucking turn, Holly!”

She shrugs, looking at her nails. “I don’t know what to tell you. But the longer he talked to Natalie, the worse it got. Even I was ready to bash her head in; she was laughing about it, Matt. Laughing about how her brother or whoever got her into Samantha’s room and how she got her all worked up and her brother had to pretend to throw her out of the hospital.”

Fucking Reilly...

“I know I’ve never made it a secret that I don’t like Samantha, but even I’m not so heartless as to make a woman miscarry.”

“No, you’re only heartless enough to kill a woman who’s done nothing to you,” I say harshly. I really don’t want to discuss Natalie or Reilly right now... “How many years did you spend trying to convince me to go back to Lucy? You and Dad and Liz all would have preferred to have her in the family than Samantha. Hell, there were times I thought you’d prefer her to Claire and me. So what, you finally get your wish at having Lucy in the family, despite her role as our father’s mistress, and you decide that’s just cause to kill her?” I don’t give Holly the chance to respond. “And what the fuck was with throwing her in my lake? You hate us all so much that you want us to have this ordeal engrained in our minds for the rest of our lives?”

“I don’t hate you,” she says softly.

“Then what the fuck happened?” I shout, slamming my hand onto the table. “Don’t treat me like your annoying little brother, Holly. My family’s lives have been at stake repeatedly in the last year. I’ve been lied to and betrayed by the last people I ever thought would hurt me. And don’t give me some bullshit line about dad’s company and how he decided to leave everything to Lucy when he died, because nobody’s buying it. You wouldn’t know the first
Goddamn thing to do with his company if you got it. You’ve never shown the slightest interest in anything other than making your hair and manicure appointments on time and spending as much money as your husband can make. At least Liz pretends to be a functional, useful member of society.”

My sister’s face hardens and I get the impression Leo wasn’t the only one getting tired of living in somebody else’s shadow. “I don’t have to explain myself to you,” she retorts coldly. “You never gave a shit about me before now; why change a habit of a lifetime? Go home to your family.”

“You’re right, you don’t have to explain yourself to me,” I reply in the same tone. “But you’d better think of something before Mom finally gets around to visiting you. She’s not going to put up with this shit.” Finally a crack in the stone—panic flits briefly through her eyes at the thought of having to answer to Diane Young. I don’t blame her; it’d scare the hell out of me, too. Clearly, neither of us has anything more to say to the other. I’m not even sure if she regrets everything she’s done or if she just regrets getting caught. I suspect the latter.

“Joe is trying to arrange a lawyer for you,” I say dryly, climbing to my feet. “Why he’d want to help you now, I have no idea. I’d start figuring out how to make things up to him if he actually decides you’re worth the effort.”

With that, I leave the jail. Very briefly, I consider sticking around and visiting Natalie, then realize I’ve spent enough time dealing with people who have pretended to be my friends. It’s time to move on, stop worrying about everyone else, and focus on the ones who are most important. And those people are all in my apartment waiting for me to get home.

Weeks have passed and I’m finally getting a glimpse into what life with Matthew Young could be. Not that I hadn’t gotten one before, but now we’re not looking over our shoulders with every step we take and stressing about what horrible thing might happen to us next. Both Matthew and I have slowly started returning to work. Diane has unofficially moved in with us, so she keeps an eye on Olivia while we’re gone. We’ve even started rebuilding our house. Whatever could be salvaged has been salvaged—Matthew’s aquarium included, much to his relief—and the rest has been demolished as we start out completely from scratch. When we started drawing up the blueprints, Matthew insisted on having an in-law house built right around where Leo’s house had been standing beside the lake. He refused to even listen to his mother’s insistences that it was wholly unnecessary and that she should be getting back to her own home anyway. She’s tried this argument dozens of times so far and my husband pretends to not even hear her.

“My mom spent our entire lives looking after us,” he told me one evening as we got ready for bed. “It’s my turn to take care of her. And to be completely honest, I have no desire to ever go back to that house knowing that is where my father killed himself.”

Put like that, I couldn’t come up with an argument even if I wanted.

Much to my surprise, I heard from Tom. He called one afternoon while I was at the bookstore and I spent a few moments debating on whether or not to reject the call and block his number permanently. In the end, though, I did answer and I’ve never heard Tom sounding more apologetic in all the time I’ve known him. He said he’d been “blinded by hope” when he found out about Olivia and would have regretted it for the rest of his life if he hadn’t found out for sure. I called bullshit, reminding him that I told him while we were in Iowa that he was not Olivia’s father, yet it didn’t seem to stop him from disregarding everything I said. He said he just wanted to see me happy and while he’d always thought I’d be happy with him, he said he hoped that this time things between Matthew and I worked out. I told him with
every ounce of confidence I possess that it would work out, then told him to find someone who could really appreciate him and love him. He didn’t seem confident he’d ever find that.

I mentioned the phone call to Matthew and for the first time in my memory, his lip didn’t curl and he didn’t mutter curses under his breath at the mere mention of Tom’s name. I think he’s finally realized he’s the only one to ever capture my attention and I have no interest in eve
r looking elsewhere, and I realized I finally feel the same towards him. There is no doubt in my mind that no other woman will ever catch his attention. It never really occurred to me just how deep our insecurities ran and it’s a relief to know we’ve actually managed to get past what was probably one of the biggest issues in our relationship.

I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve laid awake at night talking about absolutely nothing yet everything all at once. We’ve talked about the past, the present, the future, and everything in between. He talked a little about what he was thinking after his father died and how he felt responsible. It didn’t matter to him that he wasn’t given an option of whether his father committed suicide or that he wasn’t there to pull the trigger; he blames himself and that’s something even I can’t fix. He’s coping better than he wants to admit and with every day that passes, he’s turning back into himself. There are still moments when I catch him staring off into space even when he’s surrounded by family, but those times are coming fewer and further in-between.