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 washere. 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. “Performingbeing 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 totalkto 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 slepttogether 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 fuckingstop.
“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.