chest heaved, like he couldn’t get enough air. He threw himself off the bed, running a shaky hand through his hair as he looked over at me. “Where and when did you get this?”
For me, that moment was like yesterday. “You’d been in prison for about a year. Things were getting more strained between us with every visit. My last visit—not the one running up to your parole, but the one six years ago—you were caustic about Devin. Do you remember?”
“I remember it, Jane. I remember every second because it was the last time I saw you until you came to visit me two years ago.”
“That’s why.” I pointed to the letter. “Lorna came to see me just a few days after that visit. She was in LA to see you and catch up with some friends.”
He nodded. “I remember.”
“She gave me that letter and said you asked her to pass it along. That you didn’t want to see me again. She told me I was to blame for everything and that I was to stay away.” Tears streamed down my cheeks as his reaction awoke dark suspicion. “It’s your handwriting, Jamie.”
“From when I was fifteen!” he roared and spun, planting his fist through my floor-standing mirror.
I yelled his name as it shattered, pieces falling at his feet.
“Oh my God, Jamie.” I rushed forward, trying to avoid the shards littering my floor.
There was blood on his knuckles. Taking hold of his wrist, I led him away from the glass, my heart thundering as I guided him into the bathroom. He was seething and silent, and my mind reeled as I tried to focus on cleaning up his knuckles with my first aid kit.
“I don’t think you need stitches,” I whispered, fighting back tears.
When I met his gaze, I saw he was holding back tears too. “How could she do that to us?”
Then it was like he couldn’t bear his own weight. He slumped into me, falling to his knees as he wrapped his arms around my waist. His hands fisted in his T-shirt I’d thrown on, and he burrowed into me, desperate, as if he couldn’t get close enough. I could feel him shaking.
I tried to be strong, but I couldn’t hold back tears as the realization of Lorna’s duplicity cut us both to the quick.
I didn’t understand the full plot yet, but I got the general gist of it.
And it was heartbreakingly tragic.
Soon I was on the bathroom floor with him, our backs pressed to the tub, my head resting on his shoulder as we gripped tight to each other’s hands. I don’t know how long we sat there before Jamie finally spoke.
“I wrote that letter to my dad when I was fifteen, and I never sent it. He’d started coming around again after Mom died. There was a part of me that wanted him around because he was good with me. But he was an absolute bastard to Lorna. Treated her like shit. Hurt her so much that it hurt me too.
“It made me suspect that Lor wasn’t his. We all had Mom’s eyes, but Skye and I looked so much like our dad, and Lor didn’t. When I was younger, I never even thought that Lorna knew what I suspected, but when I got out of prison, I went to live in Boston for a while to be close to her. She works for a law firm there now. And she told me then that when she was ten, she overheard an argument between our parents. She wasn’t Dad’s. Mom had cheated. Lorna reached out to him when she was in college, asked him to do a DNA test so she could know once and for all.
“She definitely wasn’t his daughter.”
“Oh my God.”
“Suddenly, all her insecurities made sense, and I’d wished that I’d known what she knew because I would’ve been more understanding. I would have been a better brother. I told her that. And when I left Boston to come here, Lorna and I were in a better place than we’d ever been.”
I lifted my head to meet his gaze. The betrayal in his was soul destroying. “I wrote that letter to Dad when I was fifteen and she kept it.” He shook his head. “I threw it away, but she must have found it and kept it. She had, uh, short stories of mine, scraps of things I’d thrown away … I know she kept those too.” Jamie let out a shuddering breath. “She must