Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,83
wiped the last of my tears away, and faced my aunt with the best smiling face I could muster. “I appreciate your help.”
Fern tilted her head, watching me too carefully. It was uncomfortable. Deeply so. Like standing naked on a windy day.
“Max told me that the care I was trying to give you when you lived with me was the wrong kind. I thought if I kept you in school or helped you get a job, you’d be all right—”
“It was good care,” I said. “I wish I’d listened to you.”
She shook her head. “I think what you needed was someone telling you that you were okay. That you were safe and you’d done everything you could, but you didn’t have to be alone anymore.”
Too much. It was too much. All my buzzers and warning systems started to go off and I stiffened and stepped sideways.
“No,” Fern caught me. “No, don’t run.”
“I’m not…I’m just—” well, running. But come on. This was too much.
“You have been alone since your dad died, Olivia,” Fern said. “From before that, really. The first thing you learned to do was circle the wagons. Protect yourself and your little family. It was you and Jennifer and no one else could get in. I should have tried harder. I should have tried until you let me in. I was the adult. You were the child. I am so sorry.”
“I don’t want your pity.”
“Good,” Fern laughed. “Because I’m not giving it to you.” She pulled me sideways a little, with just the smallest touch on my arm. “I’m glad you told me about Jennifer. I want you to believe me when I say that I really think everything is going to be all right.”
Oh, I wanted to believe it so badly that I very nearly turned my face away, rejecting the words. Because that was how I worked. That was how the small scales in my heart worked. If I wanted it too much—I had to push it away.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Let me get changed and I will help you carry the glasses down to Nancy.”
It was my instinct to say no. Because the glasses were a ploy, and I knew she just wanted us to spend a little time together. And that, too, was something I knew how to reject. Oh, the practice I had rejecting that.
“Or I can do it on my own,” Fern said as if she knew what I was thinking and she was gracefully giving me an out. “I’m going to help you no matter what, Olivia. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I’ll wait,” I said. It wasn’t a lot. It was far from enough.
But it was a start.
While she got dressed, I looked at the pictures on the fridge. Jennifer and I when we were young. Really young. I leaned in closer trying to remember how being that young felt.
When she came back, she was wearing some shorts and a T-shirt. The T-shirt looked like it had been ironed. I lived out of a garbage bag and she ironed her T-shirts. It was kind of ludicrous that we came from the same gene pool.
“What are you going to do about Max?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re going to the authorities. To tell them about the drugs and that Max was involved in all of that.”
It was like out of the the darkness, out of my periphery vision, all this reality came crashing in. And I saw how this would go down. I could try as hard as I could to keep him out of things, but Max was all tangled up in this.
Max was a bad, bad man and I was going to go to the cops.
I took a deep breath and let it out as slowly as I could, turning away from my aunt under the pretense of grabbing the glasses.
It’s not like I’d been imagining a whole future with the guy. That would have been stupid. But I’d been imagining more…more time. More of him. More of what he made me feel.
“Joan?” Fern asked.
I grabbed the box of glasses and folded away all my wishes and my wants—because it wasn’t about what I wanted. It never had been.
This was for the best, really. End it now before things got messy.
“I’ll handle Max.”
And that, very much, was the end.
Chapter 22
Max
I was down on the bed, my leg throbbing. The air-conditioning thunked on and the blinds rattled against the window, lulling me to sleep. I couldn’t remember the last