The Rivals - Dylan Allen Page 0,372

domestic stasis of cohabitation - but after just that week with her, I know I’d live in hell if it meant she was by my side.

So, I package everything up and I make this last note a question. One I hope she’ll answer when she’s ready. And until then, I’ll take a measure of comfort in knowing that she’ll have these to remind her that I’m thinking about her.

Chapter 35

Walls Come Tumbling Down

Regan

“When you punish a child for telling the truth, you teach them to lie.” That was one of my grandfather’s most common refrains. I stare unseeing at his undisturbed, meticulously arranged desk and wonder what else he taught me but didn’t really believe.

He made me think he loved me. He made me think I could trust him. And because I was so desperate for a loving father figure, I didn’t ask questions that I should have. I just… followed his rules and gave whatever he asked of me.

Even when it cost me everything.

In the week since Remi’s bombshell about our father’s disappearance and the role my grandfather played in it, I’ve been plagued by something deeper, more corrosive than guilt. There are huge fissures in my consciousness.

I can’t change any of it. I can’t disown my family and as far as I’m concerned at the most basic level, we’re all victims of one person’s God complex. But, if Matty could see it, that means I chose not to.

I came to the belly of the beast today, not even sure what I was looking for. I don’t know what, if anything at all, from all those years ago would even be here.

So far, I’ve looked through the filing cabinets built into the desk. But there’s nothing, at least nothing that means anything to me. My mother has only let the cleaning lady in here to dust and vacuum since he died.

The book he was reading the morning he had his stroke lays open on the wood lacquered side table next to his dark brown leather recliner.

I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But there’s no one left to ask. Dan, his assistant, retired to Costa Rica, the year my grandfather died and hasn’t responded to the email I sent him. I want to have some answers before I call Matty. Or maybe, I’m just putting it off because I don’t know how to apologize for the wrong I’ve done.

I shove away from his desk and walk over to the bookshelf, where dozens of sterling silver frames line the shelves, with as much prolificacy as the books they were built to house.

Most of the photos are of him and me. There’s only one of him with my father. I used to think it was because he found looking at him painful. The truth of it makes bile rise in my throat. I pick up the picture and look at it through this new lens. It’s from the day of my father’s high school graduation. I run a finger over my father’s broad, handsome smile. Remi, minus the blue eyes, is his spitting image.

I wish I’d known him. So much so now that I know that he was brave enough to do what I haven’t been able to - choose his happiness over everything else. And in letters he left for Remi, ones that Gigi has held on to all these years, he said he was coming back for us. Was it selfish of him to leave us? Yes. But it’s not like he left us in a ditch to die. Not the way his own father did to him.

He may have loved Gigi, but he loved us too. And he would have been there for us if my grandfather hadn’t seen to it that he wasn’t.

I drag my eyes to the face of the other man in the picture.

Emotions batter my chest with the blunt force trauma of a steel-toe boot. I can’t believe the man who raised me so gently, who plucked me out of trouble, who literally saved my life, could do the things that we know for certain he did.

His smile is full of a smug pride that he always wore when one of us accomplished something. He saw them as his accomplishments, too.

I start to put the silver framed photo back on the shelf when the shadow of something on his wrist catches my eye. My chest tightens like it’s been placed in a vice grip and I grasp the edge of the bookshelf to