Paige had a baby. With Rick. Did it change anything?
She stood still and silent, likely waiting for some kind of reaction. Because it mattered to her.Imattered to her, otherwise why would she tell me something so personal when it obviously upset her to talk about it?
“There’s more,” she whispered, then swallowed hard. “He’s been blackmailing me with pictures of...of our time together in exchange for information about you.”
“Me?” What the fuck?
“Your whole family,” she corrected. “Especially Rose, and I...I told him she’s in Pasadena, Maryland at the drug rehabilitation center and I’m so, so sorry about all of this.” Her shoulders sagged, dropping her purse to the floor, but she acted like she didn’t notice anything else except me and the obvious guilt that weighed heavy on top of her. “When he wanted more info, I told him to fuck off.”
Whoa. If the guy wanted dirt on my family, there was certainly a lot more than the location of Rose’s drug rehab. Even if we weren’t being blackmailed by Hill, there was a chance Rick, and everyone else, could have found out about everything. Not by Paige, but still. On top of being a sex predator, Rick had also blackmailed her. Jesus, did the guy have a decent bone in his sick, perverted head?
“He’s the one who cost you the Library of Congress job?” I asked. When she nodded, I had the sudden urge to go all Dexter on his ass, but I kept that need in my tightened fists for another day. The fucker would pay, that was for sure.
Blowing out a breath, I stepped toward her and held her tight. She clung to me while I kissed the top of her head. None of this changed a damn thing. Holding her felt like coming home, like we were meant to happen. I pulled away to cup her face and kiss her, pouring whatever she needed from me into her to chase away her heartache.
Minutes—hours?—later, she leaned her head back, her lips swollen, her eyes hooded. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I kissed her again, a quick, innocent one, and pushed her cute hipster glasses up her nose. “It’s okay.”
She nodded down at her purse and swiped a hand across her cheek, and I hoped she knew I meant it. Itwasokay. It really didn’t change a thing about how I felt. Or what needed to happen next.
“I’ll go get the bacon,” she said and slid me a quick smile.
When she closed the door behind her, I leaned my forehead against it while the silence in the house pressed in. She took her natural energy with her every morning. It made the house feel empty. Lifeless.
I usually left soon after she did on the weekdays, but since it was Saturday, I procrastinated. Yeah, I wanted to see my sister again, but our last visit about two months ago had shaken me. Instead of the zombie shell my sister used to be before she’d entered treatment, she’d been angry. Like the kind of angry that possesses your soul and makes you do and say ugly, terrible things. About Mom and Dad. Even about me and Riley. The doctors said she was still detoxing and that her “irritability” was part of the process. Irritability, my ass. My sister had turned into a demon.
But soon enough, I parked in the guest section of the sprawling treatment center in Pasadena, Maryland and got out of the car, my sunglasses once again covering the bruises on my face.
The website for this place described it as upscale and private, two words that had leaped out at my parents immediately since those were the most important things tothem, not what was best for my sister. Maybe today I’d find out for sure that money really could buy happiness, at least for Rose. For her, I hoped so.
Tall, spiraled bushes and various flowers lined the parking lot and trailed along a winding sidewalk that led to the front doors. Four white marble columns flanked the sides of the building and held up a third-story balcony where heads bobbed behind a low iron fence. On either side of the columns, separate wings stretched into the distance, the left for females and the right for males.
Air conditioning blasted my face once I entered the glass doors, and I breathed it in deeply. The sharp odor of chemicals burned my nose because some guy was mopping the black and white checked tile in the corner. He swept the mop back and forth over the same spot. I had to wonder if that was some kind of punishment. Probably not since this was the twenty-first century, but how much research did his family do on this place before dropping him off for someone else to solve his problem? Maybe I had it all wrong—I hoped I did—but how much did anyone really know about what happened here behind closed doors? Or right out in the open like the man who kept mopping the corner?
Worry buried deep inside my gut as I stepped toward the receptionist’s desk near the middle of the large room. To say I hated coming here was an understatement, but today I hated the thought of not coming even more. If Rose had been exorcised since our last visit, I might ask her how many other times Riley had been to see her. And Mom and Dad. I wanted her to know she still had family. That we hadn’t forgotten about her. But I had a horrible feeling that maybe some of us had.
“I’m here to see Rose Cleary,” I said before the receptionist looked up.
She was reading a file, or pretending to anyway, and her tight brown curls bounced around her head when she finally met my gaze. Her crinkly dark eyes widened, red flooded her cheeks, and she began pawing random items on her desk in some weird attempt to keep her fifty-year-old self in her chair, I guessed.
A nervous giggle fell out of her mouth. “She your girlfriend?”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Like it was any of her business. “Sister. That’s Cleary with a C.”
“Rose, Rose,” she mumbled, nodding, and waved her hands over her computer keyboard, magician style.
Jesus H., I’d flustered her to level abracadabra. At this rate, Paige would be home before I’d been given my guest pass and a white rabbit would be hopping around my feet. Sometimes being me was such a pain in my ass.
The woman finally settled her fingertips on the home row and pecked one letter at a time while she spelled my sister’s name.
Instead of snatching the keyboard away from her, I grinded my teeth together in silent agony. No one ever said I was a patient man. I just wanted to get away from the mopping guy in the corner and the sting of cleaning chemicals to see my sister. Now that I was here, I couldn’t get to her room fast enough. I shouldn’t have waited this long in the first place. I needed to know if she still hated me like the demon inside of her had shouted last time I’d come. I needed to know if she could forgive me.
If I could forgive myself.
#sorrynotsorry
My little sister, obsessed with birds since day one, had flocked to the Twitter-verse and vague-tweeted her quick, downward spiral into heroin. #sorrynotsorry had been her last tweet before her overdose.
