She pulled at her hands, freeing them from his grip, taking a step backwards. ‘Please, don’t. It doesn’t matter what you wish, now. It’s not going to change a damned thing.’ For a minute, heat sparked in the words. Angry, frustrated heat. She forced herself to smile, to at least give the appearance of quelling her turbulent emotions.
‘Did you – do you know how – why – the baby?’
He was incapable of forming complete sentences, but she understood it. He was in survival mode. Totally overwhelmed by what he’d just learned, and the myriad spinning wheels it sparked as to their versions of the past.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It just happened.’ She drew her lip between her teeth. ‘The doctor said I could run tests, but… I couldn’t afford them.’
He swore softly, but with an intensity that sheared the room in two.
‘I was in the hospital for a night. I lost a lot of blood.’
‘I would have helped.’
‘You weren’tyouthen, Aiden. I mean, sure, you’d signed with that college, but that was just a scholarship. It’s not like you had a couple of thousand bucks sitting in a bank account.’
He shook his head. ‘I would have found a way.’
‘I found a way.’ She tilted her chin defiantly. ‘I coped.’
‘How?’ he pushed. ‘You were still in school.’
‘Yeah? Well, I got a job.’
‘Babysitting,’ he murmured.
‘What’s wrong with that?’
Another visible twist of his throat. ‘Nothing.’
But she could sense his tension and disapproval, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why. She’d met Cory through babysitting. And she’d dated him on and off for a few years. It hadn’t been serious. They both knew it was more about Mel than anything else, but also, he’d beensomeonefor Sienna to cling to as her whole life seemed to spike off into a direction she’d never foreseen. The baby. The miscarriage. Her father’s accident. The moment police came to the door and charged him. The court case and pathetic public defender. Her father being found guilty and sent to prison.
Sienna had been solitary, and weak. She’d felt as though a strong breeze might knock her to the ground with enough force to guarantee she’d never get back up again.
But there’d been Cory and Melanie, and for all Cory was not someone she could see herself with long term, he was dependable, and he was there. Even more important, he needed her, and that had been like a balm to her soul. So too losing herself to Melanie’s sweet toddler arms and smiles at that time of her life.
‘They were a lifeline, you know,’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘It wasn’t just the baby. There was some other stuff, around the same time.’ She worried at her lower lip, wondering if he’d heard anything about her dad. She’d always presumed the news must have got to him – if good news travelled fast, in Sienna’s experience, bad news was gossiped about way faster – and subconsciously his failure to reach out even over that had been almost the hardest thing to stomach of all. She waited, breath held, for him to nod. To confirm that yeah, he’d heard about the charges. How was the old man?
‘Like what?’
Her heart fluttered. ‘You really don’t know?’
‘I think it’s pretty fucking clear that your life after the night I left is a total mystery to me.’ He sucked in a ragged breath. ‘What happened, Si? What else was there?’
13
He listened in complete silence as she matter-of-factly described the night her father had driven into another car, killing a young mom. How the evidence suggested the mother had actually fallen asleep at the wheel and clipped Nico Mastrangelo’s car, rather than the other way around. But the fact Nico had a couple of drink driving charges to his name meant he hadn’t really got much leeway from the local cops.
It was, what they’d called then, an open-and-shut case.
‘After the baby, I couldn’t bear the thought of working in medicine. Just the smell of hospitals makes me sick,’ she admitted, in a way that just about broke him. ‘But my grades were good. You know Mrs Polanskova? Well, she wouldn’t let me get away with not applying to college. I decided I’d study pre-law. I wanted to make a difference. To help people like Dad.’
‘You’re telling me your father’s in jail?’
‘He’s due out in three years,’ she admitted.
He turned his back, stalking across the room to the bureau that housed the tea bags and kettle, and braced his palms against the flat surface. Memories of the man burned his brain. Sure, Sienna’s old man hadn’t been any kind of paragon of virtue, but he’d been a good guy. Salt of the earth. And he’d doted on Sienna. Aiden thought about him, locked up, and a shudder racked his whole body.
‘And you go see him regularly?’
