“I promise you, Tori. There was never another woman. I had my reasons for leaving, but that wasn’t one.”
“You’re impossible.” She grabbed her purse and stormed past me.
Grasping her arm, I stopped her right before she opened the door. She looked down at where my hand held her wrist. The contact sent currents through me, but she acted as if I’d scalded her, and I dropped it.
“When did you call me to tell me about Reid?”
“Coming back to you now? Maybe you didn’t leave me for another woman, but you sure got over me fast. Two and a half months after you left. Right after I took the pregnancy test. Right before I decided I was better off without an asshole who had deceived me. You know what hurt the most?”
I shook my head, still sifting through that time to find out who had answered my phone.
“Not that I was pregnant, or that you had found someone new, but that you had promised to love me forever, promised there was no other woman, that I was the only one and I wasn’t.”
She left me standing there, fighting to make sense of what she’d said. Time passed, yet still I remained, the scent of vanilla and cherry blossom lingering in the air.
“This is a creepy new low for you, little brother. Do you always sneak into her office when she’s not here?”
Looking over to see Liv in the doorway, a memory returned. The day I’d blocked Tori from my phone, erasing the voicemails that I had constantly replayed to further enhance my guilt, blocking her number, and deleting her texts.
“You answered the phone that morning.” I heard the heat in my tone, the edge to it.
“What are you talking about?” She glanced at her nails. “I think I went with the wrong color.”
“Fuck the color. Did you answer my phone and tell Tori to stop calling me?”
She froze, her eyes darting back and forth before they landed on mine.
“You told her I was showering? That I was better off without her? What the fuck were you thinking, Liv?”
My voice had risen, and she stepped into the office, closing the door behind her. I was livid, seeing shades of black when I looked at her.
“Look, you needed to move on. It wasn’t my fault she called when I was there. If you had been man enough to answer your phone and tell her to stop calling, I wouldn’t have had to.”
“Man enough?” My hands balled into fists as I resisted punching the wall. “She called to tell me she was pregnant!”
She flinched, and I saw the knowledge in her eyes. She knew about Reid. If she’d seen the picture, she would have known. He looked too much like me not to guess I was his father.
“And what would you have done?” she said.
“I would have gone back to her. Not let her raise our son by herself. Not let her think I was with another woman.” I dragged my hand down my face, detesting that Tori had thought that all this time because my sister had let her believe it. “Do you have any idea what you did? She thought I left her for another woman. All this time, that’s what she thought.”
“So what?” Her cool exterior was snapping, her irritation coming through. “It was better that way. You had a job to do, and we had a task to complete.”
“I had a son, Liv. A boy who doesn’t know I’m his father. Who is growing up without one.”
“It’s better than growing up with the one we had.” Her shoulders slumped. “You couldn’t have gone back to her, and you know it. There was too much at stake.”
“I would have risked it.”
Her eyes bounced between mine. “You would have stolen my inheritance from me? After all that I sacrificed?”
Defeat sank into my shoulders. “Yes. I loved her. I’ll always love her, Liv. And that boy is my son. I don’t know him, and I missed almost five years of his life. I would have given everything up for that.”
She nodded, but I saw the emotion there, the hurt. Hurting the people I loved seemed to be what I did best.
“We had plenty of money, Liv. The other businesses were thriving. We would have had plenty to live the lifestyle you have.”
“It was never about the money,” she said, turning her back on me and opening the door. “It was about getting to the end. Avenging Mama. In denying me my inheritance, you would have been denying us the chance to make him pay for what he did.”
