My stomach lurched. That night. God, that night at Murphy’s when I was twenty-one and some drunk woman kept pushing and pushing until something inside me snapped.
“There’s context?—”
“There’s always context!” His voice rose again, filling the room. “But context doesn’t matter if I don’t know about it beforehand. Context doesn’t help me when the prosecutor ambushes me in front of a jury with evidence I’ve never seen!”
“I was going to tell you?—”
“When? After you were convicted? Or were you banking on me being so in love with you that I wouldn’t care?”
The accusation hung between us like smoke.
“That’s not …” I couldn’t finish. Because maybe there was some truth to it. Maybe I had been counting on his feelings for me to outweigh my sins.
“I told you about my last client.” His voice went quiet now, deadly soft. “The one who played me. Who fed me sob stories while hiding evidence. Got him acquitted, and then he killed three more.”
Ice flooded my veins. “I’m not him.”
“How would I know?” The pain in his eyes was worse than the anger. “You’ve been lying to me from day one. How do I know what’s real? How do I know you’re real?”
“Because I love you!” The words ripped out of my throat, raw and desperate.
“Love.” He said it like the word tasted bitter. “You love me, but you don’t trust me. You love me, but you lie to my face. What kind of love is that, Faith?”
He was right. My love was warped, wasn’t it? Twisted into something unrecognizable by years of survival instincts. I hadn’t meant for it to be. I was honestly doing the best I could, stumbling through life with a broken compass. But the realization that my shortcomings had hurt him … well, that cut deeper than any prison sentence ever could.
“The only kind I know!” Tears streamed down my face now, hot and humiliating. “I just got my brother back, and then you came along, and for the first time in my life, I had something I couldn’t bear to lose. So, I did the only thing I’ve ever known how to do. I hid the parts that make people leave.”
“Everyone leaves you—is that it?” His voice was hard. “Ever think maybe it’s because you never give them a chance to stay? You’re so busy hiding and lying that no one ever gets to know the real you.”
The words struck something deep and true, and I wrapped my arms around myself. “No one loves you when they see all of you, Ryker. They leave. They always leave.”
“So, you thought you’d just … what? Keep lying forever? Hope I never found out?” He shook his head. “That’s not love, Faith. That’s cowardice.”
I physically recoiled like he’d struck me.
“Tell me about the scissors. The girl you stabbed over a boy.”
Maybe I didn’t play this right. Hell, I knew I’d made mistakes. But that’s what we do as humans, isn’t it? We stumble. We fall. We get back up and hope we’ll do better the next time.
Letting someone see all of you is terrifying. Especially for someone like me, whose past was riddled with moments that still made me want to disappear.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then tell me what it was like!” He exploded. “Because right now, all I have is Wolfe’s version. And in his version, you’re a violent sociopath who’s been hurting people since you were a teenager.”
“I was defending myself!” The words burst out. “I was jumped. Three girls cornered me in the bathroom because one of them thought I was flirting with her boyfriend. I wasn’t. I never even talked to him. But she decided I was a threat, and she brought backup.”
Ryker’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t interrupt.
“I grabbed the only thing I could reach. A pair of craft scissors from art class in my bag. I didn’t want to stab anyone. I held them out as a threat, something to make them back off.” My voice shook. “But they jumped me anyway. All three of them. And in the struggle, the scissors …” I swallowed hard. “We both got punctured. Both of us. That’ll be in the medical records, too, if Wolfe cared to look.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite belief, but the anger dimmed slightly.
“I had defensive wounds,” I continued. “Bruises all over. A cracked rib. But the foster family I was with … they didn’t want a ‘problem child.’ So, they painted me as the aggressor. Said I was violent and unstable. And the system believed them because it was easier than investigating.”
Ryker ran a hand over his face, and I could see him processing, lawyer brain working through the evidence.
“The fights,” I pressed on, needing him to understand. “All of them. I was injured too. Every single time. Stitches. Broken bones. Once, a rib that punctured my lung. But nobody cared about that. Nobody asked why a ninety-pound foster kid kept ending up in the ER. They just labeled me as trouble and moved me along.”
