Hell, she was helping raise my kid while I hadn’t gotten to see her in an entire year.
Every day I woke up and I felt like a piece of my heart was literally gone.
I’d buried myself in work so I didn’t have to think about all the ways I’d failed as a parent.
When Stanton had come to me to tell me he suspected that Sonny Gibbons, the tech millionaire who’d lived in our town, had been suspected of grooming young girls, I’d been skeptical.
What would a man like Sonny Gibbons need and or get out of young girls when the whole world was his oyster?
But then Stanton had shown me the evidence that’d piled up against Sonny with his STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—camps and his lecturer stint at college campuses and school districts around the county, and I’d started to really understand.
However, none of that had been nailed home quite like hearing that Sonny had done the same thing to my own sister from the time that she was a girl around my daughter’s age.
To make matters worse, Sonny had locked onto my daughter because she looked so much like Pippa. Pippa, his star protégé, whom he’d groomed and built into the amazing computer tech guru that she was.
It was disgusting to think about Pippa having had to deal with Sonny to get to where she was today.
And even worse when I thought about how I’d not only missed the signs in my sister, but my own daughter.
“I’m watching her closely, as you would expect. But something is giving me the vibe that she’s on to us. She won’t ever find you…but that’s why I’m suggesting that you stop communications with your parents.”
With my parents as well as my daughter.
Those three people alone were what was left from my old life.
I’d discussed my new life in length with my parents and my daughter. And all of us together had decided it would be best for me to disappear and not involve them in my life. All because of Pippa.
Pippa would never let me live free again.
She would fight tooth and nail to make sure that I was never happy in life. Would never get to watch my daughter grow up. Would never get to experience love firsthand.
She only saw the murderer who’d killed her fiancé. The love of her life.
She’d never envisioned the impossible decisions I’d had to make, even though she was there when I’d had to make them. It was as if a part of her brain had been rewired in those moments that she’d watched me kill her fiancé, and she only saw that I’d been a murderer. Not that I’d been a man with two impossible decisions.
Watch my sister get raped and murdered, or kill her fiancé.
That day, when Sonny had left my sister and me there to bask in the aftermath of my shooting her fiancé, Pippa had made a promise. I would never be happy for the rest of my life.
She would move heaven and earth to make sure that I didn’t ever see my daughter again.
And she had.
She’d lied. Cheated. Stolen.
Hell, she’d been so angry at me that she’d practically given Sonny a get out of jail free card.
And he had gotten out of jail time.
Luckily, Sonny had sunk himself by being the dumbest smart person I knew, and Sonny was currently rotting away in a frozen prison in Vermont.
“She’s not good with computers like you are,” I said. “She’s in tech, but only the components of tech. She doesn’t have the skill set to circumvent all the work you’ve put in to get me here…but if you truly think that she’s going to make waves, I’ll stop talking to my parents and Bossy. But only after I tell them what’s going on.”
God, this was going to kill Bossy.
Boston was my ride or die for the first half of her life.
It was only me and her from the very beginning.
