“Let’s get out of here,” Jack says to all of them. “Laney—take the phones?”
“Of course,” she murmurs.
He ignores me while he hands over the phone he found to Laney. “Let’s go. Mom. Dad. I’ll drive.”
Mr. Sullivan looks at me.
Reallylooks at me.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
It’s so fucking inadequate.
I’mso fucking inadequate.
Arrogant enough to think I could do this without hurting anyone.
Still so much like my father no matter how hard I’ve tried not to be.
Mr. Sullivan looks back at his family, then dips his head and heaves a sigh that I feel deep in my own toes.
Like he knows.
Like he knows this day that he’d been dreading would eventually come, but he didn’t want to face it, and now he has to, and there’s no telling where his life will go from here.
Maybe I’m wrong.
IhopeI’m wrong.
I hope he’s always known.
But there’s a difference betweenknownandsuspected.
There’s a difference betweenmy wife and I have already had this conversationand the slouch of his shoulders and the ragged way he’s sucking in breaths now.
And it’s my fault.
If I’d stayed away—if I’d stayed away, if I’d never thought of using the triplets in my revenge scheme, they could’ve kept this secret forever.
Or at least discussed it with their family on their own terms.
I’m a goddamn monster.
It’s in my blood.
And you can’t fight what’s in your blood.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Decker says to me. “And you—” He looks at Rhys, disgust coloring his expression. “I thought I could trust you. I thought we were friends. But you’d give it up all for a woman you barely know?”
Rhys flinches. “It’s not?—”
“It’s what? You’re inlooove?”
Rhys flinches again, harder this time, and I don’t know what that means either.
That he loves me?
That he doesn’t?
