Page 52 of Sin

“Maybe so,” I agree with him. “I was so caught up in it, I fell asleep on the porch swing. My mother found me out there and picked me up in her arms and was taking me downstairs to my room. My father stopped her on the landing and they began to fight.

“I didn’t really understand what they were fighting about, but I remember her telling him she knew what he’d tried to do to her. He hit her and told her she was delusional. She turned to flee. I was wrapped around her, and I watched him put two hands on her back and push her so we went flying down the stairs. I remember thinking it was just like the storm as we were falling. There was that surreal quiet where everything paused, and then there was the loud crash as we hit the hardwood floor. Agonizing pain shot through me, the impact shattering my right arm in three places. I started crying for my mother, but she didn’t respond. I crawled out from beneath her and tried to wake her up, but—” It’s been fifteen years, but I still have a hard time saying the next three words. “But she was dead.”

“Sin,” Cassidy holds out his hand to me, and I clutch at it, desperate to be grounded in the here and now of being in this truck with him, rather than being stuck in the memory of that night.

“Why isn’t he in jail?” Cassidy asks softly.

I let out a bitter laugh. “My father has a different story of that night’s events. He told the police that I was having a tantrum and I’d caused my mother to lose her balance and fall to herdeath. He hammered his version of events into my brain, calling me a mother-killer and replaying his version of the fall over and over again until I began to believe he was right. That I hadn’t wanted to be brought in from the storm, and my violent fit had caused her fall. I thought I deserved thecorrectionshe devised for me each night in his study for causing my mother’s death.”

“Corrections?”

“They were punishments my father devised for me. Some physical, some psychological—all meant to banish the sin out of my blackened soul.”

“It was child abuse!” Cassidy says, anger clear in his voice.

“I survived it.” I hesitate to look at Cassidy because I don’t know what I’ll see there. I don’t want anyone’s pity, but especially not his. I couldn’t stand it. I force myself to look up at him, and all I see is his goodness shining through tears, and it almost acts as a salve for past scars.

“Do you remember when I told you how much I loved the pool house?”

“Of course, I do,” he says, a crease on his brow because he doesn’t understand the change of subject.

“It was my mother’s favorite part of the estate. We spent a lot of time there. I think it was probably a place she could avoid my father because he has a phobia of water and always avoided it. My best and clearest memories are of her there.

“But after she was gone, I couldn’t make myself go in there. I felt too guilty since my father had convinced me I was the reason she was no longer alive. One day, though, when I was ten, I was missing her so much that I went there just so I could feel close to her. That’s when I found several journals she’d kept.

“I began reading them, hungry to know the mother that I had too few memories of. They chronicled her college years, meeting my father, and giving birth to me, but it was the last journal that was different. Instead of recording cherishedmemories, she began to chronicle her growing certainty that my father had married her for her money, and her growing realization of what a dangerous man he was. She writes accounts of his abuse, cheating, and toward the last six months of her life, she writes of her growing suspicion that my father was poisoning her.

“After reading them, my memories from the night of her death came back in full, panoramic view. I promised myself that I would punish my father. That I would live, breathe, and die with no other goal in mind. That there wasn’t a line I wouldn’t cross, a rule I wouldn’t break, a person I wouldn’t hurt, to make sure my father paid for what he did to my mother.” I squeeze Cassidy’s hand, which I’m still holding, in a vice-like grip. “Then I met you.”

Chapter 30

Cassidy

I sit listening to Sin tell me his story. His jaw tight, and his eyes burning with resolve as he speaks. I’m alternately heartbroken and furious about what Sin had to endure as a child.

I squeeze his hand, which he is still holding on to, almost as if it were a lifeline. “That’s all I lived for until I met you.”

My heart contracts in a burst of emotion at his words.

“From the first day we met, I felt you belonged to me. I wasn’t attracted to you then. I saw you as a kid, but from the first time I saw you, I wanted to protect you and keep you safe. Suddenly, I had another focus besides revenge on my father.”

“I was definitely attracted to you,” I admit to him. “You were my first everything. My first crush. The first guy to set my teenage hormones on fire.”

“More firsts,” he murmurs with satisfaction.

“That first summer I felt so close to you,” I whisper, even though there is no one else around to hear my confession. It’s like this stolen moment between us is fragile, and any loud noise or sudden movement could break it. “Like you were always meant to be my family—though thinking of you as my stepbrother never felt right.”

“No, it sure as hell never did,” Sin agrees.

I swallow hard and turn my head away from him so he can’t see the pain of the memory I’m recounting. “Then you told me you didn’t want me around and had your father send me away to boarding school.”

I don’t tell him how leaving the house, I’d only spent a few months in, felt like I was being torn from the inside out, and I could barely breathe from missing him. That he’d been the only person I’d let get close to me since my father died.

Reliving the memory and pairing it with his narrative helps me see the story—our story—radically differently than before. In a sudden rush of clarity, I gasp in a dramatic show of astonishment. “You did it to protect me?”

I look at his shaded eyes and tense body and know the answer. All the times he’d been kind to me and then pushed me away cruelly had been to protect me from his father. My memories, with this added perspective, give depth and contour to my past.

He tells me about how his father withheld my asthma medication and the way Gideon threatened to send me to what basically sounded like a military school to toughen me up.

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