Page 43 of Mine to Love
Liberty glanced toward Miles’ place. Still no movement from inside the garage. She decided on texting Miles.
Liberty:Can you come over for a second? I need to talk with you.
She set her phone on the small table and contemplated texting Rumor. No. It was too late. Whatever happened that sent her to the hospital, Liberty would find out soon enough.
Twins. Wow. That was some big news.
Five minutes ticked by before Miles emerged.
No Gabriel.
“Hey.” Miles climbed the stairs to her porch and took a load off. He stretched out his legs and smiled. “Emmerson is going to have twins.”
“I heard.”
Miles arched his brow. “That news traveled fast. I wonder if that means I get to be a godfather twice.”
“That’s a question for your brother and his wife,” Liberty said. “I need to ask a favor. Lucy Ann needs me to cover Rumor’s shift tomorrow night.”
He scowled. “That means you’re canceling our date. That I don’t like. I was looking forward to it, but we can reschedule and I’ll just go fishing with Gabriel and my brothers.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
“I have a feeling that Rumor won’t be working anymore.”
“That’s what Lucy Ann expects, but I don’t know if I can swing the dinner shifts because of Gabriel. With Charlie hanging around, I don’t trust he won’t just show up.”
“Any evening you have to work, he can hang out with me. It’s not a problem.” Miles shifted, catching her gaze. “My mother’s husband has a niece, Stephanie, who’s on the spectrum. She lives in the next town over and they’d like to introduce her to Gabriel.”
“I think that would be nice. He had a couple of friends back in Palm Beach who were like him and he enjoyed hanging out with them. He just didn’t like going to the center. It made him feel different.”
“I can understand that.” Miles laughed. “When I was little and the teachers would pull me out of class, it always made me feel like shit.” He tapped his finger on her knee. “Gabriel doesn’t want to come home tonight.”
“Excuse me?” She sat up taller.
“I found him half-asleep in the golf cart, wrapped in a sleeping bag he found in my garage.”
“Jesus,” she whispered. “He was just going to stay there until you got home?”
“He wanted to text me, but he said he left his cell at home and he didn’t want to come back and get it, figuring you’d never let him leave again.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“Not much, honestly. Only that he’s confused and he doesn’t know what to believe.”
“He should believe his sister.” She sighed. So many mistakes. Too many wrong decisions. She couldn’t go back in time and make different ones. All she could do was try to ease the pain. But with Gabriel, it wasn’t going to be easy. She’d hurt him in the worst way by lying. She’d broken his trust and it was going to take a miracle to get it back.
Miles took her hand and kissed it. “I know I don’t have to tell you this, but his emotions don’t connect to his thoughts the same way ours do. The truth to him is black and white. There are no gray areas and your reality has a shit ton of gray. You were damned if you were honest. And damned if you weren’t.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“Seriously. If you had told Gabriel the truth as things happened, he would have crawled into a hole. He wouldn’t have been able to cope in that environment.” Miles arched a brow. “Unless you had left.”
“Right. The judgment for staying with the prick is rearing its ugly head.”
“That’s not what I’m doing. It’s just, once you made the choice to stay with Charlie after the first affair, telling Gabriel wouldn’t have been a good idea. Telling him the truth about how Charlie pushed you down the stairs would have caused more harm than good, unless you told the cops and pressed charges,but even if you did that, you would have had to take some precautions to help Gabriel through it.” He raised his hand. “I’ve watched too many of my sisters-in-law be in shitty situations where they had to make interesting choices in order to survive. That’s what you did. I don’t have to agree with them. But now that Gabriel knows the truth, he needs a moment to process the new information and that means he has to face a different kind of betrayal.”
“Sometimes I really resent you,” she whispered. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea for Gabriel to spend the night at your house. He doesn’t do well with change and he could wake in the middle of the night and freak out.”
