Page 65 of Six of Hearts
“Go. It’s not like there’s much going on here anyway.”
I didn’t mind that he didn’t give me an answer to my curiosity. It was mostly a diversion tactic anyway.
“Thanks, Cap. I’ll see you later.”
“See ya,” he said.
I quickly left the department and made my way to Ronan’s house where I could see most of the other guys’ vehicles were parked out front, excluding Noah’s.
I let myself inside, and everyone was sitting in the den, each working on their own drink of choice. I noticed, to the right of the door, there was a huge, gaping hole in the drywall. I entered the den and everyone had a tension hanging about them.
“Hey, what the hell happened here?” I said.
Ronan walked over to me and shoved a glass of scotch into my hands. “Thank you for coming so quickly. Please find a spot to sit, and I’ll explain now that we’re all here.”
I did as I was told, picking a spot on one of the couches next to Liam, and knocked back my entire glass. Ronan stood in the entryway to the den where we could all see him.
“Well, I guess I’ll just start,” Ronan said.
“First of all, I must apologise. I haven’t been totally honest with you all, and I feel horrible because you’ve all been open books to me. You’ve shared parts of your lives with me that were very personal and intimate, and I fear that most of what I’ve told you about myself and my son has been vague at best.”
“What’s going on, Ronan?” Ethan asked.
“Well, that’s the first, and probably most important thing.” He took a deep breath. “My name is not Ronan.”
The room became eerily still and silent. No one moved, no one drank, no one breathed.
“Uh,” I said, raising my hand.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Ronan, or at least the man I would continue to know as Ronan despite new information, bowed his head.
“My name is Adam Rowland. I was born in Denver, Massachusetts, and lived most recently in Florida before I came here.
My son’s name is Finn, though Finn Rowland, not Finn Vale, and he is six, but his birthday is in August, not May as we have previously celebrated.”
“Why are you just now telling us this?” Julian asked. “And what does it have to do with losing Aria?”
“My ex-wife was a beautiful woman by the name of Eva,” Ronan continued.
“I was a Navy SEAL and an FBI agent and spent many hours away from home. As a result, she developed severe depression and social anxiety and took her own life by way of drug overdose.
I came home to find her dead on our bed, and before I could call the police and report it, her brother, a man who always hated me, found me and began to make claims that I had killed her.”
“Good god,” Liam commented.“I hired the best lawyers I could, presented all the evidence that was insurmountable, and proved beyond a doubt that her death was self-inflicted.
I was found innocent of her death by a jury of my peers, and I believed that would be it, but Eva’s brother continued to accuse me of the crime.
The community leaned more towards him and made my life a living hell, claiming I’d gotten away with murder, and things started to get really awful for Finn and me.
Eventually, I had to travel a route akin to the witness protection program, taking on a new persona and moving to a new city, just to keep us safe. Your boss was designated to see to it that I was merged into the community safely,” he said, looking at me.
He took a deep breath, and I noticed his eyes glance towards the hole in the wall outside the den.
“But, it would seem I didn’t escape my past as much as I believed I had. We’ve been here five years successfully, but today someone delivered an anonymous package to Aria containing pictures of me standing over Eva’s dead body.
She believes I committed that murder as well. She left, and I haven’t been able to get ahold of her since.”
