Page 80 of Secrets (The Sins Trilogy 2)
I go to my liquor cabinet and pull out a bottle of whiskey. I pour both of us a finger. I don’t want to drag Harry into my problems, but now that he’s seen Iris, he’s not going to shut up about it until he gets some answers. “She didn’t die.”
“What? Who didn’t die?” Harry asks, accepting the drink.
I glare at him, annoyed he’s suddenly acting like his IQ dropped fifty points. “Who are we talking about? Ivy, of course.”
He raises a hand. “Wait a minute. You really, no bullshit, think she’s Ivy?”
I nod.
“Tony, I know you’re still struggling to accept that she’s gone, but this is too much. We cremated her, remember? You were there.”
“We cremated a young girl. But it wasn’t Ivy.”
“Huh?”
I knock back my drink. This is the kind of conversation that requires a case of whiskey, except I can’t imbibe like that. “The body in the Lexus wasn’t her.” And I tell him the gist of what I know.
He stares at me like I’m high. “So Sam’s been hiding her all this time?”
I nod, anger stirring again.
“Why didn’t she try to escape? Call someone? I mean… What the hell?” His face crumbles. “She knows I wouldn’t turn my back on her, doesn’t she? And she was in love with you. Why…?” He clenches his hair, pacing, the drink forgotten.
“She would have if she remembered us.” Not that she would have called me after that shit I told her at Cajun Milan. But Harry is different.
Harry turns, his hands still fisting his hair. “Huh?”
I don’t have the heart to mock his huhs, the way I might if circumstances were different. “She had a brain injury serious enough to put her in a coma for a year. She doesn’t remember her time in Tempérane. She thinks she’s Sam’s poor little relative.”
“What the fuck?” He lets go of his hair. “She doesn’t even know who she is?”
I shake my head. “She remembers some, but not much. She didn’t know she went to Curtis.”
“She loved that school!”
Looking away, I pour another drink. Guilt tightens its vicious grip on me. If Harry had found her first…things would’ve gone very differently. He would’ve told her everything from the beginning.
“Did you tell her about everything? You know, Mom, Dad, me, you…the rest.”
I knock my drink back fast. “No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because she thinks she’s Iris Smith now, and it’s safer for her that way.” And if possible, I don’t ever want her to know what I did to break her heart back then.
It wasn’t just that I was immature. If it weren’t for me being stupid back then, she wouldn’t have been in Tempérane that night at all. She would’ve been in L.A. with me. Then none of the ensuing clusterfuck would’ve happened.
She wouldn’t have been robbed of nine years of her life.
It’s the conclusion I’ve been avoiding all this time, except it’s there—an old, festering wound you try to ignore, hoping it’ll resolve itself. But I know it’ll never go away. The sense of guilt and apprehension hounding me are proof of that.
“How is it safer?” Harry demands.
“Why do you think there was a body? Somebody was supposed to die that night—whether that was Ivy or not…who knows?”
A fast calculation is taking place in his head. “You think…somebody tried to kill her?”
“Maybe,” I say, even though I’m almost certain. “Sam tried to drown her not too long ago. I’m not willing to risk anything.”
