Page 47 of Always My Love

ChapterFifteen

Harper was shocked at Nick’s response. Yesterday, she’d pretty much confessed to killing someone, and he’d looked at her as if he was trying to solve a puzzle.

Now, he was wishing that she had killed someone.

She shook her head against his chest. “No,” she sighed. “I didn’t kill Fred.”

The night before, as she’d lay in bed, she’d decided to tell him everything. Whatever happened to her, it couldn’t be worse than what she’d gone through years ago.

She knew that if she was locked up and dragged away from her sister, that Nick would be there to look after Hailey. That much was obvious. Nick and the rest of the town would take care of her. Hailey would be safe here. There was no doubt about that now.

Reece had even dropped by the house and ensured her that Hailey was doing amazing in his self-defense classes.

“Who?” he asked his arms tightening around her. “Then who is it you feel guilty of killing?”

She enjoyed the feeling of him holding her for a moment more before stepping back.

She leaned against the counter across from him.

“When everyone was asleep, later that night, I snuck into my mother’s room. Fred was asleep on the floor. He hadn’t even made it to the bed. His pants and boxers were still around his ankles.” She closed her eyes as her stomach rolled. “Fred kept his stash of drugs under the mattress. Since he wasn’t sleeping on it at the moment, it was easy to get to.” She opened her eyes and looked out the window. The rain had stopped sometime the day before, but the sky outside was still gray as it grew darker. The view from Nick’s window was nice enough that she felt some of the weight lift from her shoulders. “I knew where my mother hid the rat poison.” Her eyes moved to Nick’s. “But I didn’t know which drugs were which, who took what. To me, it didn’t matter. They both deserved it. They had been poisoning themselves for years.” She shrugged and looked at her bare feet, at her pretty pink toenails, which Hailey had painted for her a few nights before while they were watching a movie.

“Your mother?” Nick asked, gaining her attention again.

She nodded. “By the time we woke, she was gone. She must have gotten into the stash after I left the room. Fred freaked. He grabbed his bag of drugs and left us there.”

“Six years ago?” he asked. “You were…”

“Seventeen. Hailey was fifteen.” She lifted her chin. “Instead of calling the police, as we’d been warned our entire lives never to do, we packed our bags and ran.”

“You’ve been running ever since?” he asked, standing stiff against the counter across from her.

“Yes.” She straightened her shoulders. “Now that I’ve confessed, are you going to arrest me?”

Nick surprised her by shaking his head from side to side almost immediately.

“You’ve confessed to adding poison to the drugs. There’s no proof your mother ever took them. She could have been dead already when you walked into the room. She could have OD’d long before Fred… before…”

She nodded. “We hid for the first year, until after my eighteenth birthday, so afraid that we’d be found and separated by the system we’d been warned about our entire lives. We were living in a small weekly hotel just outside of Atlanta. I saved enough money to buy an old car by working at a strip club as a waitress, since I wasn’t old enough to dance or work behind the bar.” Her eyes met his. “One day, instead of going into work, I decided to go back and check the old house. The thought of my mother rotting in that place…” She visibly shivered, remembering the nightmares that she had and still did sometimes.

“What happened?”

“The place had burned down. Maybe it was Fred’s doing, maybe it was natural. The mailbox, however, gave us the opportunity to move here. There was paperwork saying that my great-uncle had died and left my mother his cabin in a small town in Oregon.” She smiled, then felt her anger grow. “We tried to find out if anyone had ever found her, seen the fire.” She shook her head. “We found a death certificate online, so at least we knew that much.” She sighed. “Then, one day while I was at work, there was Fred, sitting in a booth at the strip club with that damned grin on his face, as if he’d known just where I was this entire time.”

“What did you do?” Nick asked, his eyes searching hers.

“I ran. We ran. We packed up and left town that night. It took us five years to make our way to the West Coast. Five very long years of jumping at shadows, hiding from the police, hiding from Fred. I worked shit jobs in hellholes to finally make enough to travel twenty-five hundred miles. I forced Hailey to finish her schooling. She walked into a college in Denver and passed her GED with flying colors.” She smiled and felt pride swelling in her chest.”

“Thanks to you,” Nick said softly.

“I should have taken her away long before that night,” she admitted.

Nick walked over and wrapped his arms around her. “Thank you for trusting me with this,” he said into her hair.

She melted into his arms. “Thank you for not arresting me.”

He chuckled and then leaned back. “If you want, I can look into what happened.”

She frowned. “Would… It wouldn’t raise any suspicions? If you did finally find out, that I was the cause of her death, what would happen?”