Page 62 of The Guilty One

“Tell me everything,” I beg. “I’m here to listen and to help you. I love you.”

We’re feet apart, and all I want to do is run to him and hug him, to know that we can get through this no matter what, but I can’t move. I don’t. I need to understand first.

He looks down, pacing listlessly. “The first thing you should know is that I’m not…my name isn’t…”

“I know.” I don’t mean to say it, but I need to have it out there. He’s struggling. He’s scared. I can see it in his eyes. I need him to know I’m not running away.

His eyes go wide. “You do?”

“I know your name is Matteo.”

Tears flood his cold eyes, and he blinks them away, looking out of the room. “I didn’t lie to you when we met. When I told you my name is Tate. There have been so many lies over the years, but that wasn’t one of them. My parents used to call me Tate, before they…” He sniffles. “My real parents, my birth parents, died when I was six. A drunk driver ran a stoplight, and just like that, they were gone. I don’t remember much about them, but I remember that they called me Tate. I didn’t lie to you when we met. Even though I couldn’t tell you the truth, I tried not to lie.”

I nod, chewing my lip. “I know. I know why you did what you did. I know what happened the night the real Tatum died.”

He opens his mouth, trying to say something, but tears choke out his words. “When I got put into foster care, Tatum was there. And Dakota. And Aaron and Bradley. We were brothers. They moved us from home to home, and sometimes I was alone and sometimes one or two of them were there, but the best homes…the best ones were when it was all of us.” He pauses, composing himself by swiping his hand over his face. “I loved him. Despite everything he did, despite the monster they made him into, I loved him, Celine. What I did that night…I wasn’t myself. I was so angry with him, and I just wanted it to stop. I knew it wouldn’t stop. It doesn’t make it okay. It doesn’t make me any better than him.”

I can’t stop myself. I step forward, trying to hug him, but he puts his hands up, stopping me from getting any closer.

“I need to finish telling you the rest,” he says.

“Okay.” Feeling a bit like a scolded child, I step back.

“We lost touch after everything. Dakota tried. He wanted to get us back together, but…I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at them and see the way they looked at me. I took him away from them, too. I killed their brother, too.” His voice cracks. “I’ll never understand why Daphne and Lane helped me, why they protected me, but I’ll forever be thankful because it meant I got you. And the boys. And you guys are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

Tears pour down my cheeks at his words. Why does this feel like goodbye? Why is he saying it like this is over? Like he’s still planning to leave?

“And so when Aaron called me and told me Bradley was going to tell his fiancée the truth, and then I eventually heard from Bradley about it too, I went to Mom in a panic. She’d always made things better. I wasn’t afraid of the truth coming out. I wasn’t afraid of going to jail. I was…I was afraid of losing you. I was afraid that you’d hate me. That you’d see me as a monster.”

My heart aches for him, for this truth that he’s kept buried for so long. For there being so much he had to keep hidden from me. “I know why you did it. Tatum was the monster. Aaron told me everything.”

He shakes his head. “No. We shouldn’t have let it happen. We should’ve told the truth back then and taken the consequences. Then your life wouldn’t be messed up, too. Then you wouldn’t be in the middle of this.”

“The middle of what? Whatever happens, we can face it together,” I promise him. “I love you.”

“Not this. I can’t put you in the middle of this. I have to fix it somehow.”

“Fix what?” I demand, staring at his face in the glow of the lamp. I don’t understand.

He takes a deep breath, running a thumb over his opposite palm. “Mom promised me it would be okay. That she and Dad would handle it. And then…Bradley died.”

My skin goes cold. “What are you saying?”

“And when I asked her about it, she said it was awful. She sounded genuinely upset. I wanted to believe she wasn’t involved, that she could never hurt us, but…I don’t know. And then Dakota told me he was being followed. That someone was trying to scare him by following him around, and that they’d left a burned book at his house. A burned copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which was the book Aubrey had in her bag that night, the book that we left with her body. No one would know about that except us. And my parents. I thought he was being paranoid at first, until…until I saw the car that was following him. And I recognized it.”

I wait, silently begging him to go on as he pauses.

“It was my dad.” He looks up at me, tears glimmering in his eyes. “My dad was following him, and I worried he was going to do to him what he’d done to Bradley. So, I took the money from our account to split it between the two brothers I had left. I was going to give it to Dakota and Aaron. To tell them to run, to beg them to go. To hide. And then, on the day we went to move the body, to protect our secret from even my parents, I traded vehicles with Dakota, thinking my dad would follow me and I could confront him. But he must’ve seen us trade places. I have no idea where he was, but the next thing I knew, Dakota had been run off the road, and I was hiding out in a hotel room trying to get to Aaron to warn him without getting caught.”

“Your dad is the one doing this?”

He nods slowly. “And I don’t know if he’s trying to protect me…or himself.”

“Perhaps I can give you an answer to that.” I jerk my head around to see my in-laws standing in the hallway. In Lane’s hand, he has a gun.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CELINE

---