Page 78 of Deliver Me

If Lilah noticed the sarcasm, she didn’t give any indication as she looked around the small living room and the dining room table piled high with Mia’s various textbooks and notebooks. She picked an invisible piece of lint from her sleeve as she surveyed the mess, but Mia refused to apologize for the state of the apartment. The new semester was already in full swing, and she had papers to write and exams to study for—if Lilah wanted to visit when things were tidy, she should have waited for an invitation.

“I was afraid you might not be here,” Lilah said, turning away from her inspection of her son’s home and facing him directly. “I assumed you’d move into something a little more appropriate once you had access to your trust fund.”

“It’s more appropriate than a prison cell,” he said pointedly.

“You intend to stay here indefinitely then?”

“That’s none of your business,” Gabriel said. Every line of his body was taut with barely controlled rage. The truth was that they were waiting to move until Mia had been accepted into a law school, but he clearly didn’t want his mother to know she’d be able to find them here.

“Gabriel, please,” his mother said, her tone maternal and condescending and her grip in her purse straps turning her knuckles white. “I don’t understand this hostility. Didn’t I pay for your lawyers? Made sure you had access to the money your grandfather set aside for you?”

“Did you ever call? Write to me? Do anything to make sure I was okay at all? You’ve always been this way, thinking money was enough to fix everything and it never was, not once.”

Lilah took a deep breath, her smile tight. “I did not,” she admitted. “I was angry about … about what happened with your father.”

“And you blamed me,” Gabriel said. “I was so young …”

“You stabbed him,” Lilah said, the last word catching on a sob that she struggled to swallow down. “He was my husband and I lost him.”

“He was my father,” Gabriel reminded her. “I lost him, too.”

“You didn’t lose him! You were the one that took him away from me!” Lilah wiped furiously at her cheeks as the tears began to flow. “I had to bury him knowing it was because of our own child.”

“And you never bothered to ask why,” Gabriel said. He was pacing now, his fingers digging groves in the dark waves of his hair. “Didn’t you care? Didn’t you ever wonder what had happened that could cause someone to do that to their own father?”

“You were always an angry child …” Lilah began but Gabriel’s harsh laugh cut her off.

“So you sent me to Richard,” he reminded her. “Did you read the reports, Mother? Did you see what he did to us?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I didn’t know about any of that.”

“How could you not have known? How could you have been so eager to blame me and so willing to look the other way for him?”

Lilah rubbed her temples and looked at Mia with beseeching eyes. “Richard always presented himself as a good man, a Godly man, someone that you could trust. You know what it’s like, don’t you? There are certain people in your life that you should be able to trust. Doctors, teachers, preachers … and Richard, he was so much more than that.”

“He was a monster hiding behind a mask of faith.”

“He lost his way.”

“Lost his way?” Gabriel asked bitterly. “You know what he did to me, what he did to all the other kids that were forced to stay with him.”

“Yes,” Lilah said, “and instead of telling us what was happening or coming home when you ran away, you lived on the streets. Was that any better?”

“No,” he said, his hands curling and uncurling at his sides as Lilah’s bodyguards shifted restlessly. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? You read those reports, too.”

“You should have come home,” she said. “If you had come home—”

“What? I wouldn’t have been sold to the person with the most money in their pocket? I wouldn’t have killed Hugh?”

“If you had let me help you, if you had told me what Richard was doing …”

“That’s bullshit,” he snarled. “Fuck that. If I had told you what was happening, ran home to you expecting you to save me, you would have sent me back.”

“Gabriel—”

“Don’ t lie,” he said. “For once in your life, be honest with yourself. You know how much shit I lied about before you sent me away—the drinking and the drugs and the partying. Richard knew it, too. If I’d come to you then and told you what was happening, if it came down to my word against Richard Miller’s, who would you have believed?”

Lilah sighed wordlessly and fresh tears sparkled on her lashes, but Gabriel made no move to comfort her. She looked suddenly small and frail, much older than she’d been when she’d arrived as though she’d lost control unexpectedly and it had aged her. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, and Mia thought that the admission had cost her a great deal. She didn’t seem like the kind of person to whom an apology would come easily.

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