Page 39 of A Forgotten Mistake

I hesitate as his words settle in. “I’m not… I’m not upset, Liam. I was just… wondering what this was… and what’s going on with her. Is this her birthday?”

“What?” he asks, like he has no idea what I might be referring to. He kisses the space between my fingers before smiling. “Kidding. No, it’s not. You want to know?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the anniversary of her father’s death.”

“And you killed him?”

Liam’s eyes don’t part from mine. “I did.”

I nod, having assumed as much.

“Does that upset you?”

I think about the answer to that, but I’m honestly not sure upset is the word I’d use. I don’t actually know what to say about that. “I guess… we see what she wants. Maybe she will want to talk in person over what happened… or maybe it’s something else.”

“Okay,” he says as he releases my hand and gets out of bed. We both get dressed before I follow him out the door to the car. “You can ask me about it if you want.”

“Did he deserve it?”

“DoIthink he deserved it or would you think he did?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

Liam drives in silence for a moment. “Sometimes there’s no other way out. And before you say that there’s always a way out… her father was a cop who everyone adored, but behind closed doors he had a less than desirable personality.”

“If they saw him as such a good man, why was she taken from him? Didn’t you meet at a group home? Or in foster care or something?”

“She’d run from him to live with her mother who couldn’t keep her. She was being held at the same place as me while they were determining whether she’d go back to her mother or be forced to live with her father. She fought it for a good while, but they eventually approved that her father would have full custody of her and she had no say in the matter.”

“I assume he abused her? She didn’t tell them?”

“She… wasn’t a good kid. She was a chronic liar who’d built her life manipulating people to get what she needed. People who aren’t in these types of situations don’t realize that sometimes that’s the only way you can survive. So when the time came, they believed him over her.”

“But you believed her?”

“I didn’t have to. I just had to watch him from the shadows to learn everything I needed to know. Abby was the same age as me. She only had to put up with her monster for a little over one more year, and I’m confident she was prepared to. But when she heard that her stepmother was pregnant… she knew another kid would go through the same cycle. That it would never end. So I ended it.”

My stomach tightens as I think about what she had to have gone through. “I’m glad she didn’t have to live with him anymore.”

“The two of us see the world in different ways, but that doesn’t mean we can’t both see what the better outcome is,” he says. “We just often get to that outcome differently.”

NINE

Liam

Twenty-two years ago—age sixteen

“Why don’t you look impressed at all?” Abby asks as she stands there with her shirt up, breasts on display.

I’m currently sitting on her bed in the foster home I’ve been in for a short while. She really hasn’t been here all that long, about a month at this point, and the bed previously belonged to a kid who asked me every question under the sun, all of which I ignored. I clapped when he left, which my temporary foster parents didn’t seem to approve of. I secretly think they wanted to clap as well and were merely jealous it’d be inappropriate for them to do so.

“Don’t you want to touch them?” she asks.

“If I touch them, will you write my report for me?” I ask. “You can even pick the topic if you want.”

“Why do you act like you’re the one rewardingmeby touching them!” she snaps as she yanks her shirt down.

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