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“Okay.” She takes a deep breath and squeezes his hand.

Lucas follows her into the bedroom. His mom looks young and frail sleeping on her side. She’s a formidable woman when she wants to be. Gorgeous, alluring. He was only three but he vaguely remembers that afternoon when she invited Benton St.John up to the apartment. Olivia was pissing him off, taking up the entire sandbox with her princess castle. That had to have been the day Lily was conceived.

“Hey, Mom.” He nudges her shoulder. She mumbles incoherently. “Livy’s leaving. She’s taking you with her. Let me help you up.”

She groans, her head lolling to the side. She looks up at him, eyes unfocused from the sedative, and smiles. “Luc darling. You’re home.”

He clasps her hand and eases her up. She doesn’t argue as he walks her to Olivia’s car. But man, she’ll be spitting flames in the morning when she realizes she didn’t sleep in her own bed.

Livy’s problem. Not his. He’ll be long gone by then.

Olivia joins them outside. She tosses Charlotte’s overnight bag in the back seat. He opens the door for her.

“You going to be okay?” she asks.

He nods, his expression controlled.

She cups his jaw, forcing him to look her in the eye. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Never.” He smirks.

“Lucas,” she warns.

He sighs. “Promise.” A lie. But sometimes, you gotta so you don’t hurt the ones you love. Assuming he’s capable of loving anymore.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” She settles into the car. He closes the door. The engine turns over and she backs from the driveway. With one last look at him she waves, watching as if it’s the last time she’ll see him.

If she only knew.

He turns toward the bay and breathes in the ocean air, trying to cleanse what’s rotting inside him. With one last lingering look at his parents’ house, he walks to the water’s edge with the weight of his and his father’s sins on his shoulders.

CHAPTER 34

At Charlotte’s insistence, Olivia drives her mom to her house. Charlotte doesn’t feel comfortable going to Blaze’s. Olivia doesn’t argue. She calls Blaze, and he and Josh join them at her place. He wrapped up two burgers. Charlotte skips dinner. Groggy from her meds, she goes straight to bed. Noticing Olivia’s blood sugar level is crashing, Blaze puts a burger in front of her. To her surprise, she wolfs it down. The burger is easier to swallow than what she just learned. She’s a murderer’s daughter. That was a lot to unpack, and it’ll have to wait until she finds Lily, or whatever happened to her. Josh is her priority, and she needs to keep herself together for him.

After dinner, Blaze crashes on the couch, since Charlotte’s sharing her bed. For hours Olivia paces her study. She isn’t ready to talk. Numb, she doesn’t know what to feel, let alone think about what Dwight did to Benton, Lily, and Josh. Three generations he’s successfully silenced one way or the other. And she’s having a hard time wrapping her head around that, so she spends the rest of the night with the Crimson Wave. By 5:30 a.m. she’s a wreck. Her dad killed a man. He might have killed Lily. Lucas doesn’t want to involve the cops. But she can’t sit here and do nothing.

Settling on the edge of the couch, she nudges Blaze awake. Tears run freely down her face. This is it. She’s losing it.

“Hey, hey, hey. What’s wrong?” He sits up and cups the back of her head.

“I wasn’t ready to talk last night.”

“I could tell. What’s up?” He caresses her damp cheek.

“It’s my dad. He did something awful. He’s a—” She stops. A sharp, acidic ache expands through her chest. Last week she had a loving, doting father. This week? He’s the most atrocious person she’s known. There’s a gaping hole in her heart where she’d once felt her love for him.

“Let me make us some coffee,” Blaze says.

In the kitchen, he brews coffee and she talks. She shares that Lily is her half sister and that Dwight isn’t returning home. She can’t explain why, but she has the feeling that she’ll never see him again. It was the look in Lucas’s eyes. Haunted. Something terrible happened to him while he was out of town and she suspects her dad was involved.

“Do you remember that case thirty years ago, the one where my parents’ neighbor was murdered? He was stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife? A couple of kids found his body washed up on the beach where the street dead-ends?”

“Vaguely. It was a big deal at the time, wasn’t it?”

Olivia nods. She was only five. Most of what she remembers she read about years later in old newspaper articles.

“It wasn’t solved. But everyone in the neighborhood was a person of interest and questioned. My dad was a suspect. Someone claimed they saw him out walking around the time of the murder. He got off because he had an alibi, my mom. The publicity ruined his chance of election. That was his first congressional campaign. He dropped out. He was very bitter about it.”

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