Page 69 of The Retaliation You Deliver
“Jesus, Leon. I’m so—”
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry. That’s not why I’m telling you. I don’t want your pity. I don’t even want your guilt. Not anymore,” I confess.
“But I could have stopped it.”
“No, baby,” I say softly. “You couldn’t.”
“But I could have told—”
“He got away with it for years, Red. The confession of one eight-year-old girl wasn’t going to stop him. He wastheRichard Fletcher. He was loved in every state, he was hero-worshipped for his abilities on the field. No one would have ever believed you over him.”
“But I could have got evidence or something.”
Unable to stop myself, I finally reach out and tangle our fingers together.
I half expect her to pull away but she doesn’t and I like to think she can sense just how much I need this right now. That she knows how much she settles everything inside me just by being here.
“His actions aren’t on you, Red. None of that was your fault.”
“Not what you said before,” she mutters, anger filling her tone.
“I’ve said a lot of things before. Many that haven’t been true.”
A sad laugh rips from her lips as she thinks back to all the lies I’ve told her in the past few weeks, I’m sure that’s what she’s thinking.
“I hate him so much. It has eaten away at me for ten fucking years, Macie. I had to direct it somewhere or it would have destroyed me.”
“So you thought you’d destroy me instead?”
“I never thought I’d ever find you. I’d made you out to be this evil, sadistic bitch in my head. I’d imagined all the ways I could punish you for that day and as the weeks and years passed it morphed into an obsession. All I could think about was getting my hands on the both of you, how badly I could make it hurt. How I could ruin your lives like you both did mine.”
“And now?” she asks simply.
“Now there’s only one of you that I want to hurt. Actually, no. That’s not true. I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to end him.”
“There’s not much of him left,” she says quietly. “He’s not the person you remember any more. He’s… That man who hurt you, he died years long before he ended up in that place.”
“If that’s your way of trying to tell me not to go after him, then I’ve got to tell you, baby, that it’s not possible. I might know that I was wrong about you. But him? Never.”
“I’m not stopping you from doing anything.”
Finally, she turns her head and looks at me.
Her blue eyes are dark, full of anger, hate and unshed tears making my breath catch in my throat.
“W-what are you saying?”
“Did you know that I was the one who found my dad?” she asks, her voice suddenly hollow, completely void of emotion.
“N-no.”
“I was only in kindergarten. So young and innocent. Yeah, I’d experienced death. Losing my mom was brutal, but I didn’t understand it. I just knew that she was gone and never coming back. I knew that Dad was broken because of it.
“I remember sitting at the top of the stairs at night listening to him cry, shouting, breaking things, in his attempt to deal with his loss.
“I thought it would get better. That’s what everyone was telling me. That the pain would lessen and life would continue, albeit differently.
“But Dad wasn’t getting any better. He was drinking heavily, although of course I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that he wasn’t the man I knew. When he spoke to me he sounded different, when he held me, he wasn’t as soft.”
