Page 80 of Clean Sweep
“You saw the other apartment?”
He nodded. His gaze didn’t waver from mine, but I sensed tension build between us. If he’d been to the other apartmentandthis one, that suggested a timeline. And timeline meant he’d known the truth for much longer than me.
The quiet must have been too much, because he kept explaining.
“I’m going to hazard a guess that they haven’t been able to afford any furniture.” He waved a vague hand toward the kitchenette area. “I stocked them with food last time, and was going to go again once I returned from the office with Starla. Things are pretty lean for them, I think. Landon doesn’t give a lot of details. I think he’s having a hard time.”
I ground my jaw together. Curse Landon and his blasted pride.
“Starla didn’t want to tell me?” I guessed as I gazed around, unable to look right at him. No, then he’d see the building frustration. My child was in need and Tanner knew it. He’d deliberately withheld that information during the dozens of hours of phone calls that lay between then and now.
The opportunities to tell me were endless.
He didn’t.
“She didn’t want her first impression on the whole family to be her sickness,” Tanner murmured. “She wanted to enjoy Christmas, the wedding, and meet everyone without the diagnosis hanging over everything. What they feel is real. They don’t want people to think that their marriage only happened because she needed some extra support.”
Unable to fight the building tension in my chest, I exploded to my feet and began to pace.
“Her family?” I asked.
He shrugged. “All Landon has said is that her family isn’t in the picture, and it’s better that way. She has no one else except two roommates that genuinely care about her, but are really busy with their own lives. They couldn’t give the support she needs, and she can’t work in this state. Not while undergoing chemo,” he added, “and the radiation that will follow.”
Two decades of raising pillars of testosterone taught me how to hold my tongue and think a situation through. I leaned on that experience now. I pressed my lips together as an added measure so I didn’t lash out at Tanner, although maybe he deserved that too.
None of this felt good, right, or easy.
While my mind spun out over the fact that Landon had been hiding all of this from me, I couldn’t set aside Tanner’s responsibility in all of this.
All this time he’d known the secret.
He’d been helping my son and didn’t breathe a word of it to me. I couldn’t tell which betrayal felt greater. Landon’s lack of trust and openness with me, or Tanner’s.
In the meantime, my heart went out to Starla. Estranged from her family and on her own with such a scary diagnosis. Any young-twenty-something might have done the same thing. Didn’t make it the correct path, but certainly made sense in light of their age.
Two full minutes passed before I could summon up a word.
“I’d like to talk to Starla.”
Tanner lifted a wary eyebrow. “And say?” he asked. A sense of protectiveness lay in that tone, and my cup boiled over.
“That is not your business,” I snapped with a step toward him. “I think you’ve done enough. Thank you for encouraging Tanner to call me. Thank you for helping him when he wouldn’t let me, and thank you for buying them food. But now I need you to go.”
“Les, she’s in a really vulnerable—“
I held up two hands when he stepped toward me.
“Don’t come near me.”
A wounded look crossed his face, but I didn’t care. He’d given me a chance to vent all the bubbling helplessness I’d been dealing with forweekswhile he went around my back, parenting my kid.
With fury in my voice I said, “If you really think I’m going to take out anything on that sick girl in there, you don’t know me at all. You’ve offended me with that insinuation and I don’t want to talk to you right now. Please go.”
A thousand things appeared in his gaze all at once. One could almost call the look soulful until it passed.
The mixture of frustrated, confused, aggravated, and loss startled me. How could such a large man still seem like such a little boy? He blinked it away and shuffled back a step.
“Okay.”
