Page 65 of Stolen Goods
Thinking of Thad gone, thinking of the pain he was probably enduring, the pain he had endured, it was suffocating. Addy couldn’t breathe. Her skin was hot. Her throat was tight. Jo was elbow deep in chocolate ganache, piping little spirals to look like the poo emoji. Addy took the opening. “I’ll get it.”
She practically ran to the front door.Is it him? It can’t be. Why would he be back? But what if he is? What if he came back…for me?Her heart fluttered in her chest. Her mind raced. Her imagination went all the places she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Addy couldn’t help it. With a deep breath, she twisted the knob and—
Crack!
The door flew open and slammed into the wall. For the second time in her life, two men stepped forward, aiming guns at her chest. But this time, she didn’t scream. She stood there in shock and stared, not quite able to believe her eyes. In the kitchen, the ovendinged.
“Where’s Thaddeus Ryder?” one of the men growled, accent thick.
Addy swallowed and found her voice just long enough to whisper, “Code brown?”
- 25 -
Thad
“Aren’t you that guy on TV?” Emma asked, tilting her head to the side and squinting. Her voice was carefree and light, laced with the naiveté of youth, full of all the things he’d never had. And yet, there wasn’t an ounce of jealousy in his bones. He’d always wanted that for her—a normal life. “Isn’t, like, the whole country looking for you?”
“Yeah,” he confessed, lifting his hand to run it through his hair, uncomfortable. In all his years of dreaming, this was never how he imagined this conversation might go. “I guess I am that guy on TV.”
“Thad.” Her voice was frail, so weak he thought for a moment that if he lifted his hands, he might be able to catch the sound and swat it away. This wasn’t about her. It was about Emma. Still, the words settled heavy in his bones, weighing his feet to the spot. “Thad, is that really you?”
Emma frowned, shifting her gaze to study her mom. Then she turned back to Thad with a calculating look in her gray eyes, an expression so similar to their father’s it stole the breath from his lungs. She was smart, he knew it from the many report cards he’d read over the years, but now he could see she was cunning too—a trait they shared. She catalogued every detail, taking them in and sorting them, until the full picture came to fruition. Her eyes popped wide.
Warm palms came to his cheeks, turning his face away toward a sight he didn’t much care for. His mother’s grip was tight, as though she feared he might be a ghost, one wrong word from disappearing. All his life he’d pictured her brown eyes the moment before she’d left—cold and distant, a patch of dirt trapped beneath a frozen layer of ice. Now, they watched him with a warmth he didn’t understand, turning his stubborn heart all the bitterer.
“Thad,” she whispered again, brushing her thumb across his cheek.
A crack splintered down his walls.
He quickly built them back up and twisted free of her grip. While his mother stood frozen, he moved to the table and took a seat. He ached to reach across the distance and take one of his sister’s hands, but they weren’t there yet. They might never be. Instead, he folded his fists on the tabletop and met her questioning eyes.
“Emma,” he said slowly. This time, she flinched when he said her name, confusion and anger mounting. A little piece of him broke at the sight. “I know this will be a lot for you to take in, and it might not be the best time or place or delivery, but unfortunately, I’ve run out of options. I wanted you to hear this from me, before reporters followed the trail, before the news got wind. I’m, well—” He took a deep breath, strengthening his voice. “I’m your brother.”
“My brother?” she repeated slowly.
Thad nodded.
She swallowed, gaze darting between him and her mother. “But aren’t you, like, a criminal? My friends showed me a magazine at school. They’re obsessed with you. You’re a thief or something. Didn’t you just kidnap someone?”
Thad winced. “You’re probably going to hear a lot about me in the next few months. Not all of it’s true, but I’ll—”
“How is this possible?” Emma interrupted, voice rising. Her head swiveled to the side where her mother was still standing silent. She was good at that. “Mom? How is this possible? What is he talking about?”
“Honey,” their mother murmured, on the edge of a sob. Her eyes were wet in a way Thad didn’t understand. “It’s true.”
Emma’s chin wobbled. All of a sudden, in her pigtails and her uniform, she looked so much like a child. He hated himself for doing this to her.
“When I was eight,” Thad started, paused, then forced the next word through his lips. “Mom left while she was pregnant with you. Our father was a bad man. She wanted to get away from him. She wanted to get you away from him. So, she left. You were better for it, and I—well, I guess I followed the only footsteps I had left to follow.” He could feel their mother’s eyes on him, silently pleading he turn and meet her gaze. He didn’t. He swallowed and kept going. “And now some very bad men are after me, and they aren’t above using you to get to me. Which is why I’m here, now. I need you to know that this is serious. I’m not lying. And in the next few weeks, whatever the FBI tells you to do, you’ll need to listen, because it will keep you safe. If they tell you to shut down all your social media profiles, you will. If they tell you to get a new phone, you will. If they tell you not to communicate with your friends for a while, you won’t. Because this isn’t a game. I wish you could have stayed ignorant of the harsher sides of the life forever, but because of who I am, who our father was, I don’t think that was ever going to be possible for you, Emma. I waited as long as I could, but time ran out faster than I would’ve liked.”
She stared at him in silence for a moment, then at her mom, then back at him, over and over, the intelligence in her gaze slowly overtaken by teenage emotion. “I thought my father was dead.”
“He is.” Thad held her gaze, fully aware that some blows were impossible to soften. All he could offer was the truth. “He died five years ago.”
“No.” Emma shook her head and curled her hands into fists, staring hard at the table. “I thought he wasalwaysdead. I thought you were a widow. I thought I was an only child. I thought— I thought—” Her voice rose to a scream. Her eyes fastened on their mother. “You lied! My whole life, you lied to me! Why?”
“Emma.” The word slipped out in a maternal scold, but their mother was too weak for the command to land true.
Emma leapt to her feet. The chair fell back, landing with a crash against the floor.She’s willful, Thad thought, the corner of his mouth lifting.Like me.
