Page 22 of Salvaged Heart
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“Try me.”
He clung to my hand like a lifeline while he gathered the words he needed to give me this part of himself. I waited patiently, a small part of me happy that I was finally making progress, the rest of me breaking for him.
“Jonah gave me many things. The best of which was my sexual awakening,” he laughed, but it was all nerves, no humor. “The worst was a ruthless addiction to opiates.”
“As in painkillers?”
“Yeah, the good kind they give you after surgery.” His words echoed in my brain, clicking a piece of the arduous puzzle that was Anders Carmichael into place.I said clean, not sober—which I am trying my darn hardest to be…words he’d said to Laurel the day we arrived, but I’d dismissed them as sibling sparing.
“You were high, too, that night.” Not a question.
“Yes, but watching the boy I was deeply in love with convulse and turn blue in my arms while I tried to call 911 sobered me up real fast.”
If the police had come, he would have been arrested, right? The second they arrived on the scene, they would have tested him for the drugs. He was complicit in Jonah’s death.
As if reading my train of thought, “I don’t know who my stepdad paid off, but he made it all disappear. The charges, the police reports, and every connection I had to Jonah except this photo right here. He wiped him from my life like he never even existed. I don’t even know where he was buried.” Anders let out an uncontrolled sob. It shook his entire body as he let it go. “Sometimes, I think all those years we spent together were some sort of drug-induced dream.”
Everything Laurel has told you about me is true…
“You got help, right? After, I mean. You got sober?”
He dropped my gaze, shaking his head with a sigh. “I’m trying, Beck, I really am.”
The confession hit me like a freight train. All these little bits I knew about Anders suddenly slotted into place like one of those sliding tile puzzles. When all the individual parts were jumbled, none of it made sense, but now they were beginning to slide about, and each piece clicked into place.
The image was clear as fucking day.
I jumped up from his bed and stormed over to his backpack, which lay on the seat of the bay window, yanking the top zipper open. It had been the only bag Anders had arrived with.
“Beckham, don’t.”
He was on his feet beside me in the blink of an eye, trying to wrestle the bag from my hands but, in doing so, caused the entire thing to shift sideways, dislodging the evidence he’d been desperately trying to hide. Three orange pill bottles crashed to the floor, one after the other, drugs rattling like maracas as they rolled under the bed. But it was the next item to fall that caught my attention.
A heavy diamond-covered broach slipped from under some clothes shoved in the bottom of the bag, right into my open palm. I recognized it immediately. Margery had shown Laurel and me a picture of it the morning of Anders’ panic attack while we were still waiting for him to come inside, estimating it was worth almost a hundred thousand dollars. They had discovered it in the primary bedroom closet, along with several other pieces from Aunt Millie’s extensive jewelry collection.
“I can explain.” He murmured. “Please just let me…”
“Were you planning to sell this to buy drugs?”
He shook his head. “No, no, I promise. I was going to sell it, but not for that.” His eyes pleaded with me to let him go on. He seemed like he was being earnest, but hadn’t that been what Laurel had warned me of to begin with?
He will have you thinking you're best of friends and then screw you over when you least expect it.
I had been such a damn fool.
“Then what for?” I grit out.
He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “For rehab.”
“For rehab?” I parroted. “You expect me to believe an addict was stealing his dead aunt's jewelry to pay for rehab. Don’t you have access to a ridiculous inheritance?”
“Not anymore. My mother put restrictions on it the day after Jonah died. I was able to access it for a while in limited amounts, but I burnt through my reserves too quickly, and they cut me off completely three years ago.”
“I’m sure if you were honest with them and told them you needed help, they would have paid for it without question. Why resort to this?”
He hung his head, rubbing the back of his neck. “Because I asked them once for help already, and I broke their trust.” He stared at the space between our feet like the ground would melt away from under him at any minute, and he would slip willingly through it. “Back then, I wasn’t ready. I spent the money on booze and drugs, and my bike. But things are different now.”
