Page 90 of You Betrayed Me (The Cahills 3)

Over and over again.

To what end?

So that she could hurt you? Backstab you? Then come running back for you to solve her problems?

Face it, Rebecca: You can’t fix her. No one can.

And she doesn’t want to be fixed.

No matter where she is; no matter what’s happened to her.

Rebecca’s heart ached for a second, but she forced that pain backward just as she had all her life.

As she had when her biological father had left.

As she had when her adoptive father, Donald, had divorced Lenora.

As she had when Megan had stolen James.

But she couldn’t give up.

Not yet.

She had to make a public statement, begging for Megan’s release if she were being held against her will, even though as yet no ransom request had come through. Sometimes women were kidnapped for other reasons, used by their captors. Her skin crawled at the thought of the sex slaves she’d read about, or the people drawn into cults.

Her throat was dry.

She had to do something. Her phone was charging on the small desk in her hotel room, and she snatched it up and scrolled through her recent calls. Reporter after reporter had left messages, the most persistent being Charity Spritz, but she was with the newspaper, and Rebecca thought her plea needed to be televised.

She imagined herself staring into the camera as she begged for whoever held Megan captive, if she were alive, to release her.

That would be effective.

Everyone, including James, would take her impassioned pleas to heart.

But could she go through with it?

Why did she feel like such a phony?

It wasn’t that she didn’t love Megan; she did. But she was tired of the theatrics, sick to the back teeth of everything revolving around her younger sister. When Donald had left, he hadn’t so much as said good-bye to Rebecca. He never called, not once. But he’d kept in contact with Megan.

And hadn’t Lenora doted on her younger daughter during that painful period? “She’s so sensitive, you know,” her mother had said, not thinking that Rebecca too was wounded and in pain.

In the following years, Megan had messed up her life so often, losing jobs and boyfriends and leases on apartments at a head-spinning rate. Yet each and every time, Megan had come running to Rebecca, expecting her calm, level-headed older sister to fix things, to help Megan pick up the pieces of her shattered life, thoughtlessly expecting Rebecca’s own life to be secondary.

There was the time Rebecca had come to her rescue when Megan had gotten caught in her own emotional trap and her live-in boyfriend had drained their joint bank accounts, leaving her with an unpaid lease on an expensive apartment and zero money. Rebecca had found someone to take over the lease, a soon-to-be-married couple and clients of A Vision in White, the bridal company where she worked. She’d also allowed Megan to move in with her while she licked her wounds and pulled herself together. Rebecca had helped out with the bills and offered her younger sister as much emotional support as she could. Megan had leaned on her hard and then finally moved on.

That particular incident had been nearly two years ago, before Megan had met James, but it wasn’t the only one. Each and every time Megan’s shattered life had been thrust upon Rebecca, she’d tried her best to pick up the pieces and glue them back together as best she could.

Until now. Until Megan had stabbed her in the back by taking up with James Cahill. She still remembered the day when Megan had admitted that she’d been seeing James.

They’d been in Rebecca’s condo in Seattle. It had been drizzling, raindrops sliding down the kitchen window over the sink. Megan had been nervous, licking her lips, picking at her sleeve, her blue eyes clouded. She’d come over with a message, and she’d refused to sit down. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she’d said and met the questions in Rebecca’s eyes.

“Okay.”

“You, um, you said that you thought James was losing interest in you.”

Had she? That wasn’t quite right. “I think l said, ‘James has been distracted lately.’ ” Rebecca saw the indecision on her sister’s face. “Why?”

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