Like a wrecking ball to his gut, her admission walloped him. He stumbled and gripped the wall behind him. His head was swimming. It was a roiling sea. Eighteen fucking years were compressed into this moment. Her words echoed across the vast cavern of time, clanging through the days, the months, and the pages on the calendar, stabbing him with a million cuts. His own omissions. His own secrets. Most of all, his foolish hope that his mother wasn’t a murderer.

“You had him murdered?” The question tasted like dirt.

“I had to keep you safe.”

“Why did he have to die to keep us safe? He didn’t have to die.” But even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew there was no point to them. The decision had been made eighteen years ago—whether for drugs, for money, for her lover, or from fear. He might not ever know why she did it. All he knew now was she did.

“I love you and your sister and your brothers so much and I do, I still do. I swear I love you so much. I love you, baby. I love you, Ryan.” She began weeping, a deep, dark keening sound like a bruised, battered thing heaving itself onto the shore, defeated.

Like Ryan.

He’d travelled here hoping for an answer, but never expecting to get one.

Instead, he’d received her confession.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

His legs were lead. His head was concrete. His heart had mutinied. It was somewhere lost in time. It was listening to Johnny Cash with his father before his dad’s friends came over. It was watching the end of the pirate show. It was wandering up and down the Strip without him.

He made a beeline for the exit, pushing past Clara and the other correctional officers, putting blinders on to avoid the rest of the visiting families. The second he left the facility, the door falling shut behind him, he crumpled on the hot stone steps. He didn’t care one lick that you could fry an egg on them.

Let him burn. Let him feel. Let the pain erase the foolishness, the shame, the utter shock.

He dropped his forehead into his hand, replaying his mother’s last words. Wishing he could go back and redo them, erase them, rewrite them.

Make them make sense.

Not that this—his life visiting a women’s correctional center each month—would ever make much sense. He shut his eyes, but all he saw was the blood in the driveway. All he heard were the screams when she found the body.

Were those fake too? Had she practiced them? Did she go to some abandoned house somewhere to rehearse her reaction to finding her husband shot dead?

His stomach seized, and he coughed—a dry, hacking bark.

Then, he flinched.

A hand was on his back, rubbing the space between his shoulder blades. He lifted his head to see Clara. “Rough visit?” she asked gently, kneeling next to him.

“Yeah,” he muttered.

She nodded sagely. As if she’d seen it all. “That happens sometimes. Can I get you a Coke from the vending machine? Or a Diet Coke?”

He shook his head then realized his throat was parched. “Coke would actually be great.”

Two minutes later, she returned with two cold sodas. With a weary sigh, she settled in next to him on the steps, handed him a can and cracked open hers, taking a hearty gulp.

He did the same, narrowing his focus to the coldness of the beverage and the bubbles in the drink. “She did it,” he said heavily as he turned the can around in his hand.

Clara patted his knee. “They all did it, Ryan. That’s why they’re here.”

“Fuck,” he muttered. “I really thought…”

“Of course you did. You love her. She’s your mother. If you listen to the ladies in there,” she said, pointing her thumb at the concrete building, “there’s not a guilty one among ’em.” Clara shook her head in amusement, her brown curly hair bouncing with her. “Amazing, isn’t? A whole facility full of the innocent? Judge made a mistake. Someone else did it. Framed, I was framed,” she said, rattling off the stories the inmates told.

The last one seared into him like a cattle brand.

“That one. That was hers,” he said. Framed.

Sure, there were details he didn’t know, like twisty rat tails coiled together, which would likely take years to unravel. He didn’t know why those men made her go through with the murder, or what their motivation was. He didn’t know precisely who played what role. He didn’t know how far back in time the planning went, or where the other two men were.

But he knew this much—his mother was involved in his father’s murder.

His eighteen-year obsession had an answer.

“You’ll still come see her, right?” Clara asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, what’s the point?”

Clara answered in a plain, simple voice. “That’s what we do for family.”

“But she did it,” Ryan pointed out. The specifics didn’t need to be outlined. The who, what, why, where and when could be sorted out by others.

“Right,” she said slowly. “But that’s not why you come see her. You don’t come see her because she’s innocent of a crime. You come because you’re a good man. Because you have compassion. Because even the criminals of this world need someone who cares about them. Maybe she’s in for life, and she’ll never have a chance to be redeemed on the outside. But maybe the fact that you come here helps her to be a better person in this place. Maybe she finds her redemption behind bars, because of you.”

“Do they? Find redemption?”

Clara shrugged. “Some do. Some don’t. You still gotta come to work every day, right?” she said, then drained more of her soda.

He did the same, then rose. “Better hit the road.”

She nodded. “I’ll be looking for you around these parts.”

He managed a half-hearted smile of acknowledgement. He didn’t know if he’d ever be in these parts again. He didn’t know where the ground was, where the sky ended, or how to find his way back home after hearing her confession.

The only thing he knew for sure was how to avoid the speed traps, so he turned on an app when he got in his truck.

A little more than four hours later, he’d dodged a speeding ticket, but hadn’t been able to stop playing the cruel song on repeat in his head—they made me do it, they made me do it, they made me do it.

Did she set the wheels in motion, then try to cancel? But they forced her? How would that even work?

Gripping the wheel tighter, he cursed up a storm. He’d been such a fool. For so damn long he’d clung to a big what if. That possibility had tied him up, tethered him, and obsessed him.

Today, he was cut loose. Left adrift and unmoored.

Glancing at the green sign on the highway, he registered that he was five miles from his house. He wanted to see his dog, but he also didn’t want to be alone. The closer the truck wheels turned to the exit, the less he wanted to be by himself.

He needed company. He needed someone.

Though he desperately wanted to see Sophie, he didn’t want to see her like this. Not when his head was messier than it had ever been, and not when his heart was twisted into tattered strands.

The time he’d spent with Sophie over the last few weeks was like shedding a skin, molting his old self, leaving it behind.

But now?

Hell, he didn’t know if he was coming or going. If he was the guy he’d been before or the man he’d become with Sophie.

Limbo. This was the utter hell of limbo. He was stuck in it like quicksand, and he didn’t want to drag her down with him.

He needed the three people in his life who’d known him before, during and after.

As he turned on his blinker to exit the highway, he called Shannon, gave her the rundown, and she told him she’d gather the crew.

Then his phone rang, and it was Sophie.

* * *

Passport? Check.