Burn (10 page)

The few times she’d
met his family, they had always seemed really happy, mentally and physically
healthy, although abuse could be hidden well. There had been talk of ski trips to
Colorado and beach vacations in Florida, and Evie had wanted to visit Paris for
their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Dannie had talked incessantly about
boys and possibly becoming a teacher one day. Ryan’s dad—God, what was his
name? Daniel, was it?—was more reserved than his wife and children, but polite,
if not a bit pretentious about having money. If she remembered correctly, he
was pretty high up on the ladder of some Fortune 500 company in Birmingham. Their
life back then had all the makings of a picture-perfect American dream—health,
wealth, happiness. No visible cracks.

What
had happened to them?

When Colleen
walked by, Tate snagged her. “Got time for coffee?”

Colleen checked
her watch. “I always have time for coffee, especially when you’re buying.”

“Let’s sit
outside,” Tate said.

Once they had
their coffees and were seated on a stone bench in the outdoor break area, Tate
decided to run her quandary past Colleen. “I need to talk to someone.”

“I figured as
much.”

Tate frowned.
“How so?”

“Well, for one
thing, you rarely ask to sit outside during a break, and for another, that
stack of files you’ve been working on for the last half hour didn’t get any
shorter.”

“It’s annoying
how observant you are,” Tate said drolly, but without real malice.

Colleen
shrugged. “Somebody has to keep you doctor types in check.”

“So,” Tate said.
“This big secret of Ryan’s is slowly driving me insane. I tried really hard to
put it out of my head, and I was doing a fairly good job of it, too, until I
met some friends of his Sunday and … inadvertently came by some information.
Now it’s
all
I can think about. I’m
pretty sure I’ve reached my breaking point, Colleen.”

“Whoa, back up a
sec. What’s the information you came by?”

Tate rubbed the
back of her neck, uncomfortable with telling Colleen the meager bits she knew
thus far, even though she would keep their conversation confidential. Besides
that, who would she tell? Maybe instead she was worried Colleen would think
badly of her for being so conniving. Harsh word, but that’s how Tate felt she’d
been with Elle.

“Well, Ryan finally
told me his leaving had something to do with his family, but that’s all he
would give me. And to be fair, I could tell it hurt him just to say that much,
so I backed off. But then this Sunday I did something truly awful.” She glanced
up at Colleen who motioned for her to continue. “I was having this conversation
with someone—the friend by association—who knows what happened, and I kind of
went along with it like I knew, too, just to see what she’d reveal. But then
she said something about Ryan’s mom trying to kill herself as a result of what
his dad did and I … I made a noise that pretty much gave away that I
didn’t
know—”

“Oh
Jesus, Tate.”

Tate hung her
head. “I know. I’m an awful person, I get that, but aside from my rotten
nature, what do I do now?!”

“No, I didn’t
mean what you did was awful. A little underhanded, maybe, but with your
backstory with Ryan, I think it’s forgivable. His mother tried to commit
suicide?”

“Apparently.”

“Poor
kid.
Whatever his dad did, it must’ve been terrible.”

“Trust me, I’ve
run every scenario I can think of through my head at least a hundred times.”

“It’s really not
good for you to be this distracted at work either,” Colleen said, not that Tate
wasn’t well aware of this already.

Miserable, Tate
dropped her face into her hands. “What do I do, Colleen?”

“You have to
tell him.”

“But tell him
what? That I tricked his best friend’s girlfriend out of information? He’s
liable to be furious with me, and rightly so.”

Colleen made a
wry face. “Oh, I don’t know. He might find it a huge relief to finally get it
off his chest.”

“But I’ll be
forcing him to get it off his chest before he’s ready. It’s obviously something
traumatic, something that pains him to this day to rehash.”

Tate stood up
and walked over to the low concrete wall surrounding the break area. The situation
felt hopeless, but she was past the point of being able to ignore it any longer.
The barrier between the past and their future seemed as solid as the cool stone
wall at her hips. Ryan had to come clean with her, as hard as it was for him to
do, otherwise the
whys
would always
be that ugly gray cloud hanging over their heads. Why he left, why he didn’t
call or write, why he’d stayed gone so long, why he didn’t love her enough to
trust her with the truth.

“I don’t want to
lose him, not when I’ve just found him again.”

“He found you,
remember?” Colleen joined Tate, dropping a comforting hand to her shoulder.
“And if you start with that, everything will be fine.”

Tate dumped her
untouched coffee over the wall. It had gone cold anyway, kind of how this
subject made her feel.
Cold and uncomfortable.

The things your
family did were beyond your control. She understood that and in no way held
Ryan responsible. It didn’t affect the way she felt about him one iota. But there
was still phantom pain from when he’d left her, and in order for their
relationship to feel whole and healthy, they needed to get it all out in the
open.

“Do you know his
dad’s first name?” Colleen asked.

“I think
it’s
Daniel. Why?”

“You could
Google him, see what pops up. Most everything newsworthy makes it onto the
internet. At the very least you might find an article in their local paper. It
could lessen the desire for you to hear the particulars from him. Then when he
does decide to tell you himself, it won’t be such a shock.”

“Or it could just
multiply the guilt I already feel for tricking Elle.”

“Who?”

The hospital
P.A. system crackled to life, paging Tate back to the ER. “Never mind,” she
told Colleen as she headed inside.

Chapter
Nine

Ryan was pissed.

Tate wouldn’t
answer her phone, wouldn’t return his calls. She’d responded to one text
message late last night saying she was exhausted and she’d see him in “a couple
of days.”

He understood
she worked long hours and that maybe she needed to catch up on her sleep
occasionally. She did a tough, trying job, and he had the utmost respect for
her and all health professionals in general. Honestly, he wondered how she
managed to stay sane with all the horrors she saw on a near daily basis.

But
a couple of days
?
What
the fuck did that mean?

Just as soon as
he could get away from the restaurant later tonight, he’d find out.
Personally.

“Ryan, got a
minute?” Kevin asked him before the dinner rush started.

“Sure.” Ryan set
the knife he was using aside, wiping his hands on a towel.

Kevin led the
way to his cramped, cluttered office and shut the door behind them. Ryan
propped himself against a filing cabinet while Kevin sat down in the chair
behind his desk.

“What’s up?”
Ryan asked.

The sigh Kevin
heaved didn’t bode well for whatever he was about to say. “Elle broke down this
morning and told me she let something slip about your mother to Tate at the
ballgame on Sunday.”

He frowned,
replaying Kevin’s news in his head. “How did—”

“Elle know?” Kevin
asked, and Ryan nodded. “After she met you, I told her the story, never
expecting that she’d one day meet Tate and they’d hit it off so well. I’m sorry,
dude.”

“It’s okay,”
Ryan said absently. “What exactly did she say to Tate?”

“They were
talking about what a great guy you were, and Elle said something to the effect
of you being too sweet for all the hell your family put you through. I gathered
Tate must’ve … played along so Elle thought she knew everything. When she
mentioned your mother’s suicide attempt, Tate caved and admitted she was still
in the dark.”

“Sonofabitch.”
Ryan
sat down on the corner of Kevin’s desk, rubbing his face.

“It’s been
eating Elle alive, worrying about the two of you, and if she caused any
problems.”

“This kind of explains
a few things actually,” Ryan muttered. The strained smiles she’d given him
during the game, the peculiar way she’d acted afterward, the sex marathon after
dinner that night, avoiding his calls now. This was exactly the thing Ryan
wanted to avoid—her pity—but it was his fault for delaying the inevitable this
long.

“Did Elle tell
her anything else?”

“No.” Kevin
shook his head, looking Ryan straight in the eye. “She asked Tate to be patient
with you, that’s all.”

It was Ryan’s
turn to sigh heavily. “And she has been. More than I deserve.”

“It was a shitty
ordeal, Ryan, and you were a better man than most in how you dealt with it. You
can be proud of that, even though it cost you a lot. She’s back in your life
again, and it’s probably time you told her everything so the both of you can
put it behind you for good.”

Ryan nodded
grimly.

Time
to pay the piper.

A few hours later,
he was ringing Tate’s doorbell. He stepped back so she could see him through
the peephole. It was an eternity before there was sound on the other side of
the door, but the locks didn’t rattle or click right away. He swore he could
hear her breathing through the barrier separating them.

Leaning close to
the wood, he said, “Open the door, honey.”

She disengaged
the locks and pulled it open. When Ryan stepped through, she pressed her back
to the wall behind the door and let go of the knob. He locked them inside
before turning to her again.

Tate crumpled
like an accordion.

It was hard to
believe a human being could look so small and fragile, yet there she was,
curling in on herself as if the very air around her was too heavy to bear on
her skin. She buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders began to shake with
silent sobs.

Ryan crouched
down in front of her and pulled her hands away. There was so much distress in
her damp green eyes he almost wept, too. “Oh, baby. Come ‘ere.”

She threw
herself at him, nearly toppling his body backward. Ryan
stood,
bringing her with him, then scooped her up and carried her to the couch. He
gently deposited her down in one corner of the cushions.

“I think we need
a stiff drink,” he mumbled, the “we” in that statement being him mostly, but
she probably wouldn’t turn one down.

Ryan very rarely
drank anything stronger than beer, but this particular instance demanded
something with a much higher proof. He remembered seeing a bottle of vodka
buried in the back of Tate’s freezer, frosted over and half-hidden behind some
nasty frozen dinners. He grabbed two tumblers, adding a few cubes of ice to
each, and carried them and the cold bottle back into the living room.

“I’m so sorry,
Ryan,” she said,
then
sniffed as more tears tracked
down her pale cheeks.

He tipped a healthy
portion of the liquor into a glass and handed it to her. “I need to know what
you’re apologizing for.”

Instead of
sitting beside her, he sat across from her on a heavy wooden trunk she used as
a coffee table, swallowing a gulp of his drink. The alcohol burned its way to
his stomach, but the fine tremors beneath his skin subsided.

Tate looked down
at the glass in her hand, tapping one side of it with a nail. “I tricked Elle
at the ballgame. She was just being nice—”

“I know about
that part already,” Ryan said. “Kevin explained to me earlier tonight that she
broke down and told him what she said to you.”

She rubbed her
forehead. “God, I’m such a horrible person for putting her in that position.
He’s not mad with her, is he?”

“No, they’re
fine. She was more worried about us.”

“I’m worried
about us, too,” she said, her bottom lip quivering.

Ryan’s heart
squeezed tight. He reached out to brush a fresh tear off her cheek. “We’ll be
okay, honey, after tonight.”

She nodded
weakly. “Since you know about what I did to Elle, I guess I should also tell
you I Googled your dad’s name yesterday, but I couldn’t bring myself to read
the news articles once they popped up.”

Polishing off
the rest of his drink, Ryan set the glass down and rubbed his hands together
between his knees. “And what words did you see when the articles popped up?”

Tate resettled
herself on the couch, a bit calmer it seemed, now that they were talking. “I
saw something about a … a sexual assault on a minor. I stopped reading after
that.” She winced, blinking back more tears. “Please tell me it wasn’t Dannie,
not that that lessens the seriousness of the crime any.”