Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(62)

When my mom pulled it open I guess I expected her to look older, still drawn and ravaged with grief. She didn’t. In fact she looked so much like she had before Rissa was murdered it made me fall back a step. The distance between us didn’t last long as she reached out and wrapped me up in a hug. I was so shocked by the contact I didn’t even hug her back. The warm reception stunned me and made the reason I was here after all this time even harder to choke down.

“You look so pretty. It’s been so long.” She led me through a familiar hallway littered with pictures from my youth. Picture after picture of me and Rissa growing up. The memories knocked me sideways so hard I had to put a hand on the wall to stay upright. My mom gave me a concerned look and took my elbow to guide me the rest of the way into the tiny and cluttered living room, peppering me along the way with questions about where I had been and what I had been up to. My father was lounging in his easy chair watching TV. He looked so normal, just like my mother did, that I practically fell into the couch when the backs of my legs hit it. How had life just gone on for them? How had they battled down the grief and sorrow without doing something about it? I shifted my gaze from one to the other in shock. This was not the family I had left behind. This was a family that had healed and moved on without me.

I gulped as my mom patted my knee.

“It was lovely to hear your voice today, Reeve. Your father and I missed you. We wonder how you are doing every single day.” There was so much kindness and love on her face that I wanted to fold over and clutch my stomach because I felt like I had been kicked in the guts.

My dad grunted his agreement and turned back to the television. I took a deep breath and curled my fingers tightly into my palm.

“I missed you guys too. It was just hard to be here. Too many memories.” I was going to have to tell my mom that I nearly suffocated on them and ask her how she hadn’t.

“Well, the memories are all we have left, so we try and hold on tight to them.”

Conner knew just what he was doing. This was going to kill me more effectively than a bullet to the brain or a knife slipped between my ribs. He was killing my soul, murdering my spirit, and the bastard knew it. I was going to tarnish the remaining good my parents held on to from Rissa and from me. Those memories would be forever tainted once I told them the length I had gone to, to exact vengeance against Rissa’s killer.

“We were so excited when that handsome agent knocked on the door and told us there was new information. We just knew Rissa wasn’t into all that horrible stuff they said she was when she died.”

A cold sweat broke out across my skin and I had to blink slowly and force air in and out of my lungs. “That agent lied to you, Mom. He doesn’t have anything new on Rissa. She died because her boyfriend was a drug dealer and a pimp. She died because she loved a bad man and he hurt her. She died because she made really bad choices for herself and she was just as messed up as he was at the end.”

My mom gasped and lifted her hands to her mouth. My dad shot a look at me from his reclined position but he didn’t get up. So it began.

I sighed and told my mother, “The agent came here to see you because he knows secrets about me. Ugly, dark secrets, and he wants me to tell them to you so you can know what kind of person your surviving daughter really is.” I had to take a deep breath because the look of horror that flashed across my mother’s face was almost enough to make me stop talking. “He wants me to tell you what I did when I found out Rissa was dead. He wants me to confess that I went a little crazy, got so lost in the need for revenge and in grief that I made my own bad choices. He’s not even a marshal anymore, I don’t think he ever really was. He had a badge but he just used it for his own ends, not to help anyone else. He’s a bad man and he’s trying to hurt a lot of people. He forced me to come here and hurt you.”

My mom got to her feet and started pacing back and forth in front of me. “What are you talking about, Reeve? None of this makes any sense.” She still had hope. I could hear it in her voice. If I hadn’t been planning on killing Conner already, I would be now. I hated having to be the one to take that hope from her.

“I knew Rissa’s boyfriend was the one that killed her, and I knew he was going to get away with it. Too many people die in the Point for one young girl to matter, even if she was carrying a baby. It was too much. Too much hurt, too much pain, too much injustice. I decided that he needed to learn a lesson the same way he taught it, so I went and talked to Novak.”

My mother gasped and jerked her gaze away from me. She looked at my dad with wide eyes and he finally climbed to his feet. He lumbered over so that he could put an arm around my mom’s shaking shoulders.

“I promised him anything. I would have given my soul, my body, every dime I earned from then to eternity to stop feeling all the anger and hurt I was feeling. He told me he would take care of the boyfriend and he did.” I lowered my head so that my hair fell over my face and I felt my nails break the skin on my palms just enough to release a tiny trickle of blood. “Rissa’s boyfriend died because I needed him to. It was the only way I could keep on living.”

I heard my mother muttering under her breath and then shuffling as she left the room. When I finally looked up it was just me and my father, and he was looking at me like I was a stranger.

“We raised you better than that. All life has value and you are not the judgment maker. We didn’t turn our back on Rissa when she fell into drugs. We didn’t stop loving her when she turned tricks for that boy. We still valued the good in her. How could you do that, Reeve? How could you make a deal with a monster like Novak? Where is there any kind of good in that?”