Chapter Thirty-Two
Ryan
Ruby didn’t answer me. I didn’t expect her to. Though the question wasn’t rhetorical, there was no answer she could’ve given me that would’ve been satisfactory anyway. She was living with her own demons.
She picked up her purse that she had dropped to the floor when she had first come into the bedroom and walked to the phone on the desk. “I’m just going to call housekeeping to get this cleaned up.”
That was Ruby. Always cleaning up. Always taking care of things. That’s what cops did.
A few seconds later, she said, “I’m going to get dressed. We’re going to go down to the bar and have a drink. To give them a chance to pick up and vacuum, okay?”
I simply nodded.
She gathered all of her clothes and went to the bathroom. I sat back down on the bed.
My brothers and I had always wondered all these years, before we had even told Marjorie the truth, why our father had swept this whole thing under the rug. Why we were never allowed to deal with the shitstorm of that summer. Talon should have been in therapy long ago, along with the rest of us. If we had been able to deal with it, if we had been able to…
Christ. Daphne Steel might still be alive today. Joe, Talon, and Marj had been denied their mother.
I was angry. But no longer at my brothers and sister. No longer with Ruby. I was fucking enraged with my mother. My biological mother.
Oddly, though, someone else bore even more of my anger.
My father. Bradford Steel.
He had never let our family heal. I still didn’t know what the real relationship was between Wendy and my father. I might never know. And I couldn’t bring myself to be angry with my father for having sex with his own wife and giving us our little sister. But I was angry. Despite the fact that I wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t, I was damned angry at him for fucking Wendy when he was married to Daphne. I was even angrier about him not letting us heal from Talon’s ordeal. I had watched both my brothers struggle all those years after the abduction. My father could’ve helped them avoid all of that.
Instead, he’d left us to flounder. Oh, he’d taken care of the family after his wife had taken her life, raised us to understand hard work and the value of money. But he had never let us heal. Then, seven years ago, he left us again, that time physically.
And then something occurred to me. He’d “died” seven years ago, the year Marj had turned eighteen. A legal adult. He’d waited until all of his children were legal adults. There had to be something there.
* * *
Ruby and I sat in a booth in the hotel bar, a bottle of Steel Cabernet between us.
“I can’t believe you just paid for a bottle of your own wine,” she said.
“What can I say? It was the best on the wine list.”
She took a sip from her goblet. “I wish I had some words of wisdom for you, Ryan.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s far from okay. But what you need to remember is that no one holds you responsible for what happened to Talon.”
“I know that.” It didn’t change how I felt in my mind, though.
“I went to see Melanie,” she said.
I widened my eyes. “You mean for therapy?”
She nodded. “It helped. Helped a lot, actually. I’m going to try to see her once a week, as my schedule allows. We talked about a lot of stuff, and one of the things was how I’ve always felt responsible for my father’s crimes. It’s why I became a cop, and why I’ve tried to atone for what he’s done by being the best cop I can be. I haven’t been able to put him away yet, but I’ve put away a lot of other shitheads.”
“You’re not responsible for his actions.”
She smiled. “No, I’m not. And neither are you responsible for your mother’s actions.”
I couldn’t help a slight chuckle. I’d walked right into that one. “I know that.”