This Cruel Love

Once Nina had poured the coffee out and left a cup in front of me and Harry, she sat back down on the sofa.

“We never got a chance to say how sorry we were, about what happened to your father. Rob… he was…”

“Nina.” Harry held his hand up to stop her. “I think we need to cut the bullshit and just get down to the nitty gritty. Jackson didn’t come here for our condolences.”

“You’re about seventeen years too late for that.” I reached forward to sip the coffee. It was bitter, just like me.

“So.” Harry leant forward on his desk, threading his fingers together as if he was praying. Fucker probably was, secretly. “Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? You seem to have some problem with me and you’re using my family to… I don’t know? Get revenge for something? Do you think we did you wrong in some way?”

I narrowed my gaze at him. He was still skirting around the issue and he knew it.

“We tried to get to you, Jackson,” Nina spoke now, her face no longer a picture of contentment like earlier, but pained and remorseful.

“When your father died, we contacted lawyers. We wanted you here with us. You belonged with us, but we had no say in where you lived. The will your father had in place was so old, but it was still his wishes. He wanted you to live with his sister. She was your legal guardian. We tried to fight it, but we had no grounds on which to challenge it. There was nothing we could do. We didn’t even know where you were. Sure, we had people on the payroll looking for you, but by the time they tracked your aunt down she was already dead and you’d just vanished.”

I shook my head, not believing a word of her lies.

“You could’ve found me easy enough.” I looked Harry right in the eyes, making sure he understood my next words. “You just didn’t want to. I knew too much.”

It was his turn to bite down on a smirk and shake his head this time. “I don’t know what you think you knew back then, son, but trust me, none of that would’ve stopped us from taking you in. We would’ve raised you as our own, we both wanted that. You were always a part of this family, even before your father’s death.” He looked at Nina as he said that last part, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say a look of regret passed between them.

“I don’t know what this whole fake family bullshit is that you’re t

rying to feed me, but I don’t buy it.” I moved to face Nina. “I know you were having an affair with my father. I know you were leaving him and moving in with us,” I said, nodding at Harry. “And I know he didn’t like it one little bit.”

“Of course I didn’t bloody like it. She’s my wife, this is my fucking family.” Harry’s well-kept family man façade was slipping; he was pissed.

“So you took matters into your own hands, didn’t you? Sorted out your little problem and made my father go away.”

He frowned at me like I’d just spoken Japanese. “What exactly are you saying? Spit it out, son.”

“I’m not your son,” I snapped, banging my fist on the table and making the coffee cups dance around. “And you know exactly what I’m talking about. I was there that day. I saw your car parked at the side of our house. I heard the gunshot and then I saw you flee the scene like the rat that you are. You shot my father, made it look like suicide. You didn’t fool me though, I saw the whole thing.”

“Now wait just one bloody second! What the hell did you see? Yes, I was there at the house, but I didn’t pull that trigger. I did fuck all that day.”

Harry’s face was growing redder by the minute. Nina was panting like she was about to have a panic attack. But I just kept myself calm, breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth. I wasn’t about to unravel in front of these people. I wouldn’t give Harry Emerson the satisfaction of seeing how much he’d fucked my life up that day.

“Lies,” was all I could manage to say. I clenched my fists together so tightly it felt like my knuckles would crack open. My fingernails bit into the skin of my palm to dull the pounding pain in my head.

“No.” Harry shook his head in protest then looked up at me. “All this time you thought I’d killed your father?”

I didn’t grace his question with an answer, I didn’t need to. He knew the answer.

“Oh my God, no wonder you hate me… us.” His eyes were darting around the room, unable to focus on one thing. The signs of a guilty man in my books.

“Is this the part where you feed me some bullshit about him being your best friend, and how despite him fucking your wife you’d have never hurt him?”

He winced at my words, but I didn’t care.

“He was my best friend. Yes, he did a really shitty thing, they both did.” Nina dropped her head in shame. “But I’m not a murderer. I could never-”

“So, you tell me,” I butted in. “What happened that day? Why were you there?”

Seventeen years ago…

I sat in my car at the side of my best friend’s house, gripping the steering wheel like I was clinging to the edge of a cliff and it was my only saviour. Damn it, I was on the edge of a cliff. Only it was my whole family that were about to fall over, and this was the only thing I could think of to stop it happening. I had to talk to Rob.

Rob Caine. My best friend for more years than I cared to remember, and the biggest fucking asshole I’d ever met. When he was in his good place, on one of his highs, he was the life and soul of the party. But that didn’t happen as often as it used to. More often than not, he’d be hauled up in his room, treating that boy of his like a fucking slave. I got that he had issues, mental health problems, but I felt for that boy. I took him under my wing. Taught him to play piano, took him fishing whenever Travis and I went. I opened my doors to them both, and this is how he repaid me. He fucked my wife and fucked me over.