“Em, he doesn’t know you’re here. If he did, he’d be tearing this whole town down to get to you.”
I huffed out a laugh and shook my head. I highly doubted that. He had bigger fish to fry. I didn’t register on his radar tonight.
“You know what, Finn? I don’t care anymore. He made his choice tonight when he decided to go against me. He put you and everyone else in this town above me. I should’ve known what was going on before anyone.” I thumped my chest as I spoke, feeling hurt and betrayed. I’d trusted Ryan. I thought he had my back. It hurt to find out I was so wrong.
“It wasn’t like that.” Finn took hold of both my arms, keeping me in place as he spoke. He obviously thought I was a flight risk and I had to admit he wasn’t wrong. “When we had that meeting at the factory the other night, he didn’t know half of what was going on. Sure, he knew about the money laundering, but he didn’t know about Morgan or Danny.”
I felt another piercing sting in my chest when he said my brother’s name. A million knives thrust into my back wouldn’t feel as painful as the one slicing through my heart at this very moment.
“It doesn’t matter. He knew tonight. He chose to hang me out to dry. Do you think I’ll ever be able to show my face around here ever again? After what you’ve all done?”
“No one is going to blame you, Emily. You aren’t your father.” He hung his head in shame then took a deep breath before breaking open my fragile heart some more. “He didn’t want to do it. When we told him everything, he wanted to come straight to you, but we stopped him.”
“If he wanted to tell me, he could’ve. Since when has Ryan done anything he doesn’t want to do?”
“We told him he needed to stay focused. We’d been on this for years, Em. We couldn’t take a chance on anything fucking it up. Not tonight. Ryan wanted to tell you, but we convinced him it’d be better if he waited until after the opening. Get the truth out there, then find you. Tell you in his own way. We knew if he told you first, he wouldn’t go through with what he did tonight. It needed to be done. If you’d known all that stuff before we outed your dad, would you have stopped us? I think you would’ve. We couldn’t take that chance.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d have done. It would’ve been kinder to hear it in private. To have Ryan tell me himself, but then he did try to keep me away. My stubborn ass had just pushed and pushed to get to the truth. But sometimes the truth is the hardest thing to face. My truth was I was alone, and I didn’t know who to trust anymore.
“Was it him? In the video with the mask?” The whole world went on pause while I waited for his response.
“No. That was Zak. Ryan was on the stage though, with Brandon.”
That fact made me feel somewhat better, not much, but it was something. “Where is he now?”
“He’s still back there,” Finn said, gesturing to the community centre we’d both fled. “When Kian tells him we saw you, he’s gonna lose it, Em.”
“He’s broken my heart.” My voice cracked as I spoke. My heart was breaking for so many reasons tonight, and knowing that Ryan had been the cause of it made the pain that much sharper.
“He never wanted to break your heart, Em. He wanted to own it. He loves you. Has done for years. This is gonna break him too, you know.”
Hearing Finn say that Ryan loves me should’ve made me feel something. Hope, maybe? But it didn’t. All it did was make the hurt so much more unbearable. “I guess he should’ve thought about that before he did what he did.”
“He did it for you.” Finn started to tug on his hair. He wasn’t getting the results he wanted from our little chat and it was starting to get to him. “When we told him about Danny, shit, I’ve never seen Ry so cut up. He cried, Em. And not because he’d lost a friend like that, but because he wanted to shield you from it all. The stuff with your sister, that really pushed him over the edge.” I winced when he said that. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge that girl as anything other than my father’s other daughter.
“He wanted to go to your house and confront him right there,” Finn said, ploughing on with his justice for Ryan speech. “He wanted to take you away from it all and look after you. We knew if that happened, your dad would find a way to bury it. He’d make it all go away. Probably make us go away too.”
That knife wedged into my heart twisted at the thought of something happening to Ryan. I started to gasp for air, but every breath just didn’t feel like enough. That’s when I realised, despite all the heartache and pain I felt now, a life without Ryan would be so much worse. He had brought sunshine when everything had turned grey after losing Danny. He brought clarity, security, a reason to smile through the day. He gave me life. He was my life. I loved him.
Tonight, he’d done a really shitty thing, and it was going to take me a long time to get over it, but Ryan hadn’t done it to hurt me. He wanted the maximum impact to hurt my father. I’d thought I was collateral damage, but if I stopped for a second and really thought about it, I wasn’t.
Listening to Finn, I realised I was duped and conned just as much as the rest of the town, maybe even more. Even though I knew he was driven by his job, deep down, I’d trusted my father to always do the right thing. To put our family first no matter what. But he hadn’t. He’d put his own selfish, self-centred greed first. The money, the power, the status; he’d had his cake and eaten it, keeping my mum and some other woman on the side. I couldn’t bring myself to analyse the Danny situation yet. That was still too raw, and my brain couldn’t comprehend how he could be so evil. But Finn was right. My dad would’ve buried it. These truths would’ve never seen the light of day if Ryan had shown his hand too soon.
And me? I was never a very good poker player. I wore my heart on my sleeve and my emotions on my face. If I’d known this before tonight, I’d have broken down completely.
“Em?” Finn broke through my reverie, rubbing my arm and trying to get my attention back to the here and now. “Do you want to come back with me? See Ryan? I think you need to talk, and I’m worried about you.”
“I need time.” I pulled away, but I looked Finn dead in the eyes, so he knew that something had shifted in me. Some of his reasoning had penetrated through, into my psyche, and I was starting to see the wood for the trees. Not all of it, but it was a start.
“Do you want me to pass a message on to him?”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t sure what to say. I could barely string a coherent thought together, let alone a sentence.
/> “Tell him… I think I get it, but I need space. There’s too much going on in my head right now. I need to process.” I shrugged and Finn smiled.
“I get that. Don’t push him away though. He’s waited a long time for you. He won’t let you go and I think you both deserve a bit of happiness once all this dies down. Be angry at your dad. Give us hell for hacking and digging like we did. But remember everything Ryan did was to try and protect you. You come first with him, always.”
I didn’t want to go back to my house. I knew no one would be there, but there were ghosts there that I wasn’t ready to face. My father would be holed up in some police station tonight, with my mum waiting on him, desperate for any scraps she could salvage from her life. That was a life I wanted no part of any more.