I don’t add that even the man she thought him to be was about as valuable as a bucket of horse shit—a faithless, philandering, irresponsible bag of dicks.
None of that’ll help her. It doesn’t even matter now, because the son of a bitch is gone, and he can never hurt Bri or Alyssa ever again.
“When you say he attacked her…”
I lower my gaze, clenching my hands into fists at my sides. It hurts, too. My hands ache like hell from shoveling all that dirt this morning.
I need to take a couple aspirin, try to dull the pain a bit.
Bringing my focus back to my sister, I tell her, “It’s not really my place to say.”
“I need you to, Brant.”
These words burn like acid in my mouth, and I haven’t even spit them out yet. My jaw tightens, every aching muscle in my body tensing. “He raped her, Bri.”
I can imagine the shock she’s feeling right now. I feel for her, and I want to comfort her, but I stay where I’m at. I’m braced for her to try to defend Theo or trash Alyssa, and while I can try to look past that later when I’m feeling a little more sympathetic, I can’t fucking deal with it right now. Not with the memory of Alyssa crying and apologizing to me because someone hurt her so fresh in my mind.
I’m braced for Bri to say awful things, but she doesn’t.
She sits on the chair in front of the computer and doesn’t say a single word. She sorts through her thoughts the way I would, completely on her own, and after quite a long time, she finally looks over at me.
She swallows, then her gaze drifts out the window. “You can go. I’ll finish the letter,” she says quietly.
My brow furrows and I walk over closer to her. “Yeah?”
A bit woodenly, she nods her head. “If anyone asks, he left me, and I don’t know where he went.” Bri sniffles, rubbing the tip of her reddened nose. “He was fucking some mousy bitch he worked with, maybe he ran off with her.”
An immeasurable weight falls off my shoulders. I walk over to my sister, lean down, and give her a hug. “Thank you, Bri.”
She nods, bringing her hand up to rest on my arm around her neck.
“I’m sorry,” I say sincerely. “I’m so sorry.”
Looking up at me with a sad attempt at a brave face, she says, “Yeah. So am I.”
It’s the end of a long, miserable day, the kind of day that makes a man long for the comfort of home.
When I finally return to mine, my beautiful wife comes over and wraps her warm, loving arms around me. She sinks against my chest like she’s been counting every minute until she could be back in my embrace, and maybe she has. She’s crazy like that.
“Did everything go all right?” she asks, concerned.
I nod my head. “Everything’s taken care of, baby.”
Alyssa sighs with relief, completely trusting me to handle whatever needs handling. “Good. Did you see Bri?”
“We can talk about that later,” I tell her, tugging her back and settling my arm around her shoulders. “I’m so tired I can hardly stand up. What do you say we head up to the spare bedroom and take a nap?”
I know it’ll be a long time before she can go back to ours, if ever. On the drive home, I already started making plans to do some renovations to the house—not only because now there’s blood in places I’m not sure I can get it out of, but because maybe switching up the scenery will make things a little easier for her.
We only have a few months left until we meet Mackenzie, so I don’t know how much of that I’ll have time to do, but I need to at least gut our master bedroom. Maybe the master bathroom, too, since she got trapped in there during the ordeal.
“Are you hungry?” Alyssa asks, looking up at me. Her arm is wrapped snugly around my waist, and I can’t help smiling at her wanting to feed me.
“No. I’m too tired to be hungry.”
“Well, after you get some sleep, I’ll make you some dinner. I know most of the house is a mess, but the kitchen’s clean, so…”
“Do you like our kitchen?” I ask offhandedly.
Frowning mildly, she says, “Sure, I do. Why?”
I haven’t told her about my new plans to renovate so this probably won’t make much sense to her, but I’m too tired to care. “Maybe I should just knock the whole place down and start over. Then you could change any room in the house to look the way you want it, or have whatever you want. Our kitchen’s probably not as updated as you’d like, huh?”
Cocking her head in confusion, Alyssa looks up at me with growing concern. “What are you even talking about? Honey, you need to sleep.”