Falling for the Brother

Grace and Miriam no longer friends? “What happened?” They’d been friends since childhood. Almost seventy years. Through school, and through both of their marriages. Through Grace’s grief when her husband was killed on the job; he’d been a truck driver, not a cop…

Grace had never remarried. Never had kids of her own. She’d emotionally adopted Miriam’s.

“That’s one of the things I need to speak with Gram about in the morning. I’m shocked, too. This morning was the first I’d heard there was a problem between them and I think it’s important to know what happened. It could all be part of this same issue. As you’ve said, abusers isolate.”

“Grace wouldn’t tell you what happened?” The two had always had a fierce loyalty to each other.

His shrug, accompanied by a grim expression, put another knot in her stomach. She rocked forward and then back on her bench, trying to ease the pressure of the hard surface against her butt. She had more comfortable places to sit—places for conversation. She wasn’t taking him there.

“She says that after you left, Bruce’s control got much worse. Her theory is that you were the first person who loved him who was able to walk away. You were the one person he couldn’t totally control. Everyone else—family, other women, Gwen—they all hung on, stuck around. Except for the women he dumped, of course, but then he was doing the walking away.”

Harper just wasn’t getting it. Something must have happened to turn Grace against Bruce. She was clouding the facts with resentment or some other emotion.

“Grace has known Bruce his whole life! When did she suddenly start thinking he was such a control freak?”

Mason’s studied glance sent tension spiraling through her. But there was no real reason for her to feel that way. It wasn’t like he could convince her of anything…or would even try. He was talking to her for confirmation—or not. Investigating. Not judging.

“Bruce has had…issues since he was a little guy,” he told her. “We all want people to like us, but Bruce seems to be obsessed with it. Even when he was accepting blame, he somehow came out the victim so he didn’t get into as much trouble. So he got sympathy instead of trouble. The thing with the asparagus wasn’t an isolated experience…” He’d taken a breath as though he was going to say more, but stopped, seemed to change his mind about whatever had been on the tip of his tongue.

Harper wanted to call him on it. And yet she didn’t want to know. Deciding he knew best what information she needed, she let it go. This wasn’t a personal conversation. She was a witness being interrogated.

Mostly.

“Anyway, Grace, as well as Gram and my parents, knew that he had a need for things to go as he thought they should. He’d have tantrums, and they’d work through them.”

“I can’t imagine they gave in to them.” The Thomas family played by the book. Good cops, all of them.

“Of course not. But they sympathized with him, too. And there were times they didn’t know he was manipulating them.”

She wanted to know about those times. In detail. Again, she didn’t ask.

“We all thought he’d grow out of his insecurities as he got older. Instead, he just grew craftier at his manipulation.”

She shook her head, shivering when her sweat-moistened T-shirt brushed against her skin. “If this was such a big issue, why didn’t I ever hear about it?”

Mason seemed to be struggling for words and Harper couldn’t help wondering if he was seeing something that wasn’t there, if his perception of his brother was so unclear, it was difficult for him to recognize the truth.

“We all wanted to believe he grew out of it,” he finally said, and she had to know what he wasn’t saying.

“Including you?”

Mason’s shrug looked painful. “Like the rest of the family, I wanted to believe that, too, but I don’t think I ever really did. Maybe for a while. Look at the supposed agreement I’ve been acting under for the past five years. No contact with you. I believed him when he told me you’d asked for the agreement—and that you were fully on board with it.”