Falling for the Brother

He turned back to Miriam. “You leave the room when I try to talk to you. If you’d stay put and listen, I wouldn’t grab you, to hold you back. I’ve told you that. We’ve talked about it so many times. But you still walk out. I couldn’t let you walk out when you were upset. You might hurt yourself…”

Bruce came by it honestly. The thought struck Harper out of the blue. Walking out was what he did when he got upset.

“You know how much I love you, Gram. When Harper left, you were all I had. You were there for me and for my daughter. You know that. I’d die for you.” He had tears in his eyes.

He looked at Mason again. “I can’t lose her, man. When I lost Harper, it practically killed me. You remember that.”

Then his gaze turned to her. “This week…please don’t let this change anything, babe. You and I…we’re finally finding our way back. The picnic at the beach… We can be a family again, Harper. A real family. I’m begging you…”

He said more. She didn’t hear him. Didn’t hear anything but the sound of her own blood rushing. She was back in the past, hearing him beg.

And…

She took a breath so deep, it hurt clear to the bottom of her lungs. “He grabbed me, too.” She admitted something she’d pushed so deeply inside that she’d forgotten. Because, as a cop, she would never be a victim. Hadn’t ever allowed the vision of herself to formulate. She’d gotten out instead. Downplayed. Justified the one second in a lifetime as a normal reaction of a man watching his wife walk out on him. Until she’d seen Bruce reach for Miriam’s arm at the table. She’d been trembling with the truth ever since. “That last morning, when I was leaving. I had my three-month-old baby in my arms and he grabbed me so hard I almost dropped her. He had his hand under her. He’d have caught her. But the next day…my arm was bruised.”

She looked at Bruce then, aware of Mason’s presence in the background of her life, but knowing she had to do this on her own. “There will never be an us,” she told him. “I see now that there never really was.”

She might not have consciously remembered that last act. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Hadn’t come at her with violence, but merely with a desperate need to keep her from walking out on him. He’d let her go the second she’d told him to. But she’d never lost the feeling that she couldn’t go back—under any circumstances. She’d convinced herself it was the cheating. The lack of trust. She’d made her decision to divorce him because of those things.

“I had a hand under Brie that day, Harper. I would never have let her fall.”

He was right. She’d already admitted as much. “It doesn’t change the facts. You grabbed me with force. You lied to me throughout our whole marriage. Yesterday when you told me about Gwen going to Mason’s house, that was just to put doubt in my mind about Mason. You told Gram I’d always been after him, when, in truth, you’d sent him after me that night. And you failed to mention that I’d given you back your ring because of your infidelity. When I ended our marriage because you were unfaithful, you made it sound like it was the first time you’d been with someone else. It wasn’t the first time. I feel pretty certain it wasn’t just the third or fourth time, either.” She remembered his lies about Gwen and the bachelor party, but everything was coming at her too fast. “A few minutes ago, when you were talking to Gram, you were talking about how you were just trying to keep her from getting hurt, but you knew her bones were fragile and you grabbed her anyway. It’s about control with you, Bruce. You have to be in control all the time. That’s what it’s always been about. That night I spent with Mason… You’d lost control. The only way for you to get it back was to get me to marry you. You had to make sure he never had a chance to take me from you again, didn’t you? You kept him away by making him feel guilty about the night we’d spent together. And then you played on my guilt. All these years…”

The words, when they started coming, wouldn’t stop. “There’s always an excuse with you. An explanation. A justification. It’s always someone else’s fault.”