Dark Favors

I grabbed my keychain and looked at it. Thumbing through my different keys, I finally found it. I had the key to her post office box the entire time, and I hadn’t known it. My mother had loved keys, and she’d collected them sometimes. This one had been her favorite, but I hadn’t known it was really a key that worked.

I didn’t know it was a key that held a secret.

If my mom hadn’t died so suddenly, would she ever have told me?

I needed to go to that post office and open the box. I needed to see if there was anything else there that could help me.

What was I going to find?

I took a deep breath. I had almost gone through everything on the file. It was a lot of evidence that basically ensured Josiah Reagan’s reputation would be totally destroyed, and for good reason, but there was one more thing that I hadn’t clicked.

There was one more file I hadn’t opened.

It was a document that was simply titled gala, and I was scared to open it.

There was a reason that Locke hadn’t told me all of this. There was a reason. Maybe he was scared or maybe he was just a jerk, but he hadn’t told me about my dad. He’d been holding it over my head and I’d thought, apparently incorrectly, that he was going to reveal the information when he felt the time was right.

Apparently, the time was going to be right next Saturday night at about 7:00pm.

The document was a speech he’d written exposing my dad, exposing me, and essentially throwing us both under the bus. He was going to catch me by surprise in order to what – horrify me? He wasn’t going to give me a heads up. He was just going to reveal everything in his speech, and that was going to be how he took his real estate company to the next level, I supposed.

It wasn’t a secret that Extrance had been after Locke’s company for years. Everyone knew it. They were enemies, but nobody ever really knew why.

Now I knew why.

Locke was convinced that Reagan killed his little sister, and after sorting through all of the documents he’d collected, I was certain he was right. The kind of guy who would kill someone to stay silent wasn’t exactly a good kind of person.

But Locke could have told me.

Instead, he didn’t. He wanted to keep this secret from me until it was going to hurt me.

The worst part was that he hadn’t trusted me with it. He had invited me to the gala, and he had done so knowing that he was about to reveal wildly personal information in front of other people, and he hadn’t cared.

He’d fucked me in the mansion, and he hadn’t even cared.

Shit.

I wiped my eyes and pulled the flash drive out of the laptop. I closed my laptop, put it back in my backpack, and sat there. My phone rang. It was him.

What the fuck was I supposed to do?

Instead of anything else, I just closed my eyes, and I started sobbing. This was so fucked up, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. My mom would have known what to do. She always knew. She might have been a normal, run-of-the-mill mom, but she would have known. She was always totally controlled.

She always understood exactly how to take care of herself, and how to protect herself. She had been kind, and she had been wonderful.

And I missed her.

I missed her so much.

I wish I’d known what had happened to the money. I wish I’d known what my mother had gone through. She had been through a nightmare sort of situation, but she’d done whatever it took to keep me safe.

She had protected me, and she’d done it all on her own.

I closed my eyes, and I leaned my head back against the seat of my car, and I cried.

And I cried.

And I cried.