“I’m surprised she didn’t spell it out in her will.”
She shrugged. “She had made it years before I came to stay with her. Like I said, he and my mom never got on. He went to live with Gran when I was about three, so she was very close to him. I think that was her way of looking after him. She figured I had my parents, so she became his. She never changed the will, but she sat us down and told us what she wanted. Dean had no problem with it, so there was no need to change the wording, I suppose.”
“So, what happened with the house?”
She looked lost in a memory for a moment, the sadness in her eyes getting deeper.
“I decided it was time to go to school, and Dean didn’t want the house. It was a little out of town and run-down. He had an appraiser in who said the house needed to be torn down, and the land wasn’t worth much where it was. ‘Just a bit of scrub brush,’ he called it. Dean got a second opinion, who basically said the same thing, although he was a little more polite. It wasn’t a big plot, and all around, it wasn’t developed. So, he didn’t get much for it, but my share would let me go to school and not work, at least for a while.”
“But?” I asked, sensing the crux of the story coming.
“Dean told me my gran had taken out a loan against the house. He took the proceeds from the sale after he repaid the loan and put it into the bank. But I found out that he, ah, he liked to gamble. And he decided he could make us more money. He gambled away his half—” she sighed, the sound despondent “—then he did the same with mine, certain his luck would change.”
I cursed silently. The stupid bastard.
“When he lost it all, he borrowed from the bikers he hung with, certain he could win it back. He just needed a little more time.”
This time, I couldn’t stay quiet. “Jesus. What an idiot.”
“I think he was set up. He told me he doubled it at one point…” She trailed off.
“And then lost it,” I guessed.
“Yes. He had a little left, but not much.”
“So, they came after him.”
“They beat him up pretty bad. He looked terrible. They accused him of holding back. They’d heard rumors from his former gang that he had a sister, and they told him I could be used to pay the debt back.”
I pulled her closer, horrified. “Fuck. Tell me it didn’t happen, baby.”
“Earlier that week at the bar, a bunch of bikers had come in. They kept staring at me, talking among themselves. One of them followed me to the storeroom and pinned me against the wall, and he told me they were watching. He told me to tell Dean, ‘They liked what they saw.’ The guy roughed me up a little. It scared me, and I told him what they said and showed him the bruises. He got really upset and said it was nothing compared to what they could do. What they would do once they found out everything about me. He gave me some money. Told me to disappear. Get out of the province. He suggested Alberta, saying I could get lost there. Not to contact him. To never come back to Quebec.” She sighed. “He went by his father’s last name, so they didn’t know who I was yet, and he thought if I left and they couldn’t find me, they would figure something else out. He’d kept our lives so separate. It was the first time I realized he was doing it to protect me and my gran. What he didn’t think about was that it hurt us since we didn’t understand. Sometimes, the truth is better.”
I ignored the flash of guilt her words caused. The secret I was keeping from her was different.
“So, I left that night. I packed a bag and took the first bus I could get.”
I pulled her a little closer. “Tally, you must have been so frightened.”
“I was, but I met a girl my age on the bus. I liked her and we talked. I didn’t tell her everything except I was alone and needed a place to stay. She said she was getting off in Toronto. She told me she knew of a room for rent. And her aunt ran an office cleaning service. For the next two years, I hid. I worked nights cleaning offices, slept in a little room in the basement of her aunt’s during the day. I rarely went out.” A shiver ran through her body. “June and her aunt Cathy were very kind, but everywhere I looked, I saw danger. Every stranger I met was a potential threat. June and Cathy knew I was in some sort of trouble, and Cathy paid me cash under the table and took the rent off it. I had no bank account—nothing. I paid cash for everything. Only used the internet in cafés.” A sob escaped her throat. “I found out my brother had died in a newspaper article I saw not long after I got here.”