Sink or Swim (Beach Kingdom 3)

No choice, though. This was it.

They weren’t giving him the option of lying by omission anymore.

Truth be told, he didn’t know if he wanted to keep the circumstances with Handler from them anymore. When the men jumped him last night in the parking garage, he’d had a moment of clarity amid the crunches, jolts of pain and blood running into his eyes. He was doing the people at this table a disservice. If they kept something this important from him, he would be livid. And wounded. He wasn’t saving them from hurt, he was just finding another way to cause them pain.

Forget about what he’d do if Jiya was braving something dangerous alone.

He’d set the goddamn world on fire.

Yeah, he needed to come clean and he could admit, there was some relief in knowing that by the time he finished speaking, he would no longer be carrying the weight of secrecy.

Andrew drew a deep breath and let it out. “I guess I should start at the beginning.” He swallowed. “Jiya, you remember that night we saw Mad Max: Fury Road and walked home on the boardwalk? Just over three years ago.”

She stared into the distance a moment, then nodded. “It rained.”

“Yeah.” He nodded at Rory. “You’d just gotten out of prison, maybe a couple of weeks earlier. Summer hadn’t rolled around yet, so Jamie was living in Brooklyn for the school year. It was…I don’t know. Things were coming to a head between our parents. I came home that night and…” Andrew’s leg bounced under the table, but he made it stop. “He was going to kill her. She was unconscious on the living room floor and he just kept hitting her. And hitting her. Hard.” He forced himself to look at Jiya, to watch her reaction to the next part. “I didn’t think, I just picked up the heaviest object I could find and I brought it down over his head. That was it. He never moved again.” He dug his fingertips into his thigh. “I just wanted to stop him, you know? It happened fast and I couldn’t think of what to do after that, except call my brothers.”

“Oh Andrew,” she whispered, reaching for his hand. He offered his upturned palm automatically, but they remembered her engagement at the same time and awkwardly took their hands back. It was a gut punch and it took a moment to stop reeling from the blow.

“My mother never pressed charges, not any of the times he hurt her. No matter how badly. Appearances were important to her. Really important. And this was no different. When she regained consciousness, she wanted…she begged us to make it all go away. She didn’t want me labeled as a murderer and most importantly, she didn’t want anyone to know he’d beaten her. As if the whole neighborhood didn’t already know.” Andrew paused to clear the rust from his throat. “We couldn’t convince her to call the police. She told us we’d end up in court, we wouldn’t be able to afford the legal fees. We’d lose the bar, the house. She might have been right, but looking back, I think we were just fucking scared. Mom and us. So we listened. We didn’t do the right thing.”

Andrew turned to Jiya. “I understand if you want to leave.” He dragged his attention off her unreadable face, looking at Marcus and Olive in turn. “You too. If you don’t want to know the rest, or you don’t want anything to do with me, I would get that.”

Marcus gave Andrew the finger. Olive pushed up her glasses and firmed her chin.

Jiya snorted.

Andrew slowly let out the pressure escape his lungs. Still there. She knew the worst and she was still fucking there. He couldn’t believe it. What had he done to deserve her loyalty? Or that of the people sitting with him around the table?

“Andrew wouldn’t let us help…” Jamie started. “Move him.”

“Rory couldn’t be anywhere near that shit when he already had a record,” Andrew said, remembering the moment he’d watched his father’s face disappear into the depths of the ocean—in a far out location he’d never reveal. It wasn’t information anyone he loved should carry the burden of, except to know the man would never be found. “And you, Jamie. You’d just started teaching. The less you knew the better. I’ve always believed that, but…I don’t have any choice but to tell you what’s happening now.” Andrew looked at Jamie and Rory. “That cop that’s been following me. He knows.”

Jamie cursed. Rory sat up straighter. “Jesus Christ. How?”

“Surveillance at the hardware store. Receipts that match the time stamp. The fact that our father’s forwarding address is bullshit. That might not be enough, but he knows I signed our father’s name on the bar paperwork, signing it over to me. He—”