Page 30 of Deadly Secrets

Remi places one of her small hands over mine.

“Of course, he knows about you.” A breath I didn’t realize I was holding releases. “I told him the truth about what happened to my parents and what a horrible person my father was. About how you saved us and were framed by my crooked Uncle. He doesn’t know that I know this but he has a picture printed up from an article from one of your football games that someone posted a long time ago. It’s in his bedside drawer.”

“Why did you never try to contact me?” I ask and she pulls her hand away from mine and the warmth leaves my skin.

“What do you mean? I tried contacting you for years,” she says with an edge to it. “We wrote letters and I tried hiring attorneys to help get you out.”

“Letters? I didn’t receive any letters,” I tell her.

“We wrote you letters but a lot came back. At the time I thought you didn’t want me contacting you and were rejecting them. It wasn’t until recently after I found an attorney here in Montana that they were sent back because I didn’t fill out the envelope correctly on it.”

“But I haven’t been in a Montana prison in years,” I tell her.

“Oh, I’m well aware of that now,” she sarcastically states.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that it was only yesterday that I learned you weren’t here,” she reveals. “Apparently, the attorney I hired has been helping out another inmate named Rhett Miller for the last eight months. He’s been getting all our letters and my hard-earned money being put towards his court appeal.”

“But how didn’t you know it was me?”

“We never got to meet. He only wanted letters and at the time I was just glad that you were accepting them,” she expresses and then takes a deep breath. “You have to realize that I didn’t know shit about how to help you. Every extra dollar that didn’t go to making sure Ryder was cared for was saved to help get you out of there. I’ve wasted money on shady private investigators when I’d finally learned that they moved you from prison to prison. Then all my savings went to us moving so that we could be closer to you on the rare chance you might actually read one of our letters and want to see us.”

My chest feels like I’m being stabbed over and over again hearing that she followed me when I’d been transferred all over this fucking country. What a cluster fuck.

“God, Remi, I’d have seen you if I knew that you wanted that,” I admit. “This is so fucked up. Never thought I’d see you ever again let alone have a son.”

My mind is still swimming with everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours.

“Why didn’t you look for me?” she asks. “You got out over two years ago. Why didn’t you check up on me?”

The hurt in her voice is almost too much for me. My eyes close because I’ve been dreading this question since last night when she left the strip club. She doesn’t know the danger our club brings or that I avoid anything to do with my pre-prison life.

“When I joined Dead Road MC, I decided to bury my past and not look back. That chapter of my life I wanted to close and forget it ever happened. Patching in was a fresh start for me,” I say. “To be honest when you didn’t show up to the trial, I started to resent you. I went through one of the worst moments of my life, and no one stood up for me or even stood by me. My own parents didn’t even come.”

“Yeah, well your parents were always assholes,” Remi grits. She wasn’t a fan of them when we were sixteen either.

“I did try, though,” I say. “Around a year ago I had Hawk look you up. Was thinking he’d find you married with kids living in Idaho. Only he found that you went missing a few months later and that it was a cold case.”

She snorts. “I never would’ve imagined that this is how our lives would end up.” She leans back and looks up at the sky.

The back door opens and Bulldog stands there with his phone going off.

“It’s your alarm to go and grab Ry from school,” Bulldog says. “Want me to grab him?”

I’ve never had a problem with Bulldog until last night. Whatever is going on with him and Remi is being put on ice until all this dust settles and even then, I’ll do whatever it takes to halt it.

Remi stands and brushes off the grass from her body.

“No, I think he and I need to talk before we get home,” she says then turns to me. “You gonna be here while I go and get Ryder?”

I give her a tight nod. “Yeah. I want to meet my son.”

Remi gives me a soft smile. “I was hoping you’d say that. But know he’s a teenager and it might be a lot for him to wrap his head around. You might get a warm welcome and celebration, or it might not be so great, okay? As much as I’ve tried to explain to him all the whys, he still might have big feelings about you.”

I place both of my hands on her shoulders. “I’ll take whatever he’s willing to give me right now. Just want a chance to get to know him.”

She looks at me just like she did when we were kids.