“What are you saying?” I asked Dean.
“I’m saying that I think that you forgot the life you lived in Gaither for her. I’m saying that I don’t think you’re the one that your brain was protecting. I think it was protecting the only relationship you had left.” Dean gave me a moment to process, then pushed on. “I’m saying that you couldn’t afford to remember the life you had here, because then you would have had to be angry that she took it away.” He paused. “You would have to be angry,” he continued, switching to the present tense, “that she made sure you never had that again. She made you the center of her life and herself the center of yours, and knowing what we know now—about the Masters, about the Pythia—I think you’re even more terrified than you were as a child about what might happen if you do remember Gaither.”
“And that’s why I’m using the third person when I talk to you about Kane Darby?” I asked sharply, stepping past the gates and walking the stone path of the apothecary garden, Dean two steps behind me. “Because getting close to him might mean getting close to my mother? Because I might remember something I don’t want to know?”
Dean walked behind me in silence.
You’re wrong. I’d done everything I could to see my mother through a profiler’s eyes and not a child’s. She’d been a con woman. She’d made sure that I had no one to depend on but her.
She’d loved me more than anything.
Forever and ever, no matter what.
“Maybe I did forget Gaither for her sake,” I said quietly, allowing Dean to catch up with me. “I was good at reading people, even as a kid. I would have known that she didn’t want to talk about it, that she needed to believe that none of it had mattered, that the two of us didn’t need anyone or anything else.”
My mom had let herself care about Kane Darby. She’d let him in—not just into her life, but into mine. Based on the rest of my childhood, she’d learned her lesson.
What happened? Why did you leave him? Why did you leave Gaither?
I came to a standstill in front of an oleander, its reddish pink blooms deceptively cheerful for a poisonous plant. “Kane said that Lia would be safe,” I told Dean, cutting to the heart of the matter. “For now.” I wanted to stop there, but I didn’t. “He also said that I wouldn’t be safe in her position.”
“Darby doesn’t know who and what Lia is.” Dean captured my gaze, unwilling to let me look away. “If you wouldn’t be safe there, she’s not, either.” This was Dean asking me to stop pulling back, asking me to remember. And all I could think was that he shouldn’t have had to ask.
I swallowed, my mouth dry as I began profiling Kane—the right way this time. “My mother once told you that she didn’t deserve you, but she didn’t know your secrets, the choices you had made.” Saying the words out loud made them real. I kept my gaze on Dean’s, let his deep brown eyes steady me, even as I could feel my entire life—my entire worldview—begin to shift under my feet. “You said that you didn’t deserve her, didn’t deserve us. But you wanted it—you wanted a family, and you were good at being there for her and for me.” Saying the words physically hurt, and I had no idea why. “There had to be some shred of that desire, some kernel of what it meant to be a family in your background. Setting aside loyalty, honesty, obedience, and any other buzzword that dominated your childhood, you cared about people. And because you cared, you did horrible things.”
Kane Darby was a man who’d been punishing himself for decades. Maybe he’d let himself believe, when he’d met my mother, that it was finally enough. That he could have her. That he could have a family.
But yours will never let you go.
I thought about Kane trying to intervene with Shane, trying to mitigate his own father’s harm. And then I thought about Dean, standing beside me in this garden, his blond hair falling into his face. What Kane had been to my mother, Dean was to me. Like Kane, Dean had spent years keeping a tight rein on his emotions. He’d spent years convinced that there was something dark and twisted inside of him, and that if he wasn’t careful, he would someday become his father.
All of us had a way of regaining the control that life had taken from us. For Sloane, it was numbers. For Lia, it was keeping her true self buried beneath layers of lies. Michael intentionally provoked anger instead of waiting for someone else’s fuse to blow. Dean did everything he could to keep his emotions in check.
And I use knowing things about people as an excuse to keep them from knowing me.
Becoming a part of the Naturals program had meant letting a piece of that control go. For years, you were my everything. I wasn’t talking to Kane now. I was talking to my mother. You kept me from my father’s family. You made me the center of your world and yourself the center of mine.
I wrapped my arms around Dean’s neck. I felt his pulse, steady against mine. His fingertips traced the edge of my jaw. I pressed my lips to his, let them part. I tasted and wanted and felt him, and I remembered:
Mommy kissing Kane—
The first day of school—
Coloring at Ree’s—
Melody, in the garden. “What’s the matter, scaredy-cat?” Melody is pigtails and skinned knees and bossy hands on bossy hips. “It’s just the poison garden!” She squats down next to a plant. “If you don’t come in, I’m going to eat this leaf. I’ll eat it right up and die!”
“No, you won’t,” I say, taking a step toward her. She plucks a leaf off the plant and opens her mouth.
“You kids stop horsing around in there!”
I turn around. There’s an old man standing behind us. He looks mad and mean, and he’s wearing long sleeves, even though it’s summer. Rough white lines and ugly puckered pink ones snake out from underneath his shirt.
Scars.
“How old are you?” the man demands. I know with all of my being that he’s wearing long sleeves because those aren’t his only scars.
“I’m seven,” Melody answers, coming to stand beside me. “But Cassie’s only six.”
The memory jumps, and suddenly I’m running home. I’m running—
Nighttime now. I’m in bed. There’s a thump. Muted voices.
Something’s wrong. I know that, and I think about the old man in the garden. He got mad at Melody and me. Maybe he’s here. Maybe he’s angry. Maybe he’s going to eat me right up.