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“Your father,” I yelled, lunging toward the bars, “was caught at LAX with the Pacific Diamond!”
His eyes searched mine.
“It’s true,” I said. “It’s all over the networks.”
“Goddamn it,” he muttered, and turned away.
Cold seeped into me, leeched from the air and the cement.
It was real. Every fear and suspicion it hurt to contemplate was accurate.
“Where’d the gem come from?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters!” I shouted. “Because if that diamond came from The Manor, it means you lied to me, Tyler. You lied to my face after swearing you wouldn’t.”
“What do you want me to say, Juliette?” he asked, his cheeks bright with color. “I found that damn diamond weeks ago in a box in the attic, and you know what that means?”
“That you lied!”
“It means that either my mother put it there…or Margot did.”
I blinked. I hadn’t thought of that.
“Margot wouldn’t—” I said, but Tyler interrupted.
“You don’t know that. Not for sure. But you’re the chief of police, so if I told you about the diamond, you’d have to bring my eighty-year-old grandmother in for questioning.”
“So you lied to me to protect your family?” It hurt. It hurt because I’d pushed away all the family I had left to protect him. It hurt because I’d started to believe that Tyler and I were a family of sorts.
“And you,” he said. “I wanted to keep you far away from having to make those decisions, because I knew it would kill you.”
He was right. It would have killed me. But it was my job.
“So you made the decision for me,” I said. “Just like ten years ago.”
Tyler threw up his hands. “Yep. You’re right. I lied to protect you. To protect my family. But now Dad’s going to jail, where he should have been all along.”
“Should have been all along?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Tyler stilled. “He stole the gems in the first place. Let his partner, Joel Woods, take the fall.”
“Oh, my God,” I breathed, backing up a step. And then another. “Why wasn’t…how did he…”
“Dad was questioned but released because he wasn’t at the drop-off when the cops arrived. There was no evidence.”
“But he told you?”
Tyler nodded.
“And you failed to tell me that your father was a confessed jewel thief?”
Eventually, slowly, Tyler nodded again.
I was breathless, weak with hurt.
“We said no lies,” I whispered. “And you still didn’t tell me.”
Tyler just nodded, his arms hanging at his sides as if broken.
A haze filled my head and I could barely see through it, much less think.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” I asked, wishing there was something he could say that would make it all right but knowing there wasn’t.
“I can explain,” he said. “But not here. Not—” He nodded toward Jasper. “You have to trust me, Juliette. Please.”
This wasn’t sex. This wasn’t a boy in trouble. This was my heart. Again. And he’d managed to find the old wounds and reopen them.
He’d lied, to my face, over and over again. Before we’d slept together, I could almost understand it. But after…the hurt was so deep, so painful, it made me numb.
“I can’t,” I said. “You’re the same, Tyler O’Neill. And I was an idiot to think you’d changed.”
I started to walk away.
“And you have?” he asked, his voice sharp and tipped in poison. “You said you forgave me, but the second something goes wrong you’re walking away with your dad.”
I ignored the truth in his words, too hurt to contemplate the things I was doing wrong.
I was in the parking lot before I realized my father had followed me.
My feet dragged to a halt but I didn’t turn. I wouldn’t show my father my tears so he could mock me, tell me he’d told me so.
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?” I whispered. “You’re right and I’m wrong. And now it can go back to just being you and me. Alone. Forever.”
“That’s not what I wanted, Juliette,” he said. His steps came closer and I held up my hand, making it very clear I wasn’t in the mood for a fatherly hug.
“A man like—”
“Don’t, Dad.”
“Listen to me,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder despite my no-touch signal. “A man like that will do anything to protect the people he loves. He’ll lie to them, manipulate them. He’ll walk away from them.”
I turned disbelieving eyes on him. “You’re defending Tyler O’Neill?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He dropped his hands, holding them awkwardly at his sides as if he knew they should be full or useful and was surprised that they weren’t.
For a moment I saw him as a man without. A man without his beloved wife, without the career that defined him, without the love and affection of his daughter.
Dad was a man alone, and in a night full of heartbreak, it seemed like the last straw. I wished I could feel something other than my bleeding and broken heart. Sympathy, or something, but Tyler’s betrayal stole everything out of me, leaving me raw.
