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Fraud, Dallas typed. My father was accused of stealing from his parishioners, but he was cleared when they found proof that it was the church’s accountant who did it.
I waited quietly as Dallas typed for several minutes, then handed me the tablet.
The whole thing made my father a celebrity of sorts, so he decided to parlay that into a new career. He wrote books, went on talk shows, gave motivational speeches…that sort of thing. My mother had been a B movie actress, but the scandal made her more well-known than her acting career ever had. She became one of those people who became famous for absolutely nothing. When I was a kid, we moved around a lot to accommodate my parents’ ever-changing careers. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago – we lived like that for years. But then things died down and my parents couldn’t get on TV or in the paper to save their lives. So, they decided to move to Pelican Bay – my father’s mother had grown up here and he’d spent summers up here with his grandparents before they’d died. In such a small town, it was impossible for people like them to not be celebrities.
I nodded as I handed the tablet back to him. “My mother was so excited when they moved here,” I murmured. “The famous Reverend Jeremiah Kent. She and some of the other people in town tried to get him to take over when Reverend Hill retired.”
It was just another role to them, Nolan – being respected pillars of the community. They thrived on knowing how revered they were. But it was all an illusion. They both had drinking problems and my mother had been addicted to prescription pain pills for years.
“What was all that like for you growing up?”
Not easy. Maddox and I got sucked into that world, you know? We stopped being their kids and became the supporting cast. We weren’t allowed to be second-best at anything. The more positive attention we brought to our parents, the better. If we failed at something or brought even a hint of shame to them, it was like we didn’t exist.
“What happened the night of the accident?”
My parents had both been drinking at the Fourth of July picnic, but not heavily…or so people thought. But they’d actually consumed a lot more than they let on and by the time we were ready to go, they were both feeling it. I offered to drive, but my mother insisted. I tried three times to get her to give me the keys, but she wouldn’t. There were people around, so I didn’t have the guts to take them from her or make a scene. And I was too afraid to tell anyone, so I got into the back seat. She was doing okay until we got closer to home. The road leading to our house had a lot of curves and she was going really fast.
Dallas pulled in a couple of deep breaths as I read his note. I closed my fingers around his as I read the message, but was forced to release him so he could continue typing.
It happened so fast. My father hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, so he got thrown from the car. When I came to, I knew there was something really wrong with me. I could barely breathe and I could feel that there was something lodged in my neck. But I was too worried about my parents to even try to figure out what it was. I managed to get out of the car. My father was conscious, but he couldn’t move. He kept screaming at me to get my mother out of the car because the engine was on fire. I managed to drag her to where my father was lying, then everything went dark. When I woke up, I was in the hospital. I’d been in a coma for nearly a month. My mother never had a chance – the crash had killed her instantly. My father was left paralyzed from the waist down.
“And you lost your voice,” I murmured.
He nodded, then began typing again.
No one ever talked to me about the accident. I didn’t realize why until I got home. Maddox had taken a leave from the military to care for our father while I was in the hospital. I hadn’t understood why he hadn’t come to see me at the hospital. When I got home, he could barely look at me. He wouldn’t talk to me. One day I finally confronted him about it and he lost it. Told me he hated me because I’d killed our mother. He’d always been really close to her. I was about to ask him what he was talking about when my father told Maddox to go cool off. That’s when my father told me what he’d done.
