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The woman was stunning and looked so much like Lily, I had to do a double take to assure myself it wasn’t her marrying another man. She had the same brown wavy hair and she was beaming at the man who didn’t even look happy at his own fucking wedding. She was wearing a plain, white dress and one hand clutched a small bouquet of wildflowers while her other rested over a clearly pregnant stomach.
He also had brown hair but where Sarah’s looked shiny and healthy, his was greasy and already thinning. It didn’t look like he cared about dressing for the occasion as he was wearing dirty jeans and a t-shirt that looked like it had at one time been white.
“What about the mom, is she still alive?” I thought back to the night Lily had dinner at my place and her story about her mom passing away when she was young. Her pain had seemed genuine.
“Nah, man, she’s gone. Died in a car crash when Lily was only a toddler. The dad had been the one driving and he didn’t even have a scratch on him. I tracked down an old friend of the mom’s and from what she told me, Lily’s mom was an absolute angel but the dad was a major alcoholic. Apparently, there were lots of arguments and domestic visits from the cops that didn’t stop after Sarah died.”
I clenched my fists together and gritted my teeth, “Are you saying Lily’s dad abused her?”
Roe took off his glasses and scrubbed his hands down his face. “It certainly seems that way. There were a lot of trips to the hospital in her medical records that describe more than an accident-prone kid. What I can’t figure out is why protective services never stepped in. Anyone could look at her list of injuries and know she was a victim.”
Bile rose in my throat. How could a father lay his hands on his own child like that? There was no excuse and I wanted to track this piece of shit down myself and make him pay for every ounce of pain Lily had endured growing up. Roe looked hesitant to continue but I had to hear it all. “Finish it,” I demanded.
“She ran away literal days before she turned eighteen. She was probably hoping that the fact that she was almost a legal adult would keep authorities off her back and help her disappear. The asshole didn’t even file a missing person’s report on her so who’s to say if anyone was even looking for her when she took off?”
“Fuck!” I shouted, picking up the nearest object to me, which happened to be a coffee mug and hurling it into the wall as I watched it shatter into a thousand pieces.
Lily had been all alone since she was a teenager. How had she survived once she left? The frightened look in her eyes the night I’d asked her about her past made complete sense now. She was probably terrified of being found, enough so that she changed her identity and kept her past hidden well enough that no one really knew who she was.
I paced the room with my hands linked behind my head trying not to punch a hole through the wall. I was torn between wanting to hunt her father down and running to Lily, dragging her back to my loft and holding her while I reassured her that no one would ever hurt her again.
“Where is he now? Has he been looking for her?”
A dark smile bloomed on Roe’s face and I was about to strangle him when he spoke his next words. “Dude’s dead. He was obviously involved in some bad shit because they found him executed in his own fucking trailer after neighbors started noticing a smell coming from it.”
I froze, feeling as though I had whiplash, my emotions ranging from extreme anger to intense relief. Lily didn’t have to be afraid anymore. The man who haunted her was dead and I couldn’t even fucking tell her because of how I’d found out.
I threw the door open and stomped out, ignoring Roe’s shouted, “You’re welcome and you owe me a new mug!” I took the back staircase leading up to the lofts as all the information Roe had just provided swam inside my head.
Lily had been abused when she was just a helpless child by her asshole father. It had clearly been bad enough that she ran away from home when she was still young and spent the next four years on the move. Where had she slept, did she have food to eat or had she gone hungry? And the entire time, constantly looking over her shoulder in fear.
I flung my front door open harder than I’d intended, grateful that I’d already taken Daisy to my parents’ for her sleepover. Looking at my watch, I realized I only had an hour before I had to pick Lily up for our date. I needed to get my shit together, because I certainly couldn’t tell her why I was so pissed.
Striding to my bathroom, I took a quick shower and tried to wash away the images that my fucked-up brain was creating. My entire career had been built around protecting others and I’d seen some of the worst acts human beings could inflict on each other.
Part of my training was knowing how to compartmentalize and function in high stress environments. I would just have to find a way to use that skill with the evidence Roe had given me.
11
LILY
“The light pink, it makes your skin look like it is glowing. Absolutely perfect for losing that pesky virginity of yours.” I slapped Benji’s hand that held the dress in front of me as I looked in the full-length mirror.
I lasted all of five minutes this morning before I was filling him in on everything that had happened in Grayson’s office the day before. When I told Benji that I was seeing him again tonight, he insisted on helping me pick out my outfit. Which I was more than grateful for because my nerves had me incapable of making a decision.
Unfortunately, my wardrobe options were pretty limited. Until recently, the need for dresses and clothing that was more cute than functional didn’t exist. I wished I’d had time to go shopping to pick out something new for tonight.
“Hey, what’s going on? Why the frowny face?” Benji lowered the dress and poked the crease between my brows with his index finger.
“I just…Benji, what if I’m terrible at this?” I blurted out, knowing that he wouldn’t brush aside or judge my concerns.
He placed the dress on my bed before clasping both my hands in his. “What if you aren’t, Lily-Bell? What if tonight is the start of something you’ve always wanted?”
Benji knew I’d grown up in a less than ideal situation. I’d hinted at my shitty childhood without giving him enough to know exactly how bad it was. One of the reasons I think we became close is that we were a mirror image of each other. Our childhood traumas making us both yearn for a connection with another person, someone who would love us for who we were not who they expected us to be. We were simply two people trying desperately to create lives for ourselves where we could be happy, away from the pain of our past.
“I think that’s what scares me the most. No one gets to have everything they want.”
“Says who?” His hands tightened on mine and his usual carefree demeanor was remarkably serious. “We aren’t helpless anymore, Lily. Look at what you’ve done since you moved here. You’ve opened a successful bakery and this entire town has fallen in love with you. Why is it so hard to believe that Gray could, too?”
