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Eden
“See? I knew you’d be upset.” Leopold Driscoll’s mouth drooped in a doleful upside-down U, his lower lip quivering. He legit looked like he was about to cry. “Miss Eden, I’m so sorry. Believe me, I wish I wasn’t that shit-fucker’s son, I swear. And I’m so sorry for what he did to your mama. Oh, and please excuse my coarse language. It’s bad manners to say salty words in front of a true lady like yourself.”
I stared at him. Either I was dreaming, or he was a fucking lunatic. “You’re apologizing for your language when… when you’ve terrorized me for months?”
“No, no! No ma’am, that wasn’t me. That was him.” A terrible look of rage crossed his face as he looked down at Cobee, and he gripped the shovel harder, as if readying to take another whack at him. “All those things he did to you, the things you just talked about—the photos of him getting close to you and killing a cat—that was all Cobee. Then you went and filled his hide full of BBs, and that scared him enough to tell all of us about what he’d done to you. What… what Tru made him do to you.”
“Wait. Just hold on a minute.” That was too much information for me to take in, and nothing made sense. “You said Cobee toldall of us. Who’sall of us?”
“HEG’s grounds crew.”
“You work for HEG? The son of Leonard Driscoll works for HEG?” Once I started shaking my head I couldn’t seem to stop. “That’s insane. I mean, thatcan’tbe a coincidence.”
“No, ma’am. Your father brought me here right after he bought the place and made me the first success story for New Hope Teen Shelters. Truth of the matter is, he’d been keeping an eye on me because he felt bad about… well, about what happened.”
I frowned, uncomprehending. Why had my father never told me about this? “Did he?”
Leopold Driscoll nodded earnestly. “Tru said he wanted to take care of me, and for years he did. He pushed me to graduate high school and learn a trade, then gave me a job right here doing something I love. He became a better father to me than that sonofabitch who was my real daddy. I know you know what a monster my real father was,” he added, cringing slightly, as if he feared his father would somehow rise from the grave and smack him for talking about him now. “I know what he did to your mama, and I know that you saw it all. He did the same to my mama and me before he left us. There was nothing human in him, but I swear to you, I’m nothing like that, Miss Eden. I’ll treat you with the greatest respect for the rest of our lives if you’ll just give me a chance.”
What the actual hell. “You sound like you really love my father, so I’m confused. Are you… You’re not the one who attacked my father, are you?”
Again a wave of rage washed over his expression, but this time it was tempered with a stubborn chin lift that seemed almost righteous. “I’m proud to say that’s exactly what I did.”
“But why? Why would you do something like that to a man who’d treated you so well?”
“I did it for you.”
Um, what?“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand because you have no idea of all the bad things going on around you, Miss Eden. It must be hard for someone like you to understand that anyone would try to hurt you, especially your father. I mean, I heard what you said about him on the news earlier today. You kept going on and on about how wonderful Tru is, but you’ve got it all wrong. What I said earlier is the truth—your father made Cobee try to scare you into coming back home.”
Frantically I searched for the right words, because he was clearly waiting for me to react. “I don’t know what to say.” When in doubt, stick with the truth.
He sighed. “I know. Believe me, I understand what you’re feeling better than anyone. In all the years that I’ve spent under your father’s wing, I never imagined he was capable of being just as much of an abuser as my old man. But he is. Cobee told all of us what he’d been ordered to do to you, and that Tru was looking for someone else to terrify you into coming home. That’s what monsters do to their children, Miss Eden. They terrify them and hurt them and make them scream so that they’ll behave. I loved my daddy, but I hated him even more. It’s the same way now with Tru. Part of me still loves him, but I’ve been made to see him for what he is—a monster that must be hated and reviled by the both of us.”
“Did…” Rage warred with confusion in my head, scrambling my thoughts, and suddenly all I could think about was Luke’s words.Count to ten, Eden. Count to ten when you’re angry.
Luke.
He was here.
And I was angry.
Because I was scared. So unbelievably scared I could hardly stand.
But thanks to Luke, I knew what to do.
One. Two.
“Did my father see that you were the one who attacked him? Did he know you were the one stalking him?”
Leopold nodded. “He figured out that I held him in the greatest contempt for bringing fear into your life. You know your daddy—smart as a whip.”
“Oh, yeah.”Three. Four. “I know my father very well.”
“He called me to Tamarack Meeting Hall, because he wanted to talk over my so-called confusion. When we met up, he told me he thought that I was mixing up my father with him in my head. I wasn’t, but that’s when the idea to take him out hit me. Up until then, I’d just been giving him a dose of his own medicine, see? The dead rats and whatnot. But until that moment I hadn’t really thought about ending his abuse against you in a morepermanentway. But as Tru spoke to me, that’s when I knew I was finally being given the chance I’d missed all those years ago with my own father.”
Five. Six. “What do you mean? What chance?”
