AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She should have left Josiah with Curtis’ family and given Theo to Gage or Giorgio. Had she done so, they would have been better off. None of this would have happened, and she would have spared her four-year-old from the terror he was unfairly being forced to endure.
Joel, as if he would have preferred his foot in a bear trap than reveal what he knew, exhaled and ran his fingers through his hair. “Theo told me about Mr. Veeny the night he and I had the sleepover, and I found him in the pantry,” he said. “Adrían was at the museum, and he gave me info that suggests Mr. Veeny is actually a man who goes by the name of SirianoLavigne.”
“And why would Adrían do that?”
“You can answer that yourself.”
“Is that why you were upset that day? Because of your run-in with him?”
“Yes,” he confessed. “He knew about the ‘veeny’ incident, so I thought you were talking to him and lying about it.”
She stared at him. “You don’t trust me.”
“Trusting you isn’t the point.”
“Don’t do that.” She squeezed her eyelids shut and circled a hand in the air. “Answer me directly. Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
The tears knocked again, as if she’d stopped crying in the first place. “We shouldn’t do this. Joel, adopt the boys. Raise them. They’re better off with you. Once the adoption process is complete, we’ll get an annulment.”
“No.”
“A divorce.”
He bristled. “No. Ayesha, you’re spiraling. Your head’s not in the right place. We’re not doing any of that.”
He was right about that.
She was tiptoeing on the line of delusion.
“Joel,” she balled her hands into fists, “what did this man do to my child?”
He paused. “He…terrorized him.”
“How?”
“Threatened him. Choked him.” He stretched the muscles in his neck, his top lip twitching. “Aimed a gun at him.”
Her legs gave out.
Joel tried to catch her, but he was thankfully too late. Her kneecaps hit the hard floor, and she prayed one of them fractured. She wasn’t a mother. How could she call herself a mother when she’d had no inkling about what had been happening underneath her roof? How could she call herself a mother when her little boy didn’t feel comfortable telling her about the terror he’d faced? Multiple times, if his drawings were any indication.
There were only a few moments in her life when she’d felt like she’d lost control of the steering wheel of her mind—when her mother suddenly died, when her father didn’t take her home with him, and she temporarily ended up in foster care, when she lost her aunt and her father in the same year.
Curtis’ death.
Now.
All she had left were a few threads. Anything more, and she’d snap completely.
Joel tried to help her up, but she refused his hand, so he dropped to his knees in front of her. “Ayesha, you’re punishing yourself when you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Threatened Theo, how?” she asked. “What did he tell Theo he would do to him?”
“It’s why he never said anything,” Joel explained. “Lavigne told Theo he would kill you and Josiah. Then he would kill him like he…”
He trailed off.
