Vincent was waiting for me right where I left him. Before I could think to do anything reckless or dumb, I decided it be best to give him the recording immediately. I took the hand that had been resting at his side and opened it, placing the phone in his palm. 

"The confession's in there."

He looked at the phone and then at me. A small smile stretched onto his lips. "You were right. You figured it out."

I shifted my weight from side to side, wishing I could celebrate like he seemed tempted to. Maybe if my father had been the only one guilty I'd at least felt relieved. Instead, a different burden had settled on my chest.

"Nancy helped him," I said, putting it simply. He would get a fuller picture once he listened to the recording.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them, all the happiness he must have felt for having gotten another job done had evaporated.

"She'll be away for a while."

I knew that. I knew she would be in jail long enough to lose custody of the baby. I knew she would miss years of the child's life, perhaps the majority of his it her youth. She knew what it was like to grow up with an incarcerated parent and yet she risked abandoning her child for a more luxurious life.

She must have found out about our father's business when she visited our aunt Stephanie. She had denied that she had been the one to give our family the twenty thousand and either Nancy put it together then or Stephanie had been honest with her. There was a chance that Stephanie's deceased husband wasn't solely responsible for the wealth she harbored. Maybe she had a picture of my father up in her house because he had been generous with her too.

Vincent pulled me back into the real world when he squeezed my shoulder. "You did what was right."

My eyes stung with tears and my throat ached. My stomach muscles ached from sobbing. I wanted to cry but I was too exhausted.

"Then why does it feel wrong?" I asked. "Like I'm tearing my family apart?"

Vincent shifted so he could lean against the wall by my side. Through the small, gated windows residing on the ceiling of the facility, thin rays of sunlight slipped through.

"I know it feels that way but I think this is the first step to building a better one."

What was that saying? Things have to get worse before they get better?

I could try and think of my family as built on an unsteady foundation. When pieces of us broke down and chipped, it was because of the foundational error. The little fixes weren't going to last. The glue of momentary relief that came with successful family dinners and getaways weren't enough to keep us together. We had to get to the root of the problem and that was never a comfortable experience.

I wished mending things hadn't come at such a high cost.

"I never want to be like them," I said, my voice wavering. "I want to be better for whoever comes next. A child should be raised with two loving parents. A family shouldn't keep secrets."

Vincent gazed down at me, his eyelashes long and delicate. "You will be better."

"I will be."

And I would.

_____________________

My first stop when I made it back to town was to the hospital. I wanted to see Darren.

Since I knew he wasn't some sort of drug lord or mafia boss, my perspective on who he was had finally settled. He wasn't someone to fear but rather someone who clearly wasn't for me. He had blended too well into my family's unhealthy dynamics. Perhaps that was what attracted me in the first place. He was familiar. But just like I found out with my family, there was a dark underbelly to him. 

He liked me weak. He loved me when I was the victim. If I wanted to continue to grow, I had to be with someone who didn't use my faults against me. I needed someone who saw I was strong and appreciated that.

Gone was the hate and resentment I felt for him since what he did with Nancy came to light. I wished for his quick recovery. I wished for the both of us to move on.

The receptionist told me Darren had been moved out of the intensive care unit. His surgery was successful and his internal bleeding had stopped. The doctors expected him to make a recovery though it would be slow and difficult.

"He's conscious now, if you want to go see him," the doctor said, bags under her bloodshot eyes. The surgery had lasted two whole hours and she was there after the fact, several more hours later. Still, when I had first introduced myself to her, she told me I looked like I needed to rest.

"Yes, I'd like to."

She led me to a room divided by curtains for privacy. Darren was behind the third one. He was worse than I thought.

His right arm was in a hanging cast and his left knee was braced in a plastic shell. His face was swollen to the point of near being unrecognizable with big paint strokes of blue and purple. I winced in sympathy.

He didn't see me until I was standing beside his bed. He had two black eyes.

"Is everything sorted out?" he asked. He sounded like his vocal cords were sandpaper.

The detectives had spoken to him a few minutes before me so he had a brief understanding of what was going on.

"Yes. The police know everything. My father and Nancy will be charged."

He inhaled and it sounded painful. If it weren't for the machines and monitors set up beside him, beeping and whirling in a non-alarming rhythm, I would have been concerned for him. "Nancy told me what was really going on this morning. She knew things were about to hit the fan so she sent me to go get you."

I leaned forward. After hearing that Nancy was involved with my father's criminal activity, my fears of her being taken had subsided. I theorized she had tried to book it to a new state to avoid getting arrested. It sounded as if Darren was going to confirm that for me. Nancy was bad in many senses of the word but the criminality she displayed would take some time to sink in. Not only was she guilty but she was doing all she could to get away with it.

"You were going to take me to meet her?"

Darren's fingers were tugging on the hospital blankets he was tucked under. His left leg was left exposed so I pulled the blanket over it for him. The fabric was thick and scratchy. He gave me a grateful smile. "Yes."

"So you know where she is?"

"She was going to drive until she made it to Ohio. She wanted to continue going across the country once you met up with her."

It was perplexing. My sister couldn't tell me the truth about what was going on but she could run away from the cops with me. Where was the disconnect in her brain? Why couldn't she have just been my sister? A mother to the child developing inside her? Things could have been far less complicated had she been content with what we had. The wedding she had wanted the money for had been ruined anyways. Surely, it was not her intention for Adonis to be caught in the crossfire but it was a consequence she brought upon herself.

Adonis must have figured it out sometime around the day at the lake. He had been crying in the woods surrounding it and when I found him, he said he felt trapped. Later that night, I saw the bruises on his back. The men had probably already begun to go after him. He probably knew he would end up dead eventually. Nancy had forced him to play along, perhaps reassuring him that her father would repay the debt he owed. He hadn't and that was why he was shot at the wedding. Nancy had let him take the fall for it. Adonis probably found out what was going on too late, put into an impossible position, he played along. At the wedding, when he slipped the note into my purse, he had a surge of bravery. He reached out for help but I hadn't seen it in time. Even if I had, who was to say that he still wouldn't have ended up dead? Maybe I would have too.

It was because of Nancy. She should have known better than to trust our father. The dollar signs had blinded her to the fact that he had gunned our mother down right in front of me. Had she forgiven him for doing it in the hopes of saving her from a worse fate? Or was the real explanation just a nice excuse for why she could accept money from him?

"Mickey, I know you don't love me anymore."

I felt my muscles tense. The statement had dunked me under frigid waters, chilling me to the bone and grounding me to the present. My mind had taken me far from the hospital room that smelt of cleaning liquid and alcohol wipes. It took me far away from the man I had given two years of my life to. As much as I wanted to leave everything remotely attached to this whole ordeal behind, it wasn't my plan to break up with Darren only hours after he almost died. I hoped to be distant but polite until he was well enough for me to tell him it was over.

"You don't have to feel responsible for me or obligated to stick around," he said, reading me like a book. "I've done enough damage and I deserve where I'm at."

Unfortunately for Darren, I wasn't going to argue with that. He did deserve to suffer for what he did to me. Maybe not a near death experience but to suffer nonetheless. 

I was taken aback that Darren had gone from begging me to stay with him in my voicemail to willingly letting go of our relationship. Maybe the beating loosened something in his brain or maybe the whole ordeal made it clear we weren't salvageable.

"Are you sure you're going to be alright?"

"Yeah. It's just a couple scratches and bruises. All in a day's work." He smirked and the gash on his lip was on full display. Red and blistering. "I know I never showed you this but I have an undershirt with a big S on it."

I sighed, a touch nostalgic for when his joking around had filled me with delight. It was tainted now. A parchment paper with ink spilt across it.

"Thanks for taking the beating for me." I meant it. If Darren hadn't stalled the men like he did, there was no doubt I would have been tied up in a warehouse somewhere or dead. Whether he owed me or not, it was brave. Whether it was for his knight in shining armor complex or not, it saved me.

"It's not all bad." He gestured to his nose that had a bandage going across it. "I get a free nose job out of it."

I laughed. It was the truest form of justice that someone as perfectly beautiful as Darren would be sentenced to a permanent imperfection. Maybe the next woman he dated wouldn't be so easily charmed by him if his nose was a bit crooked. It would help them see past the witty humor and dashing smiles. Unless he told them how he had broken it. I could hear him spinning the flattering tale of how he took a beating from a gang of thugs in the hopes of saving his girlfriend. He wouldn't tell them about how he slept with said girlfriend's sister in a jealous fit. No, that would ruin his chances.

"But seriously," he said. "My roommates will take care of me. They'll love that their boss will be out of work for a while. They'll make sure I'm resting real good."

"Okay. I guess I'll get going then." I pressed my lips together, making a beeline for the exit. This was the best possible way our breakup could have gone and I was afraid that if I made the wrong move, I would wake up and realize it was a dream. 

"And Mickey?"

I paused, angling my body so I could see Darren. His lips were set in a fine line, his eyebrows drawn tightly together. "Nancy knows the baby is Adonis's."

I lingered, not quite sure what to say. It was a bit of a relief that Darren had no excuse to remain in my life anymore and that I wouldn't have a permanent reminder of the betrayal against me but it also meant that Adonis had left behind yet another person in his passing. He would have been an excellent father.

Darren gave me a soft expression, one I had never seen on him before. It was sincere to the point in which it made him vulnerable, something he had usually reserved for me to be. "Adonis wouldn't want his kid to be raised by just anybody."

I was hit with the full impact of grief when I replied. "I know."

Author's Note: Thoughts? Thanks for reading!