Nothing.
“I shot him, Dad. I killed a man.”
He drew back a bit, studied her. She looked back at him, her eyes clear, focused. “You did nothing wrong. You were just a kid. Just a scared little child. Protecting your mother.”
“But she—he came before. He was with her, Dad.”
“If you want to blame anyone, you blame me. It was my fault. Only my fault.” Tears were staining his cheeks and Michelle felt her own tears start to fall.
“I’ll never do that. I’ll never blame you for that.”
He gripped her hand and steered her down the stairs.
“We need to leave here, Michelle. We need to leave here and not come back. This is the past, and we can’t relive it anymore. We have to keep going, Michelle, it’s the only way life works. Otherwise, it’ll just destroy us both.”
Outside, he held the SUV door open for her and she climbed in. Before he closed it, he said, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
She drew a deep breath and then nodded. “I don’t know exactly what happened in there.”
“I think you know all you ever need to know. Now it’s time to forget.”
She glanced over his shoulder. “You cut down the rose hedge, didn’t you?”
He followed her gaze and then looked back at Michelle. “Your mother loved those roses. I never should have taken those from her.”
“You probably had good reason.”
“Fathers aren’t perfect, Michelle. And I never had a good enough reason to do a lot of things.”
She stared up at the old house. “I’m never coming back here.”
“No reason for you to.”
Her eyes drifted back down to him. “We need to do things differently, Dad. I need to do things differently.”
He squeezed her hand and closed the SUV door.
As he walked back to his car, Michelle stole one more glance up at the house, her gaze counting the windows until it got to that room.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry that you’re gone. I never wanted to have any regrets, and now it’s all I seem to have.” The tears poured out so hard, she just rested her forehead on the steering wheel and sobbed, her chest rising and striking the wheel with the regularity of a clapper against a bell.
She looked up ahead in time to see her father wipe his face free of his own tears and climb in his car.
Right before she fired up the SUV, Michelle said, “Goodbye, Mom. I… don’t care what you did. I’ll always love you.”
CHAPTER 68
AS HE WAS GOING through the binders, Sean’s cell phone rang. It was Aaron Betack.
“You didn’t hear any of this from me,” the Secret Service agent said.
“You found the letter?”
“It was a good call on your part, Sean. Yeah, it was in her desk. Found it a while back, actually. Sorry it took me so long to tell you. Anybody found out I did this, my career is over. I’ll probably go to jail.”
“Nobody will find out from me, I can guarantee you that.”
“I haven’t even told the FBI. Don’t really see how I could without explaining how I got it.”