Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 145038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
Oliver does, too.
“Oliver?” Elizabeth winces. She tries to step toward Phoebe, but the fire coming out of her daughter’s eyes stops her dead in her tracks.
“Wh-what?” Addison staggers at me. “Move, Brayden. Your sister—”
“She’s been in pain for months. Because of your lies. That”—I motion behind me—“is what your deception and love does. Horrific. Your. Doing.”
“Let me see her,” Addison says icily, painfully, between clenched teeth. She budges forward.
“Back up,” Phoebe sneers at her. She weaves her arms protectively around Hailey, like there is no way in hell they will touch her. “You don’t get a heartfelt reunion. Not when you caused this.”
I fall in love with Phoebe a million times over in this one moment. I could kiss her. Hug her. Marry her—though we’ve done that a hundred fake times already.
“Brayden,” Addison pleads with me.
“See this line?” I drag my foot across the dusty cement, creating a line in the dirt. “Any of you cross it, Nova shoots your leg. Which’ll probably blow off since he’s holding a shotgun.”
“You’re kidding.” Addison gapes, hurt all over her face.
I’m trying not to envision her on the bank of a river, giving me CPR. I’m not thinking about the past. I’m just thinking about this moment. My sister. My family in this storm shelter. And the three people in front of me have been excommunicated, as far as I’m fucking concerned.
“Brayden.” She checks behind her, looks at her husband. Everett is torn up in ways that physically rattle her. “Everett, honey?”
“They know. I told them about Varrick.”
Elizabeth clutches a heart-shaped locket at her neck. She seems ill. “How much do you know?”
“Why don’t you tell us?” I ask her. “Dad, say nothing. You two, keep your backs to him and start talking.”
It takes at least fifteen minutes for them to run through the same exact story. With a little more detail about the car crash. (Wish I didn’t hear it.) And the deaths of Daphne and Brent.
Elizabeth is crying through these recountings of the past they clearly never wanted to revisit. Addison dries her friend’s tears with travel tissues from her purse and becomes more stoic for her. It’s not fabricated emotion. They’d have to be evil to play us this hard, and I know they aren’t. Not when all they want is for Hailey to be okay.
“Has she been sleeping?” Addison asks, constantly peering over at my sister. “Hailey, can you hear me? Hailey.”
“I wasn’t in the backseat,” Hailey mutters. “I wasn’t in the backseat.”
“Bethy.” Addison whirls to her. “We have to tell her.”
Elizabeth buries her face in her hands, then drops them. “Okay, okay. We’ll tell them. We can tell them.” She takes a readying breath, but her face punctures when she sees her son. “Nova, please don’t look at me like that.”
He’s staring at her like she’s a stranger.
“I’m your mom. I didn’t lie, spider. We didn’t lie about that.”
“You lied about Rocky.”
She slaps her hands to her sides. “We felt like we had no choice. If we were going to raise you as confidence men, you couldn’t know the truth. We’d…”
“Lose us?” Nova finishes coldly.
Elizabeth claws at her heart like it’s breaking. “I…we didn’t want it to be like this.” She lifts the slipping strap of her yellow floral sundress.
“Hailey,” Addison cajoles. Her red hair is in a tightly coiled bun. Wearing a slim black dress, she bows forward like she’s enticing a kitten out of a cranny. “I can tell you everything. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know.”
“I wasn’t in the backseat,” Hailey mutters.
Addison straightens up, then glares at me. “Let me cross the fucking line.”
“You can tell her everything right there. Maybe start with whether you were actually pregnant with Hailey.”
Addison and Elizabeth slip each other grief-stricken, surrendering looks, then Addison unknots her bun. Red strands pool onto her shoulders. She exhales for a solid second and breathes out, “No, I wasn’t.”
“But you were pregnant at one point?” Phoebe says with a heated, tremoring voice. “You had a miscarriage, right? That’s what you said at the Berkshires. That’s why we thought you were pregnant with Trevor—but really, you adopted him.”
“No,” Addison says. “We made it look like I was pregnant.”
“We staged it, bug, because we didn’t want any of you to question where Trevor came from,” Elizabeth explains further.
“We lied to you during the dinner,” Addison admits outright. “At the Berkshires.”
“Why?!” Phoebe yells. “Why the fucking cruelty?!”
Elizabeth winces and raises her hands, as if they’re clean of misdeeds. “Bug, I promise you, we felt like this was the only way to protect you all.”
Addison shakes her head in thought. “You pull a thread and then another and another. We thought we could stop you all from pulling threads, if there was a reasonable explanation for Trevor’s birth.”
“But you all kept pulling,” Elizabeth says. “If you knew we lied about Hailey, Trevor, and Rocky, then you’d doubt us, and there is no room for doubt between each other—not in what we do. We knew you could never know or…or this would happen.” Her face twists in a surge of grief as she peers from Nova, to Oliver, to Phoebe. “You’re my kids. Please. Please. I love you, and I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” Her knees buckle, and Addison catches her, holding her friend, who sobs into her chest.