She was always most vulnerable when she didn’t expect something. As he turned into the parking lot in Hawthorne, showing his ID at the gate, his stomach churned. He hated manipulating her like this, but he’d spent the drive fortifying himself, talking back to his fears, and kicking them aside.
Today he was on a mission, and his one and only goal was finding the facts.
Once inside the visiting room, after a hug and a hello, he launched into one of her favorite topics. “Did you hear Anthony Geary retired from GH?”
Her green eyes lit up. He hadn’t seen them so bright in months. “I watched his final episode. It was amazing,” she said, smacking her palm on the wooden table in excitement.
Yup, that did it. Like a fisherman casting a rod, he’d dropped the lure in the water. She was the fish taking the bait.
She chattered on about the show, and because Ryan had listened to a soap opera podcast on the five-hour drive, he was up to speed on which long-lost twin had reappeared, who had been kidnapped and sequestered away in a mansion, and who was pregnant with a secret baby.
Soon, she was laughing, and he’d done it—he’d lulled her into a false sense of security. Tension curled through him, but this was the only chance he had to shock her into stumbling into the truth.
“I think Sonny has to be behind the kidnapping,” she said, chatting about the show as he nodded a yes while reaching into his pocket to remove the pattern subtly. Under the table he unfolded it. Then he laid it on the wood surface, jammed his finger against the center of the paper, and interrupted her.
“Who are T.J. and Kenny Nelson, and why are their names hidden in a code inside your prize dog jacket pattern?”
She fumbled her next words as her jaw dropped and her eyes widened. “What did you just say?”
“Mom, I know what this is. Don’t lie to me now. Please, God, after all I’ve done for you, don’t lie to me now,” he said, desperation infusing his tone. “Who are they and what role did they play in my father’s death?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbled, dropping her gaze to her hands, twisting her fingers together.
“You do, Mom. You do. You gave me this pattern; you asked me to keep it safe. I did that.” He tried to keep the exasperation from seeping into his voice. But that was damn near impossible. “I believed it was some kind of sign of hope for your future,” he said, brandishing the paper, faded and wrinkled from age. “I kept it safe for you. I was even going to have a friend make the damn jacket for you as a gift, to cheer you up. And when she did, she figured out it wasn’t a pattern. It has addresses in it and those addresses correspond to names, and one of those names is the man doing life for murder, and two of the others might be the broker and the getaway driver in the crime.” Her face remained stony even as she blinked several times. He pressed on. “Those other two names match the initials you told me last time I was here, when I asked you who were Stefano’s friends who were looking out for his son. You asked me if they were T.J. and K.” He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms out wide in a waiting stance. “The initials all line up. Talk to me, Mom.”
She pursed her lips together and squeezed her eyes shut. Her face looked pinched, as if she were sucking all her own secrets into her mouth and holding them in with her breath.
Ryan huffed through his nostrils. Enough. This was fucking enough. He wanted to slam his fist into the wood. To knock the damn table over on its side. To throw things. But he wasn’t that kind of a man. He didn’t do that on the ice, and he didn’t do it in here. Violence begets more violence. Fear spawns more fear. He had to rely on his head and his heart.
“Don’t you dare shut down on me again,” he seethed, the words curling out of his mouth like hot smoke. “Don’t you try that routine with me. I have a right to know what I’ve been carrying around for you. It’s not a secret anymore. The pattern was made. The names are revealed.” He thumped his fingertip against the table. “Jerry. T.J. Kenny. They were in your pattern, Mom. Yours.” He pointed at her for emphasis. “I want to know why the addresses, and therefore the names, of those men were hidden. Because for eighteen years, you tricked me into thinking this was special to you. I kept it safe. Because I fucking love you, Mom.”
His throat hitched, and wild tears threatened to rain from his eyes. He stopped speaking, pressed his thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose, and pinched, keeping them at bay. “I love you, and I love Dad. I came to see you all the time, even when I was in college, even when I had leave from the army. I’m the one. I came here. I saw you. And I have been a messed-up son-of-a-bitch most of my life because of this. Please, I’m begging you. Tell me something.”
She parted her lips and bit nervously on her thumbnail. Her eyes welled up. She dug into her thumb then whispered. “Ry,” she said, like a fearful creature. “They told me not to say a word about anything. That’s why I gave it to you. To get rid of it. To hide it.”
He knit his brow. “Who? Who told you not to say a word?”
“Those men.”
“Why didn’t you just have me throw it out?”
She glanced from side to side then under the table, as if she were sweeping the room for spies. Leaning across, she lowered her volume even more. He practically had to read her lips. “I thought I’d gotten rid of that stuff already. But then the cops came, and I still had it, and I couldn’t have you throwing out something the cops might think was evidence,” she said, her lips quivering. “I didn’t want to put that on you, or make you responsible for that. I had you keep it knowing no one would ever look inside my sewing pattern.”
His chest burned with shame. He’d been played a fool by his own mother. But why? What was she so afraid of? “Why did you have it in the first place? Why did you put their addresses in there?” he asked, pressing on like a cross-examiner.
She twisted a strand of her hair, back and forth, tight against her skull. “They were just my notes. That was all. They were notes about who I was meeting, and I was taking on so much extra sewing work to pay off my debt, so I wrote things down on my patterns.”
“But this wasn’t on a pattern. It was in a pattern.”
“I know,” she said through gritted teeth. “But I didn’t want anyone to know I was meeting them.” She dropped her forehead in her hands and hissed, “About the drugs. And I told you why. I wanted to try to stay clean about the drugs in case I ever got out, and I fought so hard to have my conviction overturned.”
He drew a deep breath. “You put their addresses in a pattern because you were meeting them about drugs, Mom? C’mon. Why would you do that?”
Her jaw was set hard. “I told you. I wanted to keep you all safe from them. I had to protect my babies. I had to.”
“So you put the info on Stefano’s accomplices in a pattern to fucking protect us? You told me not to say anything about the drugs because you were trying to get out of here, but then you hid their addresses in a pattern. Something doesn’t add up.”
She flinched, but didn’t answer, then brushed something unseen off her shoulder. Fuck. This was spiraling again.
“Or was there something else going on? Did they have something else on you?” he asked, grasping at straws, but hell, he had to try something. Because it made no sense why she would need to shield all those names so badly.
She covered her eyes. “I was scared. That’s why I hid the info. That’s why I didn’t want anyone to know the addresses and who I was meeting.”
“Why? What did they have on you? Why were you so afraid of them? What did you have to hide? What was so important about those names that you asked me to hide this pattern? Because if it was that goddamn important, it sounds like it was more than drugs. It sounds like you gave me your own notes to plan a murder. Is that what it was? Was this your goddamn blueprint that you gave me?”