“Are you sure you want to do all this cooking?” he asked softly, his voice carrying the echoes of the young man he used to be. “You really don’t have to wait on me, Mrs. Holland.”
“I’ve spent twenty years waiting on a lot of things, Dylan,” I replied gently, setting a clean cloth napkin beside his plate. “Waiting on you to walk back through that front door is the only waiting that ever truly mattered.”
He looked down at the counter, swallowing hard as emotion caught in his throat. “I should have found a way back to you sooner. I should have trusted you enough to tell you what I actually found down in that garage the night everything fell apart.”
I pulled a wooden chair out from across the island, sitting down to face him directly. “You were eighteen years old, Dylan. You were just a kid facing off against a grown man who instinctively knew how to manipulate every single person in his orbit. Richard wasn’t just my husband; he was a master of psychological control. He convinced me for twenty long years that you were the one who betrayed our trust, who broke into our home, and who stole my family history. If he could systematically fool me while living under the same roof every single day, he could easily terrify a teenager who had nowhere else to go and no one in his corner.”
