No, they were something he was hiding.
Honest, real, lay-it-out Jake Spear who gave me everything had a secret he’d been keeping.
From me.
He started into the room, his eyes locked to mine, and began, “Slick—”
I lifted the letters slightly and cut him off to ask, “Did Gran give these to you?”
He stopped an unusual distance away, which was to say any distance at all, and responded very unsuitably.
“What were you doin’ in my desk, baby?”
“Did Gran give these to you?” I repeated.
He didn’t answer. He reiterated his question.
“What were you doin’ in that desk, Josie?”
“It was open. The picture out.” I moved to the side to expose the picture. “It caught my eye, as it would, seeing as it’s of me and it’s Gran’s and I didn’t know you had it.”
Jake looked from the picture to me. “The picture was out?”
“Jake,” I said steadily, although I didn’t know how I managed it since everything else about me was trembling. “The picture being out is not the issue. Did Gran give you that photo? These letters?” I lifted the letters up again.
His eyes again locked on mine and he finally answered, “Yes.”
My heart squeezed.
“Did you read them?” I asked.
“Baby—”
My voice was sharper when I asked, “Did you read them, Jake?”
“Yes.”
I looked down to the letters then up to him. “How many times?”
“Honey, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” I returned. “How many times?”
“You know Lydie told me about you,” he pointed out.
I kept hold of the letters but dropped my hand, agreeing, “I know she told you about me. Told you, Jake. I had no idea she shared my private letters with you. Why would she do that? And why would you read them?”
“Because she gave them to me.”
“But they were”—I leaned toward him—“private.”
He stared into my eyes but said nothing.
So I asked, “When did she give them to you?”
“A while ago.”
“How long of a while ago?”
He took a step toward me, saying, “Josie—”
But I stepped back.
He stopped and I snapped, “How long of a while ago?”
I saw his jaw clench before he answered, “Five, six years.”
I stared at him, my heart squeezing harder.
“Five or six years?” I whispered.
“Yeah, baby. Now—”
I lifted up the bundle again. “You’ve known this much about me, everything, laid bare to you by my own hand, through my grandmother’s betrayal for five or six years?”
His entire body got still as he said, “Lydie didn’t betray you.”
That was when it happened.
It broke.
Or I broke.
And I did this by throwing the bundle violently against the wall and shouting, “She fucking did!” He moved again to me but I retreated then skirted him and when he didn’t stop, I warned, “Jake, you get fucking near me, I swear to God, I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again.”
Instantly, he stopped.
In any other frame of mind, I would have found that unbearably sweet.
In my current frame of mind, I found it the same but not in a good way.
“Why didn’t Gran introduce you to me?” I asked.
“Josie, we went through this,” he told me.
“We did and it didn’t make sense. And you know what, Jake? None of it does. None of it ever did. She was tight with you, the kids. She loved you. She spent a lot of time with you. She opened her home to you. She opened her heart to you. She told you about her and she told you about me. She gave you everything. So how in God’s name have I not met you?”
“We can’t know why she did it now, honey. She’s gone.”
“No,” I agreed quickly. “We can’t. Just as we can’t know why she would meet a man and share not only all of her deepest darkest secrets but also mine.”
“Slick, just take a breath and—”
“I’m not going to take a fucking breath, Jake,” I bit out. “Do you not find that strange? Utterly bizarre? Why would anyone do that?”
“We can’t know—”
“I bet we can,” I hissed, leaning back and crossing my arms on my chest. “So, tell me, she gave you those letters, what did she say, Jake? ‘Here, take these. Some bedtime reading to put you to sleep.’ Is that what she said?”
Jake didn’t reply.
He didn’t reply.
Jake, who laid it all out about everything, didn’t reply.
Oh God, he was absolutely hiding something.
“She gave me to you before she gave me to you,” I told him something he well knew. “You had me in your house.” I motioned to the picture and then to the letters. “All of me. Every thought. Every secret. All of me that should be mine to give.”
“Would you have given it?” he asked gently.
“I would have liked to have had the option,” I shot back.
“Would you have given it, Josie?” he pressed, still going gently.
“Maybe not,” I conceded sharply. “But even so, if she had some grand scheme, as she had to have had seeing as the evidence is clear.” I swiped the room with my arm. “Perhaps you could have shared it with me as she obviously shared it with you. Doing this, I don’t know, maybe one of the times I wondered out loud why on earth she did the things she did. Telling me, I don’t know, just how much you actually knew about me and that you had everything.”
“Babe, it happened and we are where we are now. Why does it matter?”
That was the wrong answer.
“Because I’m asking questions I think are important and the only person in this room who has the answers isn’t giving them to me,” I retorted.
He said nothing.
Nothing.
Just held my eyes and said nothing.
Why?
“Why won’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Because it doesn’t matter,” he answered.
“It does to me.”
He again said nothing.
And, again, why?
“You’re keeping something from me,” I whispered.
“Baby, you got all of me.”
“No, you have all of me,” I returned. “There’s something of you that you’re keeping from me.”
“Can we please let this go and move on?” he requested.
“Whether you agree or not, Jake, the extent of her sharing meant my grandmother betrayed me,” I informed him. “To you. And in the time we’ve spent together, the things we’ve shared, you not telling me the extent of it is, by extension, a betrayal too. So, no. We can’t move on from this until you explain to me what precisely you and Gran had been up to in regards to me for the last five or six years.”
“What matters to you is important to me, honey. Straight up, bottom of my heart, it is. Believe that. But I gotta tell you, it’s important to me that you let this go.”
“How would you feel, someone you didn’t know knew every word written on your soul for years and then they become important to you and they don’t share that with you and won’t tell you why? How would that make you feel, Jake?”
“I’ll say what you have to know, that both Lydie and I had your best interests at heart.”
“Really?” I asked, throwing out my arms. “Because if you did, I would have met you five or six years ago instead of you and your children being kept from me.”