Page 116 of Forged in the Fire
“I already told you.” He basically stammered it, though he tried to make it sound hard. Mean like his dad’s voice.
He wasn’t great at telling his mom lies. But no way was he going to let on that his dad had forced him to do it.
Not when he knew she would confront him, which would turn into a big fight, and she’d end up getting hurt.
He would never be responsible for that. Would never let it happen. It was his job to take care of her.
It was what he’d been made to do. He knew it all the way down into his soul.
“Don’t lie to me, Silas. I know you’re not telling the truth.”
Redness flushed his skin, and the scrapes on his face from being pushed down onto the pavement burned, but not as hot as his shame.
“I told you. I saw that there was a wallet in the cupholder, and I figured there had to be money in it.”
Air huffed out of her mouth, and she inched closer to him, but her words came out soft. In all the belief that she always gave him. “You’re not a thief, Silas. I know you didn’t come up with that plan yourself. You can tell me whatever you need to.”
He wavered, looking away and gnawing at the inside of his cheek like it might be able to keep the truth from bleeding out.
“Please tell me, baby.” Sadness oozed out with it, and he looked that way just as she whispered, “I know it was him, wasn’t it? Did your dad put you up to it?”
Put him up to it?
Moisture bleared in his eyes, and in discomfort, he shuffled on his feet, trying to fight the hurt that blazed across him like the strike of a leather belt.
“Tell me, Silas. You’re not going to get into trouble. I just need to know.”
“He made me.” He hated that he sounded like a sniffling little baby when he said it, but he couldn’t help it. Couldn’t help the icky feeling that slicked through his veins.
“Because I’m like him,” he whispered like a horrible secret.
His mom took him by the outside of the arms. “You are nothing like him. Nothing.”
She almost shook him as she wheezed the last.
“You are kind and good and care about those around you. You love, Silas. You love with every cell inside this body, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve got his blood, you’ve got Silas’s heart.”
She said it as she set her hand over the thunder of it.
“It’s your heart.” The words gushed out of him. She was who he wanted to be like.
Tears blurred her eyes, the soft green sad. “No more of this, baby. It’s done. It’s over.”
He wanted to ask her what that meant, but she suddenly shot upright, taking his hand again, glancing both ways before she darted them across the tree-lined street to where their minivan was parked on the opposite side.
Confusion bound him when he saw that Meems was sitting in the front passenger seat, and when his mom ripped open the sliding back door, his brother and sister’s car seats were both buckled onto each side of the middle row with an empty spot left right in the middle.
There was no place to sit in the back seat since the whole thing was stuffed with their things.
“Get in, baby,” his mother whispered.
His nerves scattered.
Excitement and relief and more of that confusion as he tried to process exactly what was happening.
“Hi,Sigh-us, mybrover!” Brody kicked his tiny feet as Silas squeezed by to get into the middle, and he could barely return a, “Hi, buddy,” around the lump in his throat as he settled into the middle.
On the opposite side, Elena reached around her car seat, a big smile on her dimpled face as she gripped at his arm. “We’re goin’ to Meems’s house.”
