Page 67 of You for Her (The Edge of Retaliation 2)
“What happened to you, Ethan?” I ask, opening my eyes and looking over at him.
He smiles, but it’s weak and a little broken. “I was raised in foster homes. I lost my parents when I was only young. My mother died of cancer and my father killed himself. It left me … broken. I went from home to home and eventually I was put with a family that lived just by the Yates family. I befriended them right away, Tanner mostly, of course, but they all took me in. Tanner’s mom used to make me school lunches when my foster family forgot and send them to school so I didn’t get hungry. After school, she would always make sure I was fed before I went home.”
I swallow the thick lump in my throat and keep listening.
“My foster family was messed up. You know, I’ve wondered so many times over the years how people like that can even pass in the system. How they can be considered capable of looking after a child that has no family. Half of them are bigger monsters than the families they are taking the kids from. It’s a cruel system, unfair and weak. Those kids need someone to be there for them, not someone to make it worse.”
“Your foster family was cruel?” I ask.
“My foster mother, Tayce, was a drunk, and my foster father, Frederick, was high on every drug you could imagine. They were abusive. I had a foster sister, Bay, and she suffered bad, too.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know.” Ethan shrugs, frowning. “She got moved after I left home. I was going to let her come live with me, but when I went back to get her, she had been relocated. They wouldn’t tell me where. As I said, the system is misguided and poor.”
“Did Tayce and Frederick ever … hurt you?”
Ethan nods. “More than once. Which is why I loved going to the Yates’ place. They always cleaned my wounds, and fed me, and helped me with my homework. They were my family. They still are. Which is why it was so hard for me to turn my back on them. But then I had you and …”
“I get it,” I say, and I mean it, I really do. “I would kill for a family like that, and if I had one, I’d probably have done the same thing.”
“As soon as I knew who you really were and the kind of person you were, I stopped, Callie. I told Tanner I wouldn’t do it, and we had a falling out.”
I squeeze his hand. “Do you miss him?”
“Tanner?”
“Yeah.”
Ethan goes quiet, and then says, “Every fuckin’ day.”
“You should fix things with him,” I say.
“It’s too late for that. He hates me for not having his back. Hates me for not being on his side.”
“That was when he didn’t know the truth. He does now. You should try and piece your family back together.”
“You and him are a thing now?”
I purse my lips and then shrug. “I think so. It’s hard to tell, with everything the way it is. I know I care about him. I know that even after everything, he matters to me.”
“You matter to him, too. I’ve seen Tanner with people a lot, but I’ve never seen him the way he was with you today. He was scared, I could see the love in his eyes. You changed something in him, something he lost when Celia died. You’re healing him. He deserves that.”
“Did he have a hard time growing up, too?” I ask.
Ethan shakes his head. “No, they were the perfect family. Loving mom, strong father. They used to play games and laugh. Which is why I think it hit them so hard when his father had an affair. It changed everything in that house. Gone was the laughter and fun. Their mom was down, sad, and angry. Their father was distant. Tanner was angry and got into a lot of fights and a lot of trouble, Andrea moved out, and Celia was left alone. She lived with the most of it, the stuff they didn’t see, and I guess it was worse than we all knew because she didn’t tell anyone what happened to her.”
“Were you and she close?”
Ethan smiles, remembering his friend. “She was the little sister everyone liked. She never got into trouble, she was always happy and smiling. She was sunshine. She really was. She could make the darkest days bright. Which is why it was so hard when we were told you had said she killed herself. Nobody believed it, because Celia was always the light. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, we were all in our own world just before she died, and we didn’t pay enough attention to her. If we had, we might have seen how much she had changed.”
