Jonny's Redemption (Gemini Group Book 7) Riley Edwards (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

“Yeah, Bobby’s waiting.” Jonny smiled.

The men said their goodbyes at the sidewalk. Jonny waited until he was in his truck to call his uncle. He didn’t want to make the call, he didn’t want to care, he wanted to wash his hands of his mother and be done. But he couldn’t. Years of conditioning made that impossible. And she was still his ma. Somewhere deep down, under all her pain, the woman who once upon a time was a good woman, who loved him, was still there. Or at least he hoped she still was.

“Jonathan,” his uncle greeted.

“You doing all right?”

It was a stupid question but Jonny couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

“Thankfully, she fell asleep when we hit the turnpike.”

Anita didn’t fall asleep, she passed out. Either way, Jonny was sure his uncle was immensely happy his sister was out so she couldn’t babble incoherently and spew her nasty venom anymore.

“Right. How much longer until you’re home?”

“Thirty minutes. Listen, Jonathan, I wanted to apologize again. I had no idea…” Bryan trailed off.

After a beat of silence, Jonny let his uncle off the hook.

“There’s no need. She’s an alcoholic and there’s nothing more to say about it.”

“You didn’t kill your father.”

Jonny sucked in a breath and held it until his lungs burned. Obviously, Jonny knew he hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger; that was all Doug. However, Jonny had spent a good amount of time wondering if he’d handled the situation differently if he could have defused it and changed the outcome. But at the time, Jonny had been overcome with rage. He’d been furious at all of them, save his niece who was an innocent bystander in their fucked-up family, which only fueled Jonny’s anger to new heights. Instead of digging in to make a point, perhaps if Jonny had just given Doug the money he’d wanted no one would’ve died.

“She’s right in the sense I could’ve given Doug what he wanted and he wouldn’t have killed Calvin.”

“That’s bullshit, Jonathan. Pure bullshit. You were in that situation because your father had an affair that resulted in a child. Why he didn’t divorce Anita when that woman came up pregnant, I will never understand. I cannot fathom how a man has two families. And I really can’t understand why she didn’t divorce him when he asked her to raise that child. Beyond that, I don’t understand why she never talked to me, why she didn’t protect you. But from the start, my sister was mindless when it came to your father. Your granddad hated your father from their first date until the day my father died—he despised Calvin. He said Calvin had a black heart, and your granddad was not wrong. But from them came you. And as you know your granddad loved you something fierce. He was proud of you. We all are, Jonathan. I’m sorry I didn’t know what was going on. If I had, I would’ve removed you from their home immediately. I would’ve helped you in any way I could help.”

Jonny knew that the evidence of that was passed out in his uncle’s car. The moment Jonny had called, his uncle had dropped everything to come to his aid. Not his sister’s—Jonny’s.

“I reckon that’s why she didn’t tell you, Uncle Bryan. If you took me out of that house, people would know something was wrong. Something she went to great lengths to hide. They both did. The other part of that is if you took me she’d lose her buffer. They needed me to watch out for Doug and that became even more so when he found out Calvin was his real father, not just a friend of his mother’s who came to visit them. No part of that discovery had been fun, but Doug took it as an opportunity to blackmail them. And from there, I had to watch him and make sure he wasn’t talking out of turn to people around town. They’d convinced me if anyone found out our lives would be ruined, we’d have to move away and I didn’t want to lose my friends and my home. I was too young to fully understand what was really going on. Our lives were already ruined, Calvin had done that years before. All that was left was their reputation and they wanted that intact. As an adult, I don’t get it any more than I did when I was a child. But there you have it. Decades of lies and secrets for nothing.”

Lies always come out in the end. One day, one year, or decades later. And right then Jonny was feeling the nothingness of those secrets. They were all for naught. Even if Anita hadn’t been arrested, even if his uncle hadn’t had to drop everything and come rushing down to Maryland, even if Jonny was done hiding—the secrets meant nothing. Not a goddamn, fucking thing. Who gave a flying fuck if everyone knew his father was a philandering sack of shit? Who cares if all of Kent County had known that Doug was his blood brother? God, the stupidity of his family was unreal. And Jonny had gone along with it, making him complicit in their lunacy.

“None of that is important anymore,” his uncle told him and Jonny felt that hit. “It’s time for you to start living your life without the cloud of their failures hanging over you. Whether my sister wants it or not, she’s getting help. I’ve talked to the rest of the family and they’re on board. I hope it doesn’t come to this, but if she won’t immediately go into treatment, she’ll be experiencing at-home family therapy.”

Jonny was glad he wouldn’t be there for that. Anita could be mean or meaner when she was confronted with her problems and she defended her husband even while she was sober like a lioness defended her cubs. Her unhealthy obsession with Calvin was just as much a problem