Liberty At Last (The Liberty Series) (37 page)

Early, early the next morning, feeling deliciously sore for a number of reasons, I opened the letter from my father. My palms were sweating and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

Dear Liberty,

If you are reading this, it means I’m gone and that I was too late to meet you. I’m so sorry for that. And for a lot of other things, as you might imagine.

I trusted your sister Alexandra to deliver the necklace to you, and this letter. She is someone you can trust. Your other brothers and sisters, unfortunately, are not as reliable. They are, in fact, scheming and desperate. They won’t be happy that you were included in their inheritance. To a certain extent, I can understand what they’ll think — you didn’t have to put up with me for all these years, so why should you get as much money? They’ll think you had it “easy.” Clearly, you didn’t get the same benefits that they did — i.e., paid-for private schools, colleges, weddings, cars, apartments, etc. You didn’t get anything at all. But like I said, they’re greedy and monomaniacal, like their father, so they won’t want to hear all that.

That’s why I set the necklace aside for you. What you’ve gotten now, between the value of the necklace and your share of my estate, will never be equal to what my other children had. But at least it’s something.

The reason I’m writing this letter is to explain myself, but more than anything, it’s an apology. You deserved better. It’s too late for me to give you better now. I can never tell you how sorry I am that I wasn’t there for you growing up. I’d be lying if I told you I was completely ignorant of your mother’s problems. I wasn’t, even though I only knew her briefly. She was so beautiful. But even being that beautiful couldn't hide the amount of pain she was in. So I’m an even worse man than you might have imagined, because I knew. I just used her for what I wanted and then I left her alone. Troubled as she was, I didn’t ever want to see her again. And then she told me she was pregnant, and I made her take a test. And you were mine, but I never came to claim you.

I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me: But. Can you imagine how I slept at night? If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t sleep much.
I knew what I’d done was wrong. I left you with her. I’d never been a good husband, but I did pride myself on being a halfway decent father, so I knew what I was doing to you by never reaching out. Never insisting. I sent your mother plenty of money, and letters, but if I’m being honest, I knew in my heart that she never told you that I wanted to be a father to you. And I did, at least in the beginning. Then time passed, I started sleeping again, got married again…and I let myself wipe you from my conscious mind. You were always with me, in the background, and I still hated myself for abandoning you, but I just put you out of my mind. Doesn’t it seem impossible to do that? To a child? Forget all about your own child?

It should be impossible, Liberty. But I am here to tell you, my own daughter, that it was not.

I didn’t know until too late the extent of her substance abuse. By then, by the time Ian found you, your mother was dead and you were gone. I am glad to hear that you made it out. I can only hope that a better fate awaits you than hers. Or mine, for that matter.

Please know in your heart that if I could take it back and do it all over again, I would. But that’s the thing about being close to the end of your life. You see it all so clearly. I can’t go back, I know I can’t. And I will die knowing that I failed you.

I can understand it if you never forgive me. But please know that I love you, and I always loved you, even though it was a coward’s love.

Your Father,

Eric Kingston

I sat there for a long time, watching the sun come up. Then John started to stir and I got up quickly and went down to the kitchen. I took a lighter out of the drawer and ran down to the beach in my bare feet. Then I took the letter my father had written me and I lit it on fire. And watched it burn.

“You’re up early,” John said, coming into the kitchen a little while later. I was already dressed in my running clothes, drinking my second cup of coffee. I was all keyed up.

“Everything okay?” John asked, eyeing me warily.

“Fine,” I said, but I could hear the tension in my own voice.

“You read the letter from your father?” he asked, leaning back against the counter and watching me.

“I did,” I said. “It was fine,” I said, in answer to his questioning stare. “I burnt it down on the beach this morning.”

“So you got up before five, read the letter, burned it, and you’re on your second cup of coffee?” he asked, still watching me, my knees bouncing with a nervous energy I rarely had.

“And it was fine?”

“It was fine. Fine
ish
,” I admitted.

“Fine
ish
,” John said. He sighed and sat down. “Liberty, we’re getting married. You have to be able to talk to me, to tell me how you feel.”

We looked at each other. I wanted to tell him how I felt; there was nothing I wanted more. There was no one I trusted like I trusted him. No one who understood me as perfectly as he did. My knee-jerk reaction was to run to him. To tell him everything, and to have him make it all better.
But would he really want to hear how angry I was? How disappointed? In a father who was never there for me?

I had to be strong now. Not just for me. For him, too.

Even though John wasn’t like Eric — he’d had a relationship with his daughter, he’d seen her every year — it would still be too close a comparison for him. It would send him on a downward spiral about Catherine. I couldn’t do that to him, or to me. We had too much to do, and not enough time.

“I think he had good intentions,” I said carefully, trying to sound like I wasn’t being careful. “He gave me the necklace to make up for some of the money I didn’t get over the years. I don’t really care about that, but I appreciate his point of view.”

“Why did you burn the letter?” he asked, searching my face.

Because I didn’t realize that I was angry at him until I read it,
I thought.
I didn’t realize that I’d been abandoned, even though that fact had been as plain as day my whole life. I just never considered it.

“He asked me to forgive him,” I said. “And I do. I forgive him. So I just wanted to let that be it.” I got up and went to him, hugging him to me fiercely. He looked up at me and I lovingly stroked his stubbly face.

“I just want to start our life together,” I said. “I want to move forward. I don’t want to make the same mistakes my parents made, or that I’ve made in the past.”

“We’re always going to make mistakes,” he said, crushing me against his powerful chest. “But I agree: it’ll be a relief to make different ones. We’ll be helicopter parents — I’ll be a soccer dad, or whatever they call it these days. We won’t spend a night away from them.”

I sat on his lap and he wrapped his arms around me, cradling me. “I don’t know what a soccer dad is, but do you promise you’ll be one?”

“I promise,” he said. “We’ll be home every day to get the kids off the bus, and they’ll only eat organic food and watch
Sesame Street.
None of that
G.I. Joe
crap that I watched. It gave me all sorts of crazy ideas.”

“And no slutty Barbies,”I said. “My sister had a slutty Barbie. I think that was part of her problem.”

Just then Ian came in, wearing a silk paisley robe, striped pajamas, and a worried expression on his face. “What’s wrong?” John asked, alerted to trouble immediately.

Ian stepped over to the coffee maker and started pouring himself a cup. “Eva texted me just now,” he said, and we all looked at the clock on the wall. It was six-thirty here — three-thirty in the morning in Los Angeles. My heart rate sped up, and I felt John tense beneath me.

“Catherine’s gone,” Ian said. He took and a long sip of coffee.

“Eva got up in the middle of the night Catherine had left. She left her mother a note. She said she’d be in touch when she could.”

“Eva’s not taking it well?” John asked, evenly.

“She’s hysterical,” Ian said.

“You need to go out there,” John said. “Could you do that?”

Ian nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

“Ethan’s already there doing surveillance. He probably followed Catherine last night. I haven’t heard from him,” he said, and checked his phone.

“Ethan’s in California?” I asked.

“He’s probably in Mexico now,” John said, and grimaced a little, like the mention of the country itself brought back bad memories. “I sent him as soon as they left. Just to watch the house, make sure that they were safe. My orders were to follow Catherine everywhere she went.