“I never thought she’d take the money, Cole, I swear to you. I just wanted her as far away from your father as possible until I could figure out what to do. I didn’t know if you were ever coming back to us and I didn’t know what to do.”

I hear her crying as she speaks, but I don’t answer her. I can’t give her the comfort I know she needs because I don’t understand what the fuck I’m looking at right now. It can’t be real, but it is. It’s real and the proof is in my hands.

It’s a copy of the front and back of a cashed check. It’s made out to Olivia in the amount of ten thousand dollars, dated six weeks after I left for the Dominican a year ago. I want to shout and curse and throw the file at my mother and tell her it’s fake, but I can’t. Because it’s not. The back of the check has Olivia’s signature on it and it’s marked up with all of the numbers and codes that were stamped by the bank the day she cashed it. The day she fucking cashed it.

“I never thought she’d actually cash it and do what she did.”

My mother’s words echo through my mind. There has to be an explanation. There’s no way this means what she’s fucking implying. Olivia wouldn’t do this. She WOULDN’T. That nightmare she had was real, the guilt and the sorrow she felt was real. She couldn’t fake something like that, not with me.

“You’re lying. You’re FUCKING LYING! Why can’t you tell the Goddamn truth for once in your life?” I shout.

Olivia did something else with the money. All I have to do is ask her about it. She probably put it in a savings account for me for when I got home or some stupid shit. She didn’t tell me because I’m sure she was embarrassed. Hell, maybe she even spent the money to pay the mortgage since I wasn’t there to help. I don’t care what the fuck she did with the money as long as it isn’t what my mother is trying to say.

“Look at the next page, Cole,” my mother tells me quietly, a hiccup in her voice as she cries harder.

I look away from her and snatch up the next page in the file, quickly scanning it and my blood runs cold. It’s a medical report, Olivia’s medical report, and it’s dated two days after the check was cashed. After being around people in the medical field all my life, I know enough to understand what the fuck I’m looking at right now. My first thought is that it’s fake. I mean, for fuck’s sake, my parents run a damn hospital, my mother could easily forge a document like this. Then I see the signatures of not one, not two, but three different attending physicians. As much pull as my mother has at UC San Diego, not even SHE could force three well-renowned doctors to lie about something like this. There are checks and balances in place at every hospital to make sure things like that never happen. With a large sum of money, she might have swayed one of them to commit medical fraud, but not three of them. It would never happen.

Even with the proof staring me right in the face, I still want to deny it. She wouldn’t do this. GODDAMMIT, she wouldn’t do this!

“I didn’t want to do it on my own.”

“I wasn’t taking care of myself.”

“I didn’t want to do it without you.”

Olivia’s words repeat on a loop in my head and I can’t turn them off. I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me, but how in the fuck could it be this? How could she do this? How could she tell me everything else but leave this part out?

Because she knew you would hate her for it.

She spent all that time and energy being pissed at me for leaving, making me beg for her forgiveness and open up every bad fucking wound of my past when the entire time, she was keeping a secret like this.

Something isn’t right about this entire thing, but I’m too full of rage to try and make sense of anything. I loved her, I promised her the fucking world, I told her EVERYTHING and she lied to me. She lied right to my fucking face. I want to argue with my mother, I want to swear on everything that I am and everything that I believe in that Olivia would never do this, but the proof is right in front of me. It’s in my fucking hand and, as much as I don’t want to believe it’s true, I can’t ignore this piece of paper. I feel the rage burning a hole right through me the longer I look down at it, rereading every single detail of what she did to her body and to my child. Everyone in my life lied to me. EVERYONE. It doesn’t hurt knowing my parents and my sister lied, but it tears apart everything inside of me realizing that Olivia did. Even Garrett lied, my own fucking best friend. His cryptic words about how when the shit hits the fan, I couldn’t dare leave Olivia again. He knew what she did and he knew it would break me. Jesus Christ, I crawled to both of them on my hands and knees! I blamed myself for every rip and tear in our relationships and they let me. They fucking let me.

“I should have never given her the money. I take full responsibility for even suggesting that she do something like this, but you have to believe me, Cole. I never thought she would. I lost five babies, son, babies I wanted with every fiber of my being. Surely you can see that I’d never expect a woman like Olivia could do this. I thought she was stronger than that. I just wanted her to leave so she’d be safe.”

I don’t say a word as I push myself up from the chair. I don’t ask about my father because I don’t fucking care. I don’t tell my mother I forgive her, because I never will. She played her own part in all of this and she’s going to have to live with that for the rest of her life. This family is a joke. One big, fat fucking joke.