Tyler O’Neill’s Redemption by Molly O'Keefe Page A

promised me shit before and it ain’t worked out so well, has it?” he spat.
    Louisa, his sister, crept out of the dark hallway to come stand by her brother. Her pretty black hair was pulled back in braids framing a round face, so sweet in its youth. In its innocence.
    Juliette’s heart cracked.
    Louisa tucked her little hand in Miguel’s and he held it, cradled it in his own not much bigger than hers. The two of them, two children, were a united front against a world determined to pull them apart.
    “I’m not going to some foster home,” he said. “We’re not getting split up.”
    “I don’t want you to get split up,” she said, praying he would listen, that she could convince him, somehow, that after all this, she wanted him safe. “I don’t want you to go to foster care. And right now, I’m telling you that your best shot of staying together is to wait this out. Let’s see what happens with the social worker.”
    “I like you, Chief,” he said.
    “Me, too,” Louisa piped up, and Juliette’s throat burned with acidic regret.
    “But I don’t trust you,” he said. “Not anymore. And I’m not going to sit at school waiting for you to show up with some woman who is going to take me away.”
    Hurt and regret, jagged pains right through her chest, made it impossible for her to speak and she wondered if this was how Tyler had felt tonight when she’d sliced him apart. She didn’t think she could hurt him, didn’t think he had feelings she could injure, but it was obvious she had.
    She refused to feel guilty about what she’d said. She was just being honest and if Tyler was hurt by that, so be it.
    But she had a bad feeling that Tyler was smack-dab in the middle of Miguel’s situation whether Juliette liked it or not.
    She swallowed her pride and it was bitter and hard, a rock in her chest. Sour in her heart.
    “Do you…do you trust Tyler?” she asked, desperate.
    Miguel shrugged and then, finally nodded. “I guess.”
    “Then whenever this meeting happens, I’ll tell you and you can stay with him,” she said, and waited for Miguel to agree.
    Miguel looked down at Louisa and stroked his little sister’s hair, twined the long braid through his fingers.
    “Miguel?” Louisa whispered. “What’s happening?”
    “Everything’s going to be okay,” he told his sister, and Juliette looked down through a haze at the worn nap of the red carpet, trying to keep her emotions schooled. Professional.
    “Fine,” he said. “We’ll stay with Tyler.”
    She nodded, relief filling her with a cold wind.
    But she knew she had to head back out to The Manor and make things right with Tyler. It killed her—destroyed her, actually—that after everything he’d done to her, the pain he’d inflicted, the doubt and confusion, she was going to have to apologize to him.
    He’d torn her to the ground, ruined her. The person she’d become after he left was not the person she’d been before, and he’d done that to her.
    But she needed him. Watching Miguel help his sister into her coat so Juliette could take them back to their crappy home, she needed Tyler more than ever.
    And she hated it.

    R EMY’S WAS SO FAR OFF the beaten track you couldn’t even find the road on a map. Tyler took Main out past the three oil drills and then took the first gravel road on his left. He followed that into the bayou, where the cypress and swamp crept closer and closer to the road. The gravel turned to dirt and twice Tyler had to stop because there was a big old croc in the middle of the road. Ten minutes out past the shack where the Louisiana State University bio students came out every spring to count dying plants, there was another dirt road that was actually Remy’s long driveway.
    The trees broke into a clearing, a strange little tongue of solid earth in the middle of the swamp, and Tyler parked Suzy beside the twenty or so other cars in the makeshift lot.
    Remy’s was alive tonight, every ragged Christmas light and