“It was me!”
A stunned hush fell over the group as Elliott’s words rose above them all. He stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard and looking weak.
“What—What do you mean?” Cayden asked.
“I leaked the damn documents.”
Lauren covered her mouth with her hand and sank to the couch. “Why, Elliott? Why would you do something like that?”
“Because I’ve had to live with the guilt of this for years. I warned them, but I sat by and did nothing when they lied to Congress. I am not going to die with that on my conscience.”
“You did this?” Alexis whispered, swaying backward against the counter.
“Did he put you up to it?” Cayden demanded.
“No. But if you’re wondering whether Noah had anything to do with it, yes. He did. I was inspired by him. He told me what happened to his father. I don’t blame him for hating people like me, companies like mine. And he told me that if I wanted to really earn redemption, then I needed to do more than apologize. So I did. I leaked the damn documents. It’s time these people paid for their crimes.”
Alexis couldn’t move. Noah was right. It hadn’t been a whim when she checked that box on the DNA test, the one that allowed her results to be shared. She wanted to find family. She wanted to find her father. But all of this was a charade.
Elliott could have avoided all of this by being honest, but he let Cayden and who knew how many other people assume that Noah was behind the hack. To assuage his own guilt.
She forced her feet to move. “I have to go.”
Candi raced after her. “Alexis, wait.”
“Leave me alone.” She held up her hands to ward off everyone’s attempts to get her to stay. “I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d never met any of you.”
“No, wait.” Lauren shot to her feet. “You can’t go. What about the surgery?”
Alexis laughed joylessly. “Noah was right. That’s all you care about, isn’t it? My kidney.”
“No. Alexis, please . . .”
She spun on her heel. “Go to hell. All of you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Noah moved through the next day as if detached from his body. He tried to throw himself into work, but his brain and heart weren’t in it. Anger was like sandpaper inside him, rubbing every nerve raw until he was blind with it. At four o’clock, he gave up. But instead of going home, he headed toward his mom’s house. At least there, he wouldn’t have to spend another night sitting alone on his back porch with a bottle of booze and his thoughts.
As he pulled onto his mom’s street, he lifted a wave at his mom’s neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Foster, who were stringing Christmas lights around the trunk of a maple tree that took up most of their yard. They would turn the lights on for the first time on Thanksgiving night. Christmas came early in the Oaks subdivision.
He pulled into the driveway and had to wedge his car next to a familiar sedan. Marsh was there. Great.
The man himself appeared from the side of the house as Noah got out. He carried a ladder with both hands and balanced a tool belt over one arm. He wore a faded pair of jeans with a crease down the middle because the man still couldn’t leave the house without ironing everything into military precision.
Marsh leaned the ladder against the side of porch as Noah walked up the sidewalk. “What’re you doing here?” he asked, wiping a gloved hand across his brow.
Noah had to bite back what he really wanted to say. Since when do I need to ask your permission to come over? “Came to talk to my mom. Where is she?”
“Inside with Zoe. Help me put up these lights, will ya?”
“I really need to talk to Mom—”
Marsh ignored him. He gestured vaguely toward the top of the garage. “Put the ladder over there, and I’ll hand you shit.”
“I’m not sure I actually know what to do here.”
“Hammer. Nail. It’s pretty self-explanatory.”
Noah resisted the natural urge to make an obscene gesture and instead did what Marsh told him to. He took the hammer and a bag of nails from Marsh’s outstretched hand. Gripping both in one hand, he held tight to the ladder as he climbed to the highest possible rung. “Start here?”
“Yeah. That should be good.”
Noah leaned just far enough to press the tip of the nail to the wood and damn near toppled off the ladder trying to bang it in.
Marsh snorted from below. “Jesus, who the hell taught you how to use a hammer?”
Noah answered with a hefty whack at the nail. “Well, as you know, my father died when I was young, so . . .”
“You’re going to bend the nail doing it like that.”
Noah hit the nail again, and as Fate would have it, it bent in half. The flat top became lodged in the wood.
“Fuck, I knew it,” Marsh grumbled. “Get down from there.”
Noah descended the ladder.
“Give me that,” Marsh griped, grabbing the hammer. “Wouldn’t have asked you to help if I’d known you didn’t know what the hell you were doing.”
“I’m not any good at this shit. I usually just hire a contractor.”
“A man should know how to hang Christmas lights at his own goddamned house.”
“This isn’t my house. It’s my mother’s. When I need something done at my house, I call a contractor.”
Marsh glared. “Can you at least hold the ladder and hand me shit?”
“All MIT graduates can do that.”
Marsh’s face turned the color of canned cranberry sauce. “You want to keep that attitude in check, boy?”
“I’m an adult, not a boy.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
The front door swung open then, and his mom walked out wearing a surprised smile and carrying a weathered cardboard box with the words Christmas Outdoors scribbled in Sharpie on the
