The Helford Trials (Helford #3)

Chapter Seventeen

                 

It did all come out in the trial, like Meade thought it might. The things Helford made him do were chronicled and laid out precisely, but Marlisse fought back relentlessly. Meade had sat without speaking a word, staring down at the table as she spoke for him, pleading for mercy for a man who had been corrupted by Helford, who had lost his brother, whose fight for the resistance showed his true colors. She fought for his participation in the final night, and how he desperately helped work to keep us alive, even when it was at its least likely.

The Senators had to step out of the room to make the decision, leaving Meade where he was gripping his chair until it looked like his muscles must have been straining. After ten minutes, they returned to the room, and it was then that they announced Meade's pardon.

And Meade didn't say anything at all.

He had worried for so long about his guilt, believing so hard that he would not be pardoned, that I had expected him to be happy, even to celebrate it. But he didn't. Instead, his face remained expressionless like stone as they let him walk out the front door, cleared of all of his crimes, and he didn't say a word no matter how much Valerie and I tried to coax them from him. Instead, he returned to our shared hotel room and sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall, and didn't say anything more after that.

It took until Matthew showed up and quietly convinced us to leave him alone to his own thoughts for us to leave Meade alone with the guilt he was attempting to come to terms with. So we reluctantly walked away and left him alone to think, worry pooling deep in my gut, but I knew that Meade would be alright, Matthew promising to stay close by for when Meade let it all sink it. Valerie disappeared out the door with a whispered excuse, probably hoping that I wouldn't notice the exhausted set of her shoulders, and eventually I found myself standing in front of a hotel room door I had been avoiding, my hand hovering over the door uncertainly.

Before I could even try to knock, the door opened, and my father stared back at me.

"I had a feeling you were there," he told me, and then smiled a little. "It's like I could feel your anxious energy."

I worked hard to screw a responding smile onto my face. "Can I come in?"

My father nodded, stepping back. The room was small with only one large bed shoved into the center, the top of it covered with his half-unpacked suitcase and the contents that had made it out. The desk was covered with papers, and some of them were even taped to the wall. I hovered by them uncertainly, not knowing if I was allowed to read them. My father caught my uncertainty and laughed.

"It's nothing you don't already know," he assured me, gesturing for me to take a seat at the office chair, sinking down onto the edge of the bed only when I did. "What's on your mind?"

It used to be much easier, talking to him. My father used to be the best friend I'd ever had, but then we'd had our fight, and then we hadn't spoken for months—it might have even been years. Time was started to blur, but within that blur I knew I couldn't get that relationship back. But still, a little piece of guilt and sadness kept lodging itself into the back of my throat.

When I was a kid, my father had always been my hero. To me, he was larger than life. Hell, even when I was eighteen and running around Paris with Caitie Foerst, my father was still everything to me. And then Helford had stepped back into lives and forced itself in the middle of us, and I didn't think me and my father had yet had a proper conversation since the day he screamed at me that my obsession with a make-believe girl who didn't love me was going to get me killed.

We definitely hadn't talked since the night in Paris. And sitting there, in that room with him, I realized that I had come here because I had to. I wanted to. I was drowning, and I needed him to reach out and save me, even if it was just enough that I could catch my breath.