“All right.” She nodded. “I have something I need to say to you, too.” Admitting that she had been wrong wasn’t easy for her, but she owed him an apology for accusing him of swindling her grandfather, as well as overreacting when she discovered the truth about his past.
He took a deep breath, then raising his gaze to meet hers, he shook his head. “I wasn’t trying to hide what I did when I was a kid,” he said. “It’s not something I’m proud of and I prefer not to think about it, but I did intend to tell you about it at some point.”
“After the things I had accused you of the night I arrived, I can understand your reluctance.” She had unknowingly brought up his past that night and given her insistence that he was guilty, she couldn’t blame him for being hesitant about sharing his youthful mistakes.
He shrugged. “I don’t know how much you know about it, but my dad embezzled a fortune from the people who trusted him to build their savings. That’s why he took his own life. He knew he was facing the rest of his years in prison and he wasn’t man enough to face the consequences of his actions.”
“I read about your father’s crimes in the article from one of the Houston papers,” she admitted.
“My mom wasn’t aware of what he had been doing, but by the time he died, my father had squandered all of their savings, as well as run through millions of his clients’ money.” He stared off into the distance. “I’m not sure why he did it, but I suspect he was trying to project an image of being a huge success.”
“He might have thought it was important for the type of job he had,” she suggested gently.
“Probably.” Lane shook his head. “Anyway, after he died my mom found a job as a receptionist in a big corporate office and we had to move out of the suburbs and into an apartment in Houston because we didn’t have a car. Both of our vehicles were sold along with everything else at the court-ordered auction.”
“That had to have been a huge adjustment for you and your mom.” She could only imagine how hard that had been for both of them.
He nodded. “Everything was going along okay and we were squeaking by until my mom found a lump in her breast.” His expression hardened. “Because of the treatments she needed, she couldn’t work, and along with losing her job, she lost her health insurance.”
“That has happened to a lot of people,” she said, thinking how unfair it all was. “How old were you?”
“I was fourteen and suddenly thrust into the role of being our sole means of support,” he said, taking a deep breath.
“Couldn’t your mother apply for assistance from some of the state agencies?” she asked.
“She did,” he admitted. “But they had a backlog of cases and we needed money right then.” He gave her a meaningful look. “Some landlords don’t give a damn what people are going through. They want their money when the rent is due or they’ll toss you out in the street. Same thing goes for grocery stores. If you don’t pay for the food, you don’t eat.”
“I’m so sorry for what you had to go through,” she said, feeling worse than ever. When she found out about his past, she had assumed he stole things for the fun of it or had been rebelling as a lot of teenagers do. But that hadn’t been the case. Lane had turned to crime as a way to survive.
“I wasn’t old enough to get a real job and it didn’t take long for me to figure out that mowing lawns and doing odd jobs wasn’t cutting it,” he continued. “I had to find a way to make some real money.”
“That’s when you started—”
“Yeah, that’s when I became a thief,” he interrupted. “I stole whatever I thought I could resell, went door-to-door selling magazine subscriptions that people were never going to get and solicited donations for charities that didn’t exist. I did whatever I could think of to make ends meet.”
“Did your mother know?” Taylor asked, her heart breaking for what he’d had to do.
“If she did, she was too sick to care,” Lane answered. He glanced down at his hands. “She died six months after her diagnosis and it wasn’t long after that I was caught trying to sell an expensive silver tray to a pawn dealer.”
“Is that when you became a ward of the state?” she asked.
He nodded. “When my case came up in court, the judge looked at the evidence against me, and after asking me why I had done the things I had done, he took pity on me. He said that if I pleaded guilty to the charges, instead of a juvenile detention center, I would be put into the foster care system and sent to the Last Chance Ranch.” Looking directly at her, he smiled. “That was the best thing that ever happened to me.”