I cringed, thinking of the woman who’d stood gaping at me from their front door yesterday.
Nothing made sense, because looking at my father now, I was pretty fucking certain he hadn’t forgotten about my mom.
Hurt dripped from his every pore.
I blew out a troubled breath, dropped my eyes because whatever passed through him now felt too private, too intimate for me to see.
Finally he stood and took a couple steps back. Exhaling heavily, he settled to the ground off to the left of me, facing into the stillness of my mom’s silenced voice.
“No, I didn’t follow you here,” he finally answered. “Figured if you came to my door, it was about damned time I had the courage to show up at yours. Should’ve done it years ago,” he admitted quietly.
I fidgeted, rubbed the back of my hand under my chin. Sure as hell didn’t know what to do with that statement.
At one point in my life, I would have confided anything in him. Now he’d become nothing more than a stranger. I didn’t know him any more than he knew me. And here we were, tiptoeing around all the shit we should’ve hashed out years ago.
His voice grew thoughtful. “As soon as you took off last night, Mary hurried inside to her computer and searched to see if she could find out where you lived.”
A hard breath escaped my nose. Mary.
“Saw you had a house back here in Phoenix. Drove all night to get here… hoping you’d gone home after you left my place last night. Went straight to your house.” He lifted his face in my direction and quirked a sharp brow. “Imagine my surprise when your front door opened and there stood Aly Moore.”
Aly.
Just her name tightened my chest.
Soft, disbelieving laughter seeped from him. “Pregnant, too.” He shook his head and looked off in the distance. “Would’ve made your mom real happy, the two of you being together.”
I tucked my knees closer to my chest. “I heard something about that.” I paused around the discomfort, sucked in a breath and forced myself to continue. “She always knew everything before the rest of us, didn’t she?”
God, it felt like treachery, talking about her aloud. Voicing her had always seemed forbidden. Taboo. Like I’d overstepped my penance, illicit in my taking, dipping my fingers into the memories of the good when I’d been given over to the wicked.
“She sure seemed to,” he mused softly.
His tone sobered. “I have to tell you when Aly saw me, it just about brought her to her knees, Jared. If I didn’t know how badly I messed up seeing you last night, then I sure as hell found out today.”
My eyes jerked toward him. Did he really have the nerve to come here and lecture me? Judge me? He had no clue what was going on between me and Aly.
He caught my exasperated expression, his own deflecting, his eyes flashing with regret. Nervously, he rubbed his hand over his mouth, cocked his head so he could see me better. “Aly didn’t reveal a whole lot to me. She told me if you wanted me to know what was going on, then that was between the two of us to work out. But I could see how badly she was hurting.”
He shook his head. “God, if that woman isn’t ferociously protective of you. She was angry. No question about it. She didn’t even try to hide her disappointment in me. But there was no missing her compassion, either. How happy she was that I came.” He stopped for a second, lost in thought. “She was always that way, even when she was a little girl. She was always one of the sweetest, kindest girls. But she sure as hell never kept quiet if she believed someone was being wronged. Clear not a whole lot has changed.” He smiled a little. “She loved you back then, too, you know. Obviously she never stopped.”
My stomach twisted, tangled with all the emotions pushing out from the inside, vying for release.
For a moment we sat in awkward silence. Then he dropped his face in his hands, burying the desperation of his words in them. “God, I wish there was a way for me to make you understand the relief I felt when I saw you yesterday. Like the weight of this ugly world had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders.”
I shifted on the hard ground, doing my best to keep my cool. To listen. To really fucking hear. Because a huge part of me wanted to unload on him. Pretty sure he didn’t know the first thing about burdens.
He pressed on. “But then I saw the disappointment in your eyes when you made the connection that Mary is my wife. You looked at me as if I’d been unfaithful to your mother. It just about killed me, Jared. You took off without letting me get a word in and all that weight came crashing back. And I knew I didn’t deserve a minute of your time… I still don’t… not after the way I failed you. But I had to try. I’m tired of living with all this pain. That’s why I chased you back here.”
He stared at me, his gaze traveling all over me again, like he’d done last night. Only this time slower. Studying. Like he was reading the horrific story painted on my skin.
“Look at you,” he said, the words laced with pain. “I didn’t know it was possible for my heart to break any more. But seeing this?” He craned his head toward my scars, to the evidence of my sins exposed in vibrant color, all of them shouting out my guilt. His jaw visibly clenched.
“Don’t pity me,” I seethed, the old anger I didn’t know how to rid myself of breaking free.
The shake of his head was harsh. Disbelief narrowed his eyes. “Pity you? I pity myself. I don’t even know my own son. The boy I raised and loved with all my life is getting ready to become a father and I had no clue until I showed up at your door an hour ago. It makes me sick, Jared. Sick. Disgusted with the person I allowed myself to become. It took my son being man enough to come find me for me to be man enough to turn around and try to find my son. There’s something majorly wrong with that picture.”
Blood sloshed in my mind, and a wave of dizziness swept through me. I wanted to cover my ears, to scream at him to stop, while the little boy locked up inside me felt frenzied, frantic with the need to hear him say it.
To say what I heard bleeding from his voice.
His gaze caressed the stone, and his voice dropped, became slow and reverent. “No one saw things like your mother did. She had an insight about her like no one I’ve ever known.”
He rubbed his forehead, seemed to waver on what to say.
“She loved you and Courtney so much. At night before we’d go to sleep, she’d lie in bed in my arms, dreaming about what the future would hold for you and your sister.”
My heart squeezed.
God, this was unbearable and seemed vital all at the same time.
Incredulous, low laughter tumbled from his mouth, like it originated somewhere deep within him. “It was always you and Aly in those dreams, Jared. I thought it was ridiculous. I chalked it up to her having some romantic notion about her son marrying her best friend’s daughter. I humored her…” He shrugged, like he’d always been as helpless to the connection he shared with Mom as I was to Aly. “… because how could I not? Aly was so cute, the way she followed you around. Turns out I was wrong about that, too.”
Sadness fell over him, and he looked away, his eyes tracing over the letters cut deep into the stone that marked her grave. “Without your mom, we all lost our way. Every single one of us.”
Shame bowed his head. “Jared, I need you to understand how much I loved that woman. I didn’t know how to go on when she was taken from my life. Somewhere inside of me, I knew you and Courtney needed me and you both were scared and hurting, too, but I couldn’t see through the pain to the other side. During that time, I couldn’t feel anything but my own loss. Nothing else mattered except for the way I felt. With the trouble you started getting into, it was easier letting you take the fall for it than admit you needed help just as badly as I did.”
He choked over a sob stuck deep in his throat.
I squirmed, staring down at my fisted hands.
“The night you stole the Ramirezes’ car… I knew what you were trying to do, Jared.” He lifted his face to the sky, his eyes squ
eezed tight.
Something rocked through his voice. “My last memory of you was in a hospital bed, escaping death for the second time in months. God, you were so messed up, Jared… your eyes wild… but I saw you under it. Saw someone who was suffering as deeply as I was, and I couldn’t handle it. I just turned my back and walked away.” He touched his chest. “I betrayed my own son because I hurt so bad inside.”
That lump expanded. I choked over it. “I thought you hated me.”
“For a while, I thought I did, too,” he said, completely honest.
And fuck, it hurt, him coming right out and saying it. But I got it, understood being blinded by pain.
I’d been blinded by it for a long, long time.
Something heavy broke free inside of me. Sorrow gripped me tight. My eyes blurred. “I needed you,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said, his voice strangled. “I know that now.”
Restlessly, he propped his forearms on his knees and wrung his fingers between them. “When your grandma passed, I had to pull myself together because Courtney had no one left. I packed up our stuff and headed to California, looking for a new start. But it didn’t take me long to realize that start wasn’t moving away. It was realizing how badly my child needed me. Those couple of years messed your sister up. Scarred her. She wasn’t immune to any of it, either, and I knew it was time I was strong for her. But once I finally found that strength, I soon found I needed to be strong for myself, too. I was never going to truly get over your mother until I allowed myself to move on. Moving on was impossible, though, knowing you were out there. There’s been a void inside me for years, and not just the one left behind by your mom.”
I reeled, my fingers digging into the back of my neck as my head dropped.
“When I met Mary… she loved me through a lot of crap, Jared. She also helped me come to terms with what was missing from my life.”
I crammed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to stop the emotion welling there. My fucking throat burned and tingled and throbbed.
“But I’ve been struggling with the guilt, not knowing how I had the right to ask you to become a part of my life after what I’d done. I had to find you, I knew it, but guilt kept holding me back. When I saw you yesterday… it was like looking at myself, Jared, seeing all the same guilt I’ve carried for years.”
He huffed a heavy breath from his lungs. “I love my wife, Jared, but no one will ever replace your mother. She was the love of my life. My soul mate.” He shook his head with a soft chuckle. “Didn’t believe in any of that shit until the day I met her.”
I smiled a little. Now that I could relate to.
“But I had to find a way to live again. Had to finally accept Helene would always be missing from my life.”
Sadness deepened the line between his brows when he looked at my knuckles. “You’ve got to let your guilt go, Jared. You’re almost there, son. I can see it. Feel it. I may not have seen you in almost seven years, but I recognize you. Recognize the boy who always made me and your mom proud. I can also see him clinging to the past, afraid of letting it go because it might mean letting your mom go. But guilt doesn’t do anything but destroy what’s good. Neither Aly nor your baby deserve that. You don’t deserve it, either.”
Tears gathered in his eyes. “I’m sorry, son,” he said, the words raspy as he pushed them up his throat. “So sorry I left you to deal with what was never your fault. You were just a boy… a boy who made a mistake.”
His admission tore through me.
Shit.
I couldn’t tell if his words comforted or cut.
Emotion tightened his voice. “Don’t ever feel guilty for loving someone, Jared. I have to believe your mom can see us now… have to believe she’s looking down and sees the happiness returning to our lives. I have to believe it makes her glad and she wants that for us. That she knows she’s getting ready to be a grandma and you’re living the life she wanted for you. Don’t let your guilt over what happened destroy that for her. Don’t let it destroy it for you.”
I felt pinned by the magnitude of his stare. “Don’t repeat the mistakes I made. Fight for what you love. For what’s important. Cherish it. Only a fool believes there’s a good enough reason to let love go.”
He climbed to his feet and gently settled his hand on my shoulder, spoke out into the distance behind me. “I know you can’t forgive me overnight. I have a lot of years to make up for. But I sure hope you let me try.”
That rock of unspent emotion raged like a ball of fire.
“Yeah,” I whispered hoarsely. “I’d like that.”
He squeezed me once before he turned to walk away.
I watched him make his way over the grass, his head hung low as he retreated.
My heart pumped hard. Too hard.
All the years of guilt and pain knotted at the center of my chest. It surged and spun, my mother’s voice the softest echo in my ear. God, I’d loved the sound of it, loved the way she’d sit and listen and whisper her belief into me. I drifted on it, like I could feel her here, like maybe just like my dad had said, she was looking down.
Maybe she knew how lost I’d be without her.
Maybe she knew how much I would need Aly.
I lifted my face to the subtle warmth of the winter sky. Sadness twisted up my expression, but somehow it was still a smile.
And I felt shocked, almost horrified, when that rock of unspent emotion finally broke free.
Tears burned hot, dragging all the torture inside me finally out into the light.
Into her light.
And I just fucking sobbed.
Sobbed like a baby because it hurt so bad.
Because I missed her and I wanted her back and I wished I could change what I’d done.
But I couldn’t.
Fuck, I couldn’t.
But I also couldn’t hang on to the guilt any longer.
I thought I’d gone to my father for mercy.
But he’d shown me that mercy was buried somewhere deep inside of me.
And I knew, just like I was sure my mother knew.
Just like Aly knew all along.
It was time I forgave myself.
TWENTY-FIVE
Aleena
I froze when I heard a key slip into the lock.
I stood at the kitchen sink, facing out the window into the backyard. Rays of late-afternoon sun slanted into the dimly lit house, and my arms were soaked with the dishwater I had my hands buried in, desperate for anything to distract my distraught mind. Over the last four days, I scrubbed every surface of the house, multiple times, knowing I had to keep my hands busy if I didn’t want to lose my mind.
Or lose my nerve.
So many times I’d been close to begging him back, my finger poised at my phone in the weak moments when I was missing him so much that I’d take him any way I could. But I knew the error in that, knew I was only inviting the same trouble back into our home, and I had to wait for him to find his way.
And I knew… knew with all of me, Jared wanted to find that path just as fiercely as I wanted him to. So for the past four days, I continued to breathe belief into him, pouring all of my thoughts his direction, praying he would hear or that fate would somehow intervene.
That intervention had come in a tangible form to my doorstep.
Now my stomach twisted in anticipation, and I listened acutely to the rattle of the knob as it was turned.
God, I’d been begging for that sound, my hopes soaring on a boundless high ever since Neil Holt had shown up this morning.
Jared had gone to him.
I knew it the second I saw Neil’s pleading eyes staring down at me – of course after all the shock had worn off at finding each other there, the two of us standing with gaping mouths for endless seconds. Obviously, neither of us were what the other had expected.
Then the strongest sense of pride had taken hold of every corner of my heart and swayed in the slowest dance with my spirit, because
I knew Jared had finally taken the first step.
I also knew whatever meeting they’d shared had not gone well, and the man I loved with all my life had been hurt yet again.
It killed me, knowing Jared was out there alone, suffering through the anniversary of his mother’s death, on his birthday. Being helpless this way was awful. But the waiting was even harder. I wanted to run to him, wrap him up and hold him and whisper I was never going to stop loving him.
Every single one of those assertions were the truth. Because I would never let him go, would never give up on this man with the tortured, beautiful heart. But I knew I had to wait until that heart was truly ready.
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