13
In addition to his report cards and other various paperwork from his youth, there were five emails, each worse than the last. Jesse spread them out on the dining table and read them over and over. Hart read them, too, dabbing at his nose with a paper napkin. Clara stayed where she was, with her mother and father. Her big brown eyes were solemn. Worried.
Jesse straightened and looked long and hard at his foster mother. He knew the truth now—the emails made everything crystal clear—but would any of them possibly believe it?
“Why,” he said finally, “would you ever ask me to come back here after emails like these? Why would you want someone who hated you this much—” he looked at the worst email—“looking after your business? Your patients?”
Maybe Dr. Wilder was getting a clue, because she turned the question right back around on him. “Why would you come here to help me after I cut you off?” she returned, in a voice that wavered slightly.
Nash laughed abruptly. “You probably both assumed the other one was ready to apologize.”
There was a long pause. Jesse didn’t know what Dr. Wilder was thinking, but it was certainly true on his part—he’d come for her apology. He wasn’t sure if he’d been ready to accept it, but he’d wanted to hear it more than anything. After the first few days of his trip, he’d figured that she was trying to get away with not apologizing, to save face.
“I didn’t care if you apologized,” Dr. Wilder said softly. “I just wanted to see you. Make sure you were doing okay.”
He felt like there was a fist wrapped around his heart. His lungs weren’t working so good, either.
“I didn’t write those emails,” he told her. “I didn’t tell Hart to pound sand, and I never called the cops or mentioned a restraining order. My crazy ex-girlfriend took that upon herself.”
“Brittany,” Clara whispered.
“Oh,” Dr. Wilder said lightly, wiping her eye with a trembling hand. She cleared her throat briskly. “I see.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. He had to get away to process all of this, so he said, “Gonna shower,” and left the room, purposefully shoving Hart out of his way with his shoulder as he passed him. More sign language.
For once, Hart didn’t react.
Jesse took the stairs two at a time, and didn’t slow down until he had reached his childhood bedroom, where he locked the door and leaned against it.
It was kind of a lot; he’d felt tricked into falling in love with the Wilder family only to be horribly abandoned by them upon reaching adulthood, but now he knew that they had felt the same way about him. To make matters worse—or at least, more confusing—it was his own fault for introducing the unstable Brittany into the mix and ignoring her serious mental health issues until she’d destroyed almost every aspect of his life.
It sucked that he’d wasted the last six years feeling like so much trash the Wilders had put out on the curb; a charity case who no longer needed their charity and had therefore been discarded. Only now did he realize that the whole theory had come from Brittany, who’d sought to separate him from his family, and his own vulnerabilities and fear of abandonment had made it easy for her.
But leave it to Dr. Wilder to swoop in like a fairy godmother and fix things for him again, just like she had when he was a kid. At fifteen, his problems had been pretty straightforward: he’d needed parents and somewhere safe to sleep. It was impossible for a kid to feel unsafe when the Colonel was around, or to feel unloved around the Doc and her four clamoring monsters.
And now she’d rescued him again. First she’d given him space and time to come to his senses, and when he hadn’t done that, she’d used her shepherd’s crook—that is, a mother’s watertight guilt trip—to bring him back into the fold.
He exhaled slowly, letting that sink in: he was back.