Chapter 12 #2
Ford hummed as he thumbed through a bunch of stapled yellow receipts. “Yeah. She did a fucking number on him, Micah, and Caleb.”
“Micah’s the one who plays in Salem, right?”
Ford looked up with a small smile. “You’re such a fucking hockey player. Yes, bud. The one who plays for the Fury.”
I flushed. “Sorry. I try to remember more things about people, but…it’s hard.”
“I’m just giving you shit.” He reached over and gave my leg a pat before going back to his task at hand. “Anyway, it’s a wonder those guys grew up as stable as they are, you know? When you have that kind of shit happening from birth.”
I looked over at Nikos, who seemed as confused as I was. “Uh…what shit?”
“You know, the whole social media thing?” Ford said, waving his hand.
“When Micah and Jonah were…I don’t know, seven or eight—something like that—their mom started a YouTube channel called The Blind Thing, and every week, she’d make the boys answer a bunch of really invasive questions from total randos online.
I’m talking weird shit, like how do they wipe their ass and do they know what naked ladies feel like. ”
My gut twisted. “Are you serious? They were babies!”
“I know. She had millions of followers too. She had them trained to perform, and there were these daily videos, like ‘Cooking Blind with Jonah’ or ‘Brushing My Teeth Blind with Micah.’ Sometimes she’d get Caleb involved, but he has some usable vision, so she didn’t bother unless she was on her soapbox about blindness being a spectrum. ”
I’d been speaking English for years, but his words started to feel like one big jumble in my head, and I couldn’t make sense of them all.
“Why would she do that?”
“Because she’s a fucking weirdo,” Ford said, looking up as he finished going through the last bit of his papers.
He tossed them back into a box and let his head thud against the wall beside his crutches.
“I think they realized it wasn’t normal after a while and started giving her pushback, but she was relentless.
She wrote a book about her experiences and thought she was going to become famous for it.
She put them in hockey after that, and, well, we all see how that went. ”
I frowned. “They’re both amazing.”
Ford burst into laughter. “Yeah, that’s what I mean. They were finally able to shine on their own. Caleb moved out and started a blacksmithing company, Jonah and Micah were drafted into the PPHL, and the moment they got distance from her, they started scrambling for more.”
“Their dad,” I started, but Ford cut me off with an irritated noise.
“He wanted no part of it. Never did.”
I wanted to defend him, but the way he’d been with Nikos at first, I knew Ford was telling the truth. Peter was kind to me most of the time, but not always. And the things Jonah had said—the things he’d implied—I couldn’t ignore those now.
Biting my lip, I stared at the papers in my hands. It was for payday loans, and my stomach twisted.
“Why don’t the other two come help their brother?” I asked quietly.
Ford let out a puff of air. “Jonah…” He bit his lip, then shrugged.
“Listen, I love Jonah to death. He’s such a good person.
But he will literally set himself on fire if it means keeping people warm.
Sometimes the people he’s keeping warm are the ones who hurt him.
Micah and Caleb aren’t built like that. And I think mostly they’re hoping Jonah will start prioritizing himself. They don’t want to enable him.”
“But he needs help,” Nikos said. “Jonah can’t take care of Peter by himself.”
“Yeah,” Ford said from behind a sigh. “He does. I don’t like their dad.
He never stopped his wife from exploiting their kids, and he kind of went out of his way to ignore the fact that the boys were blind and needed help in ways that he wasn’t prepared to give.
For a while, I think Jonah wanted to believe his dad was being taken advantage of by their mom just like they were, but…
” Ford trailed off and shrugged. “After he moved out, I think he had to face the fact that his dad wasn’t a victim. He was complicit in other ways.”
Fuck.
Fuck.
I knew it was bad. I just hadn’t realized how bad.
“Look, can we keep this between us?” Ford asked, grabbing the rest of the papers and shoving them back into a box. “I think Jonah might kill me if he knew I spilled all of this to you.”
Nikos snorted. “Alexio can keep a secret.”
I shrugged. I could. “I have no reason to tell him. But I appreciate understanding what all of this is about.” I forced myself to stand, grimacing at the ache in my legs as Ford climbed to his foot and grabbed his crutches. “Did you find anything at all?”
He jerked his chin toward the bed, where there was a small collection of paperwork.
“A few doctors. I’ll pretend to be Jonah and give them a call.
Killian told me we need to check about medical power of attorney and all this other shit.
This is probably going to get complicated before it gets easy.
Even if he finds a place, if Jonah doesn’t have that, he can’t force Peter to move. ”
And I doubted he would. He was a stubborn old bastard and liked to make things difficult. Turning to my brother, I shrugged. “You think he’d listen to you and agree to stay in a memory care facility?”
Nikos grimaced. “I don’t know. I can try.”
It was all either of us was going to get.