25
Deacon
The first thing I noticed was her eyes.
Green. Lila’s green.
They hit hard enough to steal my breath. I had carried those eyes for years without meaning to, caught them in dreams and memories I never knew what to do with after Lila disappeared from my life. Now they stared back at me from a face too young and too familiar.
The girl came out of the apartment distracted by her phone, took a few steps toward the truck, then looked up.
And stopped.
So did I.
Traffic moved beyond the complex. Blue’s baby fussed against her shoulder, and somewhere behind me Evan said something low to Ink. None of it reached me properly anymore.
She looked like me.
There was nothing vague or generous about the resemblance, nothing somebody could dismiss as coincidence because we happened to share a hair color.
My mouth. My jaw. Even the wary set of her body struck somewhere deep, that braced look of somebody waiting for the world to explain itself before she gave it anything.
Then she looked at Lila, and I saw her there too. Those green eyes. The expression around them. Pieces of two people I knew too well assembled into somebody I had never seen before.
Jesus Christ.
“Mom?”
A tiny sound left Lila, almost nothing, but I heard it. She stood close beside me, pale in a way I had never seen. The fear on her face had nothing to do with danger. She looked cornered, as if the thing she had been trying to prevent had arrived before she could decide how to survive it.
“Please,” she said, voice low and tight enough only I could hear it. “Please don’t do this out here.”
I stared at her, then at the girl.
There are moments that split a life cleanly in two.
Everything before, everything after. I could feel mine dividing while years crashed together inside me: that night with Lila, leaving, everything that came after, and seventeen years of anger with nowhere useful to go.
I had carried questions I thought I understood because I never knew there was one this big waiting underneath all of them.
The answer stood twenty feet away with Lila’s eyes and my goddamn face.
“Lila?” I asked again, and my voice barely sounded like mine.
Her throat worked. “Please.”
No part of me could live with that answer.
I wanted the truth before another second passed.
I wanted enough time to understand what had just been put in front of me.
Both needs tore in opposite directions, leaving me standing there with my pulse pounding against injuries that suddenly felt insignificant.
Then a truck rolled into the lot.
The girl looked first, dread replacing shock.
“Grandpa and Uncle Matty came back,” she said.
Matty.
Richard’s truck stopped, and both doors opened. Richard got out carrying pizza boxes. Matty came around the front talking until he saw me.
He stopped dead.
“What the fuck?” Matty barked, his whole body jerking like somebody had struck him. “What are you doing here? Where the hell have you been?”
His accusation swung toward Lila before I could answer.
“Have you been in contact with him all these years and keeping it from me?” he demanded. “How could you?”
“No,” Lila shot back immediately. “No, I haven’t…”
Matty’s attention had already moved to the girl.
Recognition hit him with none of the confusion I was still fighting through. His face changed as he took her in, the coloring, the shape of her mouth, the stubborn way she stood there trying to hold herself together. Something ugly settled behind his eyes before he ever looked back at me.
“Sonnofabitch,” he said.
Cold slid through me.
“You sonnofabitch. It was you.”
He charged.
My body was still healing, whether I respected that fact or not. My temper forgot. My ribs and shoulder remembered.
I had enough time to brace before his fist caught my jaw and snapped my head sideways. Pain flashed hot through my face. Lila screamed. So did the girl, and that sound cut through the surge of anger faster than the punch.
Priest moved, but Ink reached Matty first. Between them they dragged him off before he could land another clean shot.
“Stop!” Lila was screaming. “Stop, he is injured, you could kill him!”
She tried to reach us, but Richard caught her arm and pulled her back.
“Let me go!” she shouted. “Dammit, Dad, let me go!”
He held her as if he had any right to.
“No,” he growled. “This is earned. If that ass got you pregnant and stranded you, he deserves every last inch of what’s coming to him.”
Blood flooded my mouth from where my teeth had cut my cheek, sharp and metallic. My ribs protested every breath after the hit even though Matty had never touched them. He fought Priest and Ink hard enough to prove rage had buried whatever judgment he usually carried.
Richard made it worse.
“Did he assault you? Why would you cover for him and protect him?”
Lila spun and slapped him.
The crack silenced everyone.
Richard stared at her, one hand rising toward his face. Lila shook with rage.
“Jackson grew up in our house,” she said, and every word landed harder for how low her voice had gone. “He was always my protector. The fact that you could even think that of him for even a moment shows me you aren’t the man I thought you were.”
Nobody answered. Even my anger stalled under what Lila had just said. She had defended me without hesitation, and I had no room in my head to understand that either.
The girl was crying now, silently at first, tears moving down a face she was fighting too hard to keep controlled. Evan went to her immediately and pulled her close.
“Hey, hey, gemstone,” he said, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it. “Don’t give these idiots the satisfaction of thinking they’re the main event.”
She folded into him like she had done it before.
Priest and Ink still held Matty, though he had stopped fighting hard enough to get loose. His glare stayed fixed on me.
“I’m an officer of the law,” he snapped at them. “You don’t put your hands on me.”
I wiped blood from my mouth and let him see the smile he had earned.
“Not in this city, you aren’t,” I said. “And you assaulted me.”
That bought one second of silence.
Lila stepped clear of Richard, fury still burning through every inch of her.
“Get in the truck and leave.”
Matty stared at her. “No. We deserve answers.”
A laugh scraped my ribs.
“I’m pretty sure,” I said, “I deserve answers before you do.”
That hit him hard enough to show on his face.
Lila met his stare without yielding. “He just saw Jade for the first time before you and Dad pulled up. He never knew about her. He and I have a lot to talk about, and that takes precedence over whatever it is you think you deserve to know.”
Jade. Her name caught somewhere beneath my ribs, attaching itself to the face I still couldn’t stop looking at.
Lila had just handed me the truth in front of everyone, clean and brutal: I hadn’t walked away from my daughter.
I hadn’t known there was a daughter to leave.
Relief should have existed somewhere in that, but grief swallowed it before I could reach for it.
Sixteen years opened between us all at once, packed with birthdays I had missed, scraped knees I hadn’t kissed, school pictures I had never seen, ordinary mornings when she had woken up and gone on living while I moved through the world with no idea she was in it.
I had spent years believing I understood what losing Lila had cost me.
I hadn’t known the half of it.
Richard stepped forward.
“I think we’ll stay for this conversation,” he said. “We can’t be leaving you two women alone with criminals.”
The girl tore herself out of Evan’s hold.
“I am so damn tired of the two of you thinking you can run our lives!”
Her voice ripped across the lot. Tears still streaked her cheeks, but she planted herself there like neither man had a chance of moving her.
“This has nothing to do with either of you,” she shouted. “This has everything to do with me. Me. So you two need to leave now.”
Richard looked stunned. I barely noticed.
I was looking at her.
My daughter.
The words formed inside me before I had any right to them, and they still fit with terrifying ease.
I knew nothing about her except her name, her age, and that she had enough fire to stand crying in a parking lot and order two grown men out of her life.
Somehow my chest already ached with the need to know everything else.
Evan wrapped an arm around her shoulders without trying to quiet her.
“There she is,” he murmured. “My gemstone has entered her uprising era.”
A wet little snort escaped her, and even that landed somewhere tender.
Lila had gone past anger into something colder.
“If you don’t want to irrevocably hurt our relationship,” she said, “you will return to Wicker Falls now. I will call you later and let you know I’m okay.”
Richard stared at her, then at Jade, me, and the whole wreck of the scene around us.
The pizza boxes lay where he had dropped them.
Matty stood red-faced between Priest and Ink.
His granddaughter was crying beside a man she had known all her life while the father she had never met stood bleeding ten feet away.
Whatever argument he had left died there.
“You better call me by nine,” he said at last, voice low and hard. “Or I’ll be back here in a flash. With the police.”
Lila rolled her eyes, exhausted fury making her painfully familiar.
“Yeah,” she said. “Got it, Dad.”
Matty still wanted a fight, but Richard had decided for both of them. Priest and Ink released him carefully. He yanked free, gave me one last murderous glare, and followed his father toward the truck.
The doors slammed. Richard drove out faster than necessary.
Afterward, the lot felt stripped raw. My jaw throbbed, blood still coated the inside of my mouth, and none of it ranked high enough to matter.
Lila looked nearly as wrecked as I felt, hair coming loose around her face, shoulders locked tight. Beside her stood Jade. Sixteen. Lila’s eyes. My mouth. Enough attitude in the lift of her chin to make something inside my chest crack open wider.
I had come here to help Lila move boxes. Instead I was standing in front of a daughter I had never known existed, trying to understand how a man could become a father sixteen years late.
I looked from her to Lila.
“I believe,” I said slowly, because calm was the only thing keeping the rest of me contained, “we need to go have a talk.”
My attention returned to Jade.
“And you, miss sassy, won’t let yourself get left out of it, I’m guessing.”
She lifted her chin higher, wet-cheeked and fierce.
“Sixteen years of not knowing who you are gives me the right to be involved in any talk about where you’ve been,” she said.
The laugh escaped before I could stop it. Nothing about this was funny, but there she stood looking like me and burning with her mother’s fire, and I already knew I was done for.
I looked at Lila and shook my head once.
“Definitely our spawn.”