31 #2
I crossed my arms. “You spend time with your daughter, which is good. Then you keep hanging around my kitchen looking at me like you’re trying to wear down my resistance through eye contact alone.”
He let that settle before asking, “That workin’?”
“No.” The answer came too quickly, and his mouth knew it.
Jackson stood and came into the kitchen without hurry. The apartment suddenly felt smaller, his nearness familiar enough to be dangerous. “Lila.”
My name in his voice was always worse than Princess. It belonged to the version of us that had existed before everything broke, and some part of me still answered to it.
“This is about Jade,” I said before he could say whatever he intended. “It has to be.”
He stopped a foot away, close enough for me to see the darker ring around his irises and the tiny scar near his jaw I had kissed when we were young enough to believe love could outrun everything. “It is about Jade,” he said. “Don’t mean it’s only about Jade.”
I shook my head. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean. You can’t do that. You can’t just walk in here and decide we’re going to... what? Pick up some impossible thing that got broken almost seventeen years ago?”
His gaze stayed on mine. “I didn’t say easy.”
“No, you just keep acting like persistence is somehow the same as repair.” The words landed harder than the argument before them.
His jaw flexed, but his voice remained low. “I know I can’t fix all of it.”
“Do you?” I hated how much I needed the answer to be yes.
“Yeah.” He didn’t decorate it or defend himself, which somehow made it harder to dismiss.
A humorless laugh escaped me. “Because from where I’m standing, Jackson, you still don’t get the worst part.”
His brow lowered, and I knew he was bracing.
The old anger had cooled over the years without ever dulling.
“You didn’t just leave,” I said. “You made my choices for me. You decided what I could handle, what I deserved to know, what I deserved a say in. And even now, after all of this, I can still feel it. There are things you’re not telling me.
Things you still think you have the right to keep from me. ”
He went still. I had hit the exact place he guarded, and the certainty of that hurt almost as much as the secret itself.
He took the accusation without retreating. “I’m not tryin’ to take anything from you now,” he said.
“No,” I said quietly. “Now you’re trying to get in anyway.” That was exactly what scared me.
Pain crossed his face before he buried it, and part of me hated being the reason. “I’m trying.”
“I know.” That was the worst part. I knew he was trying with Jade. I knew he loved her already with a fierceness that frightened me in its immediacy. And some part of him had probably never stopped loving me either.
None of it erased what waited outside this apartment. Dad was still angry. Matty’s texts had gone stiff and wounded. Jade wanted all of us to fit together badly enough to hide it, while I stood in the middle afraid one wrong move would pull something apart.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted, hating how small the confession sounded after all my certainty.
Jackson’s expression softened. “You don’t gotta know all at once.”
I looked away. “That sounds very convenient for you.”
A quiet huff of laughter left him. “You always did know how to cut me up nice.”
“That wasn’t nice.” If anything, it had been the gentlest version of what lived inside me.
“No,” he said, easing a little closer without touching me. “But it was honest.”
I should have moved. I didn’t. Down the hall, Jade moved around her room with music playing low. Those ordinary teenage sounds held the moment in place, reminding me what stood to gain or lose depending on what Jackson and I did next.
He reached past me for the mug I had abandoned on the counter and rinsed it at the sink like he had any business doing dishes in my kitchen.
I stared at him, almost offended by the domesticity of it. “Are you doing dishes to avoid being kicked out?”
He set the mug in the drainer with far too much satisfaction. “Maybe.”
I folded my arms, refusing to let a clean mug count as charm. “That’s manipulative.”
His grin came back, faint but unmistakable. “Effective, though.”
Before I could answer, Jade came back dressed and tying up her hair. She took in Jackson at the sink and me glaring beside him. “Wow,” she said. “He’s domestic.”
I covered my face with one hand, because apparently my daughter had developed a talent for finding exactly the wrong observation at the right time.
Jackson only smirked. “Your mama likes me useful.”
“Please stop talking,” I muttered, which made Jade laugh.
A knock rescued me from answering. Jade’s face changed enough to tell me she knew who it was before she hurried over. Cage stood outside with the awkwardness of a teenage boy trying hard not to show it. His eyes flicked past Jade toward me and Jackson, then returned to her.
Cage’s attention settled back on Jade, and some of the awkwardness eased. “Hey.”
Jade’s smile came quick and small. “Hey.”
Jackson straightened the second Cage stepped inside. He didn’t say anything, but I recognized the shift. Apparently fatherhood came with instincts he had acquired in under a week.
I elbowed him lightly in the ribs as I passed, earning a grunt. “What?”
I kept my voice low enough to spare Jade the full performance. “You are being weird.”
His brows lifted as if silence proved his innocence. “I ain’t said a word.”
“You were about to.” I knew him too well to be fooled by technicalities.
Jade looked between us, already exasperated. “We’re going out.”
“Fine,” I said. Whatever else was happening, Cage had always been respectful with her, and I refused to make this more embarrassing than necessary. “Just keep me updated so I don’t worry, and be back for dinner.”
Jade answered before Jackson could add another condition. “We will.”
Jackson tipped his chin toward Cage, all humor disappearing beneath the father he was becoming. “Take care of her.”
Cage met his gaze without flinching. “Always do.”
Jade made a face, caught between embarrassment and affection. “I am literally standing right here.”
“That you are,” Jackson said, completely unrepentant.
She groaned and caught Cage by the sleeve. “We’re leaving before either of you gets worse.”
“No bikes,” Jackson said before she could make it to the door.
Jade turned halfway back with the long-suffering expression of a girl burdened by ridiculous adults. “I wasn’t planning on stealing one.”
“Good,” he said. “’Cause I’d have to admire the nerve before I grounded you.”
She blinked at him, then at me, and I watched the meaning land. Jackson had stepped into fatherhood without asking permission for every inch of it, and instead of recoiling, something in Jade softened.
The joke about grounding had turned real somewhere in the middle. “Okay,” she said, quieter now.
Cage seemed to understand that the moment had shifted. “He just gave me my bike, but he hasn’t started teachin’ me yet, so we won’t be ridin’. You don’t have to worry about it.”
Something warm moved through Jackson’s expression. “Yeah? First bike?”
Cage nodded, and Jackson’s mouth pulled into a faint grin. “You always remember your first one.”
Cage smiled back, small but genuine, before he and Jade slipped out together.
The apartment felt different once the door closed. We had both seen Jade soften when he joked about grounding her. This was becoming more than a few visits and careful conversations. She was making room for him one ordinary moment at a time.
Jackson stared at the closed door for a beat before looking at me. “She’s a good kid.”
My throat tightened around years of pride and all the work he had never seen. “Yeah.”
His voice dropped, wonder softening it. “We did that.”
The words went straight through me. He had missed almost all of the doing, yet Jade was still ours. His pride didn’t erase what I had carried alone. It sounded like wonder, and I couldn’t answer without giving away too much.
Jackson let the silence stand without pushing. Then he picked up his cut from the back of the chair and looked once toward the window. “I’ll head out. Give you some peace.”
I almost laughed. “Since when do you do that?”
He glanced back at me with one hand on the door. “Since I know you well enough to know that if I push when you’re not ready, you’ll shut every door I’ve managed to crack open.”
That landed harder than I wanted it to. For all my accusations about persistence, he had been paying attention.
He opened the door, then paused and looked over his shoulder. “I’m not goin’ anywhere, Lila.”
The words carried none of his usual swagger. Just certainty. Then he left me with the donut box on the coffee table, the rinsed mug in the drainer, and a quiet changed by his absence.
Dad’s anger still bruised. Matty’s disappointment still pulled at me. Jade was outside with a boy she liked, carrying whatever worry she still refused to share. Jackson Hayes, who had once shattered my life by leaving, had just promised he was staying.
I didn’t know whether that made anything easier. I only knew I was starting to believe him.