32 #2
Lila looked exhausted when she opened her apartment door. Not wrecked. Worn thin. Her hair was half loose, and the tiredness around her eyes made me want to take whatever had done it apart with my bare hands.
She saw me and let out a slow breath. “I am too tired for your games, Jackson.”
I stayed in the doorway, hands empty. “Ain’t here to play games, Princess.”
Her brow lifted, unimpressed. “Blue and Evan and I have been dealing with suppliers for the emergency department all afternoon,” she said. “If one more man says projected turnaround time to me, I may actually commit a felony.”
Usually that would have gotten something smart out of me. Today I only said, “I just wanna talk.”
Her expression sharpened in a different way, and I knew exactly what she was telling me: whatever I had come to say, Jade wasn’t here to soften it. “Jade’s still at school,”
“I know.” I had come because she was alone, because this truth belonged to Lila before it belonged to anyone else.
That gave her pause. She stepped aside, and without Jade there, the apartment felt too quiet, all the space between Lila and me suddenly exposed. She shut the door and faced me. “If you’re planning to tell me half of something and then shut down again, I don’t have the energy.”
I held her gaze. “I’m gonna tell you.”
That got her attention. After a long second, she nodded toward the couch. “Sit.”
I did, and she took the other end, leaving enough space between us to hurt.
I leaned forward and started where everything had gone wrong. “After I dropped you off that night,” I said, “I went back to the clubhouse to help the prospect that called me. Said he needed somethin’. But I ended up hearin’ a conversation I shouldn’t have heard.”
She went still, so I told her about the office, the prez and VP, and what they were moving. Women. Kids. Guns. Drugs. Then the cops.
The word cops changed her face. She sucked in a breath, alarm cutting through the exhaustion. “Cops?”
I nodded once, already hating what came next. Her mind went exactly where I knew it would.
“Cops from my dad’s department were involved in that kind of stuff?”
I lifted my eyes to hers. The truth sat one breath away when pounding struck the door, hard enough to sound less like a knock than a demand.
Lila’s face tightened the second she opened it. Matty stormed past her without waiting for permission, anger filling the apartment before the door shut behind him.
“You’ve avoided us long enough,” he snapped. “It’s time you started talking and stopped acting like—”
Then he saw me. The accusation meant for Lila vanished beneath something hotter.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” The question came at Lila more than me.
Lila slammed the door and turned on him. “Could you not come storming into my apartment yelling and asserting yourself like you can control my life?” She sounded exhausted enough to be done with the argument before it started.
Matty barked out a laugh. “Control your life? Lila, you skipped Sunday family dinner to go to his biker clubhouse, and now I walk in here and find him in your living room like he lives here?”
I got to my feet before he could wind himself tighter. “You wanna lower your voice?”
Matty snapped toward me, all that old resentment finding an easier target. “No, I don’t.”
Lila muttered, exhausted rather than surprised. “Excellent,” she said. “This is exactly how I wanted my day to go.”
Matty barely heard her. His anger swung right back. “You don’t get to do this,” Matty said. “You don’t get to act like we’re the problem when you’re the one dragging this mess back into our lives.”
Lila’s face hardened. She had spent too many years raising Jade alone to let Matty erase what this meant now. “He is Jade’s father.”
“And he left you.” Matty threw the words like they settled everything, and they hit because there was truth in them.
I stepped forward, but Lila lifted a hand without even looking at me. “Don’t.” The single word stopped me faster than anything Matty could have said.
Matty dragged both hands through his hair. “Jesus Christ, Li. You think this is best for her? For Jade? For you?”
“What’s best for Jade,” Lila shot back, “is that she gets to know her father instead of living with a hole in her life because the men around her can’t get their heads out of their asses.” She didn’t look at me while she said it, but the defense landed deep anyway.
Matty’s anger had nowhere useful to go, so he aimed it at the fear none of us could pretend wasn’t there. “And what happens when he leaves again?”
I answered before Lila had to. “He ain’t leavin’ again,” I said.
Matty laughed, sharp and ugly. “You don’t get to say that now like it fixes anything.”
The apartment door opened before I could answer.
Jade stood there with her backpack on one shoulder and keys in one hand, already narrowed-eyed enough to tell me she had heard the argument from the hall. She looked straight at Matty.
Then, dry as anything, said, “Really? Here to control somebody else’s life instead of living your own?”
Matty turned on her too fast, all that anger moving before sense could catch it. “He’s only been in your life a short while and he’s already teaching you how to be an uncontrollable bitch.”
Jade sucked in a shocked breath. Lila went white, and whatever restraint I had left disappeared with the look on our daughter’s face.
I moved. My fist caught Matty clean and dropped him hard enough to rattle the table. I was on him before he could recover, fury burning so hot it tasted metallic. “You do not talk to my daughter that way.”
I hauled him halfway upright by his shirt. “You’re the male influence she’s had all these years?” I bit out. “You got no room to say a damn thing talkin’ to a girl like that.”
Something changed in his face. Not the anger. The part beneath it that knew exactly what he had done.
“Shit,” he said, pulling back. “Shit. No. No, you’re right.” His eyes went to Jade, shame cutting through the rage. “Doodles, I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean that. I was pissed and I took it out on you and I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry. I just—”
He broke off and looked back at me, years of hurt still sitting there. “You got my baby sister pregnant and then left her. You didn’t take care of her, man. You fucking left.”
My temper was still hot, but the pain in his face changed the shape of it.
“I had a reason,” I said, lower now. “A solid one. But I loved her. Love her. Always did. Always will.”
Matty stared at me as if he hadn’t expected the last part.
Then he shoved both hands through his hair and backed toward the door. “Fuck. I can’t do this.”
He was gone before anyone stopped him, the door slamming behind him.
I turned to Jade. The snark had vanished from her face, leaving her pale and shaken. I crossed the room and pulled her into my arms. She held herself stiff for one second, then folded against me, the tremor in her hands giving away more than her face had.
“Hey,” I murmured, rubbing a hand over her back. “It’s alright. Your uncle’s got a short fuse and a dumb mouth. He’ll get over it.”
She made a sound against my shirt that could have been a laugh or the edge of a cry. I tightened my hold. “It’ll be okay, baby girl.”
Over Jade’s head, I found Lila. The truth had been right there, one breath away, and now it sat between us again beneath Matty’s anger, my fist, and our daughter shaking in my arms.
Lila stood beside the couch with shock and exhaustion written all over her, but underneath both was the question I had almost answered. Just hearing that cops from her father’s department were involved had hollowed something out of her.
Finding out one of them was Richard Morgan was going to break her heart.