Chapter 17
Things moved in short clips. One minute, he was on the floor in Jenna’s arms and the next Jack was sitting at the kitchen table with an officer telling what he knew.
Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he understood that Lilly was in the living room telling a different officer her story.
Jenna was with her. Possibly. He wasn’t really sure.
Jack should be the one to go to her, but he couldn’t really move.
He wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten to the table.
Then he blinked, and the officer was gone. Voices drew his attention to the backdoor, and he watched as the pale ghost of Mr. Zarin walked in with Chief Cunningham at his heels. The Chief had his hat on now. Neither one was carrying Jack’s jacket, but that was fine. He didn’t really want it back.
Lilly came running into the kitchen from the living room.
She threw herself at Mr. Zarin. The man caught her, picking her up as if she weighed nothing, and drew her to his chest. Jack saw Lilly’s tears, but his ears still weren’t working quite right.
Or maybe her sobs were muffled by Mr. Zarin’s jacket.
Mr. Zarin was rubbing a hand up and down Lilly’s back as if he was trying to lend her comfort.
That wasn’t right, though. He shouldn’t be comforting her. Or maybe it was a good thing he was. Jack wasn’t really sure. The cyclone in his brain kept jumbling up his thoughts.
Jack blinked again, and he was standing in the doorway of his bedroom. How had he gotten here? His legs felt too numb to have brought him.
His eyes danced over the room that had once been Mr. and Mrs. Zarin’s shared office.
His new bed was in the center of the room, up against the right wall.
He’d never had such a comfy bed in his life.
Who would sleep in it now? Would the desk that was now piled with his books and homework return to being where Mr. Zarin organized household bills?
Jack had really liked having a dresser and a closet.
Even more so, he liked having enough clothes to fill them.
He supposed he should have known better than to get used to the nice things in life.
That was his own mistake.
The truck was his. He had the paperwork to prove it.
Maybe it was selfish of him to still consider keeping it, but he needed the truck at the very least. The truck bed gave him the option of taking other larger items too, though he’d need to get a tarp or something to cover it.
Maybe it was better to just take enough that they could keep in the cab with them.
It wasn’t right to take everything the Zarins’ had purchased for them. That would be greedy.
Jack found himself standing by his bed, an open suitcase on the mattress.
When had he gone to his closet to get the suitcase?
It was a decent sized bag, a hand-me-down from Mr. Zarin after Mrs. Zarin had gifted her husband with a new suitcase set this past Christmas.
They’d been planning on taking a road trip that summer.
The four of them driving down the coast, maybe even making it as far as California.
Lilly had been given the smaller of Mr. Zarin’s suitcases and Jack the larger one.
Maybe Jack would take Lilly south. Was there really a point in staying around Port Townsend anymore?
They were less than a year away from his eighteenth birthday.
Maybe they’d take the year to drive, see the country.
Jack could pick up odd jobs along the way and they could sleep in his truck to save money.
Once he was eighteen, they’d find a place to settle down and he’d re-enroll her in school.
She’d only be a year behind. That wasn’t too bad.
Jack didn’t remember packing his suitcase. He didn’t bother to pack his books or schoolwork. He certainly didn’t need to take that with him.
His vision paused on the pictures hanging on his wall.
Family pictures. Because, if only for a little while, he’d had a family.
He’d had parents. Good and loving people who had opened their home to two abandoned children.
Who did that? In this harsh and cynical world, who let in two strange children with the intent to feed them, house them, and care for them?
That was their mistake, though. If they hadn’t offered, if Jack hadn’t accepted… She’d be alive. She’d still be alive.
It was all his fault. He’d wanted a family so badly.
He could justify his decision all day long, saying he’d done it for Lilly and that he’d wanted to provide her a home that he couldn’t give her, but they were just empty justifications masking the real reason he’d taken Mr. Zarin up on his offer.
He’d wanted a home, he’d wanted a family, parents, someone to take care of him.
Selfish.
He’d brought evil into this house.
For the first time since she’d been born, Jack believed with his entire being John Duncan’s accusations that Lilly was not his biological daughter. She was too precious, too pure, too good to be tainted with his blood. Whomever her father was, it hadn’t been John Duncan.
Jack was not so fortunate.
His blood was evil, passed down from father to son.
“Jack.”
His back stiffened at the sound of her voice. He still didn’t know what she was doing here, how she’d gotten here, why she was here.
“You shouldn’t be here.” His voice sounded like a toad’s croak.
He couldn’t look at her. If he looked, he would break again. He needed to finish packing. There was a storm outside, wasn’t there? What if the roads weren’t passable? Where were they to go then?
The trailer? It would be empty now. So long as his father paid his lot rent. But he hated the idea of taking Lilly back to that fucking thing. He never wanted to return there, let alone bring Lilly back.
They’d just have to head south and hope for the best. If the snow got too bad, they’d figure something out.
“Where else should I be? You need me—”
“I need you to go.” Keeping his head down, he hurried out of his bedroom, across the hall, and into Lilly’s room. At least he remembered the walk there this time. He felt her body heat as he passed and did his damndest to ignore it.
He’d already brought evil into this house, tainted the goodness within. He would not touch her with that same depravity.
“Jack!”
Ignoring her call, he went to Lilly’s closet. She had so much more stuff than he did. Toys and art supplies. How was he supposed to take it all? He should have used the larger of the two suitcases on Lilly’s things, not his own. Did he have time to swap them out?
It wasn’t just the storm outside he was worried about. When Mr. Zarin finally saw past his grief, when he put two and two together…
Jack squeezed his eyes closed, his own grief and guilt so debilitating that it hurt to breathe. He couldn’t picture it. One without the other. Yin without yang. Salt without pepper. They fit so perfectly, like puzzle pieces designed in a factory.
How did one survive without the other?
How did someone live on without the other half of their soul?
“Jack, you need to stop. Slow down. You’re not thinking clearly!”
Jack stopped, but not because she’d told him to.
Having her here was like aloe to the burn, the magic elixir to heal his broken heart…
He wanted to go to her, to wallow and allow grief and pity to take him over while in her arms. Because in her arms was sanctuary. There was no judgment, only serenity.
He could weather this storm, so long as he had her.
But therein lay the problem.
He stood unmoving in the middle of Lilly’s room, his back to her. If he turned, if he so much as twitched a muscle, he would go to her. He would crumble and yield, to share this pain with her as she was offering.
He couldn’t. This pain, the torment inside him, was his burden to bear. His penance owed for what he’d done…and hadn’t done.
And so he spoke the words he never thought in a million years would cross his lips, the words her father had tried to pay him to say. They felt like acid on his tongue, but he savored the pain. Owned it, claimed it. He would suffer this too.
“If you ever loved me, Jenna Scanlon, you’ll leave and you’ll never come back. I don’t want you here and I don’t need you here. Go back to your perfect life of riches and glamor. Make something of yourself and leave me in peace. I’m done fighting for you.”
Jenna stepped out into the living room. Though grief for the loss of Mrs. Zarin was still at the forefront of her mind, making her belly ache and her chest hurt, anger masked her sadness like a blanket.
Who the fuck did Jack Duncan think he was?
To kick her out, to say such hurtful things, to her?
A part of her understood that he was in shock and not in a good frame of mind.
She got it, but refused to excuse it. What happened to them facing the world together?
To standing by the other, no matter what?
To lean on the other so that neither of them ever had to bear the weight of the world alone?
And Jack Duncan thought he could just throw all that away? Fuck that and fuck him.
He might be done fighting, but she was not.
She knew him well enough, though, to know that if she dug in her heels in front of him that he would push even harder.
She didn’t know exactly what had happened to Mrs. Zarin, but she knew that Jack’s father had done the deed.
Jack would be blaming himself. He was punishing himself and the oldest punishment in the world was to take away the one thing your enemy loved the most.
And Jack’s biggest enemy right now was himself.
Jenna got it. Didn’t mean she wasn’t still pissed off, but she got it. She’d give him space, time to process. Right now he needed his family more than he needed her. He might not get it yet, but soon he’d learn that she was his family, too.