“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I’m going to reach out to a few people, find you a professional who can help you get through this.”
The thought of talking to anyone about the awful truth made my skin crawl. “Can’t I just talk to you?”
“You can always talk to me. But your first semester of college is going to be hard enough without the shadow of this ugliness hanging over you.”
“I just want to forget I ever knew any of it.” I sobbed into his chest. He smoothed my hair and rocked me gently in his arms.
“I wish you didn’t have to know any of it, sweetheart. And I wish I knew the right things to say to make it all better. But you need to process this, otherwise it’ll haunt you. I’ll make some calls in the morning.”
He held me as my sobs tempered into sighs. I doubted I’d ever feel comfortable talking about the things my mother had told me, but Mason was right. If I tried to bury the truth, I’d end up just like her: cold and bitter, a body haunted by secrets and shrouded in lies.
“Well,” I said, trying to sound chipper, “at least now we can tell people you’re not really my dad.”
“We will, I promise. But not just yet. If the bastard is still alive, he might try to find you. I want to know where he is before we say anything.” He dried my tears with his thumbs and then kissed both my cheeks. “I’ll kill the fucker with my bare hands before I let him come within a ten-mile radius of my little girl.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the possessive tone his voice had taken. I was still his little girl, even though we both knew where I’d come from. He kissed me gently on the li
ps. I tried to deepen the kiss, but he pulled back, his expression restrained.
“What else did Gretchen tell you?”
I didn’t want to talk about the drawings or why she’d made him leave, because as far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a drop of truth to it. But I didn’t want to lie to him, and a lie of omission is still a lie.
“She told me why you left,” I said. “She even brought your old drawings for me to look at. I think she thought seeing them would make me feel differently about you, which is ridiculous.”
Mason closed his eyes and took a step back. Something in the air around us shifted, as though a sinkhole had opened up between our feet.
"People hear the word love and automatically think sex,” he said. “You were my daughter and I loved you. You were beautiful, so I watched you. Photography wasn’t my forte, so I found other ways of capturing you. I would've sooner put a bullet in my head than let anyone lay a finger on you, including me."
He rounded the kitchen island. With every step, I felt him slipping away, like air leaking slowly from a balloon.
“Maybe it was for the best that I had to stop drawing you,” he said. “Being scrutinized like that when you’re still growing into yourself has to be tough. At least you got to have a normal adolescence."
If normal meant happy and well-adjusted, then there’d been nothing normal about my adolescence. “You really think I was better off not knowing why you left or where you’d gone?”
“Compared to the alternative? Yes. Leaving you isn’t something I’m proud of, but it beats having to tell your twelve-year-old that her mom thinks you’re a pedophile.”
The abject pain in his voice hit me like a sledgehammer.
“I thought about fighting it,” he said. “But if you weren’t my biological kid, I had no legal standing. Then I imagined what a big court battle would’ve been like for you. Having to answer a bunch of disgusting questions about our relationship, not to mention the possibility that other people would see what your mom saw in those sketches. I didn’t want to put you through that, and I sure as hell didn’t want you to have to carry it around.”
I hopped down from the counter and went to him, taking his face in my hands. He pressed his cheek to my palm but kept his arms at his sides. I kissed his face and tried to kiss his lips. He slipped away before our mouths could meet.
“Maybe you should’ve gone home with your mother,” he said.
My stomach seized. “You can’t mean that.”
“Jett, I’ve spent the last six years telling myself I was in the right, that your mother was just paranoid. Then you show up here and... I can’t even say it.”
He let me take his hand. "Weeks ago, when I asked you if my father was a bad man, you said he might be the worst. Were you talking about yourself?"
"Does it matter?"
"Of course it matters! Mom’s wrong about you. You're nothing like him."
“I don’t know what I am anymore. When I saw you at the museum it was like waking up after having been asleep my whole life. Then later, in your room, when you asked for a hug and I was finally able to hold you, I couldn’t get close enough.”
A twinge of loss skittered up my spine as he pulled his hand away. I wanted to snatch it back, to staple it to mine so he couldn’t pry us apart again without drawing blood.