The Good Father

“Did someone hurt you?” The words forced themselves out.

She shook her head. But didn’t speak.

Every nerve in his body was tense. He couldn’t get them to release their grip on him. It was a feeling he knew well.

Bracing for a blow.

Only this one wouldn’t be as simple as a fist in the face. Or a belt to the back.

“It’s not me, it’s Chloe.” He heard her, but the words only confused him more. What did her sister-in-law, living in Palm Desert with Jeff, have to do with The Lemonade Stand?

Oh, God. The idea hit him, accompanied by a maelstrom of rejection.

Ella’s gaze was steady now. Steady and needy.

“Chloe’s hitting Cody?” The godson he knew only through pictures. He’d told Jeff, when his friend had called to tell him about the boy’s birth, that, with him being divorced from Ella, he couldn’t possibly be anything to the boy, but Jeff had insisted. It didn’t mean anything. It was just a title.

The shake of Ella’s head caused a new wave of foreboding.

“Chloe’s with me,” Ella said. “Her and Cody.”

“Visiting?”

Another small shake of Ella’s head. Brett realized he was still covering her hand with his own, but he didn’t let go.

“They’re living with me.”

“Where’s Jeff?”

“Palm Desert.”

He sat back, letting his hands fall into his lap. Then reached for his wineglass. “They’re divorced?”

He’d never, in a million years, have figured that one. If anyone was the perfect couple it was Jeff and Chloe. They were crazy about each other. In a way that couldn’t be faked. Even Brett, who’d never personally witnessed a healthy relationship in his life, could feel the bond between Ella’s brother and his wife.

“No!” Ella’s shock righted a world that was quickly spinning out into space. “Of course not.”

Until he considered that she’d just told him that Jeff’s wife and son were living with her, not him.

Not him.

Ella watched him.

Jeff. Jeff?

If she wanted him to think that Jeff Wales had done something that would make his wife need a women’s shelter then she was just plain—

“It’s Jeff, Brett,” she was saying. “He has...bouts. They’ve escalated over the past few years. This last time...Chloe asked me to come get her, and I did. Jeff doesn’t know. That she’s with me, I mean. He has no idea where she’s staying. They communicate by cell phone, and she has a pay-as-you-go one so he won’t be able to get any details from their bill.”

She’d thrown him for a loop. “Have you talked to him? Does he know you know she’s gone?”

“He called me, I think trying to figure out if she was with me, but I went on and on about the new job and how I was in the middle of moving into my new apartment and it was only at the end, when I asked him why he’d called, that he told me she’d left.”

Brett felt as though he had rocks in his gut. He could just imagine how Jeff must be feeling.

“Your brother is the kindest man I’ve ever known.” The only person who’d ever seen Brett cry.

Ella’s older brother had held an eighteen-year-old college-freshman Brett as he’d sobbed out his anguish over his parents. Helped him treat the raw strap marks on his back, left by his father’s belt, so that he didn’t have to report them to anyone. He’d spent many a night sitting with him that first year they were roommates, listening to him talk, or more often, allowing him complete silence without the aloneness that usually accompanied it, and had never told another soul about any of it.