“We hooked up a couple times. She moved a few weeks later. We weren’t even close enough that she felt the need to say goodbye. Hadn’t seen her until she showed up at my door in the middle of the night a few days ago.”

Dad’s head shook, and he bounced his knee, like he was trying to come to grips with this. “I get it, Evan, trying to fill a void when you know something is missing. What I don’t understand is if you were so lonely, why didn’t you come home? Why did you think you needed to separate yourself from us? We love you. You really think we considered you a burden?”

I huffed out a sigh, hesitated, lifted my hands, dropped them before I was speaking aloud again, “I know that I was.”

Everything quavered with the memory, and my tongue darted out to wet my dried lips. “You think I couldn’t see it, Dad? See it in all of your eyes that day when you came rushing into the emergency room? The fear? The agony? I didn’t want to be the person who brought that on anymore.”

When I’d finally felt I’d reached a peak in my life, finally accepting what I’d always wanted, I’d collapsed. Heart function dropping and sending my blood pressure into the danger zone. They were able to adjust my meds.

But there had been something that had changed that night.

A realization that had come on when I’d seen their faces.

I’d known it immediately. It was what they had been waiting on all those years. For the day when they would get the news that I was gone.

I figured I was nothing but selfish if I stayed and continued to put them through that.

“Yeah, Evan? Well that agony only increased tenfold the day you took off. And it never went away. So maybe it’s time you stopped fooling yourself into thinking you are less than you are.”

He hesitated, warred, his attention flickering away before he was pinning me with the force of it. “Frankie.”

He said her name like mourning.

My fucked-up heart shook. Shivered and fisted and pulsed.

He knew. I should have known that he would. I didn’t think I could keep a truth that bright and beautiful concealed.

I met his eye. “She deserved to have a life that I couldn’t offer her.”

And I knew, if I was being honest, the root of the problem had been that I couldn’t stick around to watch it happen.

Sorrow billowed through the air.

Dad’s.

Mine.

The years of loss and the question of where the hell I was supposed to go from here because there wasn’t a whole lot that had changed.

Nothing but this child who stood like a beacon in the middle of us.

He exhaled through the tension, fighting whatever war I could see going on in his mind. “She loved you.”

He said it so simply.

With so much remorse and disappointment that I wasn’t sure how to remain sitting in the regret of it.

His hands fisted on his thighs. Like he was having to hold himself back. “Leaving her like that? It was wrong, Evan. I would have supported any decision you had to make, except for that one.”

My chest felt tight.

Achy.

Everett grabbed my index finger and shook it all around. Kid rooting me. Grounding me. Making me feel like there was a bigger purpose for my life than I’d ever imagined.

I lifted my attention to Dad. Could feel the confession coming raw, a jumble as I forced it off my tongue. “I never wanted to hurt her. I never wanted to hurt you or Mom. Ate at me every single day, and with each day that passed, I felt more out of reach. More distanced.”

Lost.

My throat tremored. “Sometimes it hurts too damn bad to stay.”

“Yet you came back?” he pressed in an encouraging challenge.

I gazed down at Everett.

Affection took me whole.

I looked back up and gave my dad the truth he had instilled in me, his promise forever etched on my spirit, one he’d issued when I was eight-years-old. “You find your purpose when your love for someone else becomes bigger than your fears.”

* * *

After Everett’s appointment, I pulled my car to the curb in front of A Drop of Hope. Maybe I should have kept right on driving. Gone back to my parents’ place and spent the day with Everett getting to know the kid who I kept glancing at through the rear-view mirror.

Mom would be home in a couple hours, but stopping to see her was an easy excuse.

Hell. Almost a mandatory excuse. She’d barely been able to pry herself away when she’d left to open the café this morning.

But I knew better.

Knew why my heart felt like a fucking rock that might crumble where it sat so heavily in my chest.

Knew why my breaths felt short and my head felt light.

Tags: A.L. Jackson Romance
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