Still, we all had our comforts.
I wondered what it meant that I wasn’t crying, too.
Grabbing his dog by the black collar around its neck, he opened the door. “Barny, stay.”
“Well trained,” I commented, studying the dog after I’d stepped into the short hallway.
Barny stared at me, and I stepped forward, holding out my hand.
He growled but then sniffed away. Five seconds later, he was licking me. “Good boy,” I said, patting his huge head.
“Are you, um…” Daryl closed the door. “Are you staying or…?”
He was eyeing my bag, which I’d dropped to the floor beneath an entry table covered in mail. Above it, a small wooden plank with a red heart in the middle and two hooks either side of it sat on the wall. One of them hung his keys; the other was awaiting someone else’s.
He didn’t live alone.
“I won’t take up too much of your time.”
“It’s fine. I’ve not long got in from work, and Danni should be home soon.”
“Wife?” I asked.
“Girlfriend.” He gestured down the hall, and I let him take the lead while I took note of the suede sectional in the living room, the flat screen on a glass entertainment unit, and the numerous dog toys littering the tiled floor. “She works at a call center in the city.”
“Where do you work?”
He froze in a stark white kitchen, his back to me as he stared inside his fridge. “Drink?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
He grabbed a beer and shut the door, popping the top.
I followed him to a large brown dining table outside the kitchen. A sliding glass door overlooked a kidney-shaped pool and an outdoor wicker setting.
I lowered to the cushioned suede seat, and he moved to the opposite end with his back to the pool. “I’m a high school gym teacher.” He still had an American accent, though some of his pronunciations were lower, some words rolling into the next as I’d experienced with the few Australians I’d met today.
“I sent you letters,” I said, folding my hands on the table. “I recently found them all in my mother’s room.”
Something moved over his face, frosting his features a little. “Right. How is she?”
“Fine. Why would she keep them? And why haven’t you ever called, let alone visited?”
His brows furrowed. “You’re one of them now, I assume.”
I lifted the hand wearing my bling. “Married at the tender age of nineteen.”
“Your birthday’s not for another two months.”
Surprised he’d remembered, a jolt traveled through me, straightening my spine. “It’s nice to know you haven’t forgotten that much, at least.”
He sipped his beer, thumbs dragging down the chilled sides for a heavy minute as he stared at it. “I haven’t forgotten anything, Fern. I never will.”
“What happened?” I finally dared to ask.
His head began to shake. “You can’t ask me that, and I can’t tell you. You know that.”
“I don’t know nearly enough,” I said, my voice roughened with anger. “All I know is that one day, you were there, and the next, you were gone. You were my best friend, my only ally, and you left me to rot in the dark.”
“Fern…”
“No,” I said, slamming a fist on the table. “I came all the way here for answers. I don’t want anything from you other than the god damned truth.”
He cupped his mouth with his hand and rubbed. “You’re right. You’re right, but you know what they’ll do to me when they find out I talked?”
“They won’t.”
“You’ve met your mother by now, correct?” His brow arched. “The real January Denane. Ever wonder why you had her last name and not mine?”
I sat back, slouching a little. “Sometimes.”
“Because although my blood runs through your veins, you were never going to be mine.”
Cold brushed over my bare arms, and I blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I was plucked from college graduation, working two dead-end jobs with a degree I’d hoped would make all the difference while knowing it would make none.” Leaning forward, he lowered his voice. “Her parents were so meticulous in their selection. I was a fucking orphan through most of elementary school until some wiseass shoved me into the system, and I jumped from home to home. I have no family, Fern. I never have, and I never will. I was a tool for them to fuck their daughter with, nice and hard while they watched on like the sick fucks they were.”
As though remembering who he was talking to—his daughter—his eyes popped, and he drank half his beer, collecting himself.
“I loved her. I won’t lie. She’s incorrigible and insane, but I eventually fell for her.” He licked his lips, cheeks billowing as he set a large exhale free. “January hasn’t loved me a day in her life. She might love women, but I highly doubt she’ll ever truly love any one of them either.” He jabbed a finger at me. “You’re the only exception. The moment you were born, I saw the immediate shift in her. I watched as the snake became the wolf.”
Stunned, I stared, some of the ice in my blood thawing.
“Make many friends at school?” Daryl asked, then huffed when I couldn’t answer that. “Didn’t think so. Had many boyfriends?”
You know the rules… I remembered some of them saying to one another and struggled to swallow. “You make her sound like a monster,” I rasped. January was many things, but for every fault she never hid was a promise to protect me while surviving this life as best she could.
“She’s not,” my father said, expelling a pained breath. “She’s not. She did it for your own good, but I bet it sucked for you.”
“Enough about me.”
He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “I tried, Fern. They promised me the world when I agreed to marry their daughter for reasons I would soon find out had nothing to do with me, but I knew, shortly after my entire life had changed at their hands, that world they’d promised me? It wasn’t fucking worth it.”
“You were her initiation,” I said.
“Correct. We married right out of school, but they refused to ink her skin and allow her all the way in until she bore them a child.”
My own skin began to tingle at my back, and a muddled sense of disorientation spun me where I sat. “You initiated.”
He nodded. Barny whined at his side, anxious.
“She couldn’t until she had me.”
He nodded again and finished his beer. “Look,” he said. “She gave me a choice after what happened to your grandparents. She was already second tier. She and Elijah…” He flicked a hand. “They have some weird silent pact. There was no way I’d stand a chance at fighting them. So when she offered me the money, a chance for a normal life if I never returned to hers or yours, a life I could keep if I stayed away and kept quiet, I took it.”
His hands spread as though he’d lost a game of poker and his yearly savings. “I’m sorry. Do I regret leaving?” He shrugged. “Sometimes, yes. But only because of you. You were the only light in that fucked-up world I’d willingly walked into, and I loved you so much.” He sniffed then and wiped beneath his nose before looking at me with wet eyes. “I still do, but this is where we are, and we can’t change that.”