Page 40 of Paradise

As soon as stiff handshakes were exchanged, and Jack and his lawyer left, Jonah bolted from the room and headed straight for the infirmary. God damn it all to hell, why did he end up spending so much of his time there? If it wasn’t Cody getting shots, it was Garrett getting his eyes burned out of his head. Might as well rent space in the one back home if this was an indicator for the kind of trouble his guys could get into.

There was a part of his brain, getting louder and louder by the minute, that was yelling at him about what an absolute idiot he’d been. Not because he was with Garrett; no one could have looked at what had happened today and not noticed how devoted Garrett was to Cody. The man was goin’ out of his mind, and he’d still moved to defend Jonah’s son, and even though it hadn’t been necessary, had in fact been just about thedefinitionof overkill, it wasn’t anything Jonah felt he had to fear.

No, Jonah was shouting at himself because he’d let distractions get the better of him and hadn’t noticed his lover, hisfiancé, slowly goin’ crazy. Or whatever was the matter with him.

Jonah asked the first doctor he saw where Garrett was and was directed to a private room on the west side of the facility. The walls were clear, the type that could be blacked out with a touch for privacy, but right now they were transparent, and Jonah could see the bed and Miles sitting beside it. He was holding one of Garrett’s hands and looking down into the recessed bed, and it almost seemed like too private a moment to break. Then he reminded himself,I’m family,opened the door, and stepped inside.

Miles looked up and smiled slightly when he saw him. “You just missed Cody.”

“Who’s he with?”

“Wyl came by to get him. They’re going to go repaint Garrett’s bike as a surprise gift for him when he wakes up.”

“Wyl’s a good guy,” Jonah said as he sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed and looked down at Garrett. The blue-tinted gel covering him gave his face a strange, corpse-like cast, and Jonah unconsciously bit his lower lip.

“He is. We’re all happy he and Robbie found each other.”

“Kinda surprising, you gettin’ along so well with your son’s ex.”

“If I couldn’t get along with Garrett’s former paramours, I’d lose a large number of friends,” Miles said dryly. “And generally, my son’s partings have been amicable. He doesn’t take a lot personally.”

“Good to know,” Jonah muttered.

Miles stared at Jonah for a moment before he sighed. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Blaming yourself. Garrett has been dealing with his medical issues very successfully for most of his life; this little lapse isn’t your fault.”

“I should have paid him better attention,” Jonah said stiffly. This wasn’t exactly a conversation he wanted to have with his future father-in-law, but it didn’t look like he was going to have a choice. “I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure what. I thought he was just anxious, you know. Worried about the wedding and then worried about Jack and Kilroy. I should’ve—”

Miles was already shaking his head. “There’s no amount of hindsight that’s going to help, son. There are plenty of things you could have done, or that any of us could’ve done, but Garrett’s an adult. He knows his responsibilities. He let this slip, and I’m not blaming him for everything that’s happened, but still. It’s clear there’s a lot you don’t know about his history, and he shouldhave explained it to you long before things got to this point so that you would beableto help him.”

“I know he was sick as a kid,” Jonah offered, wondering—hoping—that Miles was going to fill in some of the gaps Jonah knew were there.

“He tried to kill himself.”

“Oh.” Holy … shit. Suicide wasn’t all that rare in a Drifter community, but on Alliance planets, where doctor visits were mandatory and regular, Jonah knew it almost never happened.

“I should have seen it coming,” Miles said pensively. “And don’t look at me like that; I’m allowed to take responsibility in this instance because Garrett was only thirteen. His mother killed herself when he was a small child, and I knew there was the potential for it in his genetics, but I was a rather-neglectful single father for a long time, and I didn’t make sure he was getting the care he needed.” He took a deep, slow breath. “Ten years to the day after his mother’s death, Garrett shot himself in the chest.”

“Holyshit.” Jonah had just thought it, but he figured it merited sayin’ aloud too.

“He missed his heart, and fortunately the kind of gun he used made a wound that cauterized around the edges, so he didn’t bleed out. My housekeeper found him and got him help. By the time I returned from deployment, he was already out of the hospital.

“We had such a fight about it.” Miles stroked the back of Garrett’s hand carefully, but the look on his face was almost fond. “He didn’t want to get treatment, especially not the rather-drastic kind that had been recommended by his surgeon. He shouted about how I should just go away, how he had always taken care of himself, and he could keep doing it, how I didn’t even care.” Miles snorted. “He was a very melodramatic teenager. He heaped all sorts of abuse on me, a lot of it welldeserved, and I sat there and took it and then told him he didn’t have a choice, he was going to a specialist. He stayed in a private hospital for nearly three months while they worked out a solution to his particular mental imbalance, and then he came home.”

“And you stayed with him.” Jonah knew this part of the story; it was one of the reasons Garrett loved his father so much.

“I did. And he hated me for the first, oh, six months. We got counseling, obviously, and eventually, Gare accused me of wanting him to be different. He said I had forced him to change. And I told him I loved him however he was, and that I always would.”

Miles smiled slightly. “It’s strange, but before Gare shot himself, I knew almost nothing about him. He was a perfect son whenever we saw each other, which was maybe twice in a standard year. Excellent scores in school, physically healthy, polite. Like a caricature of a child, and I didn’t even realize it. I’d made the same mistake with his mother, never digging deep enough to understand the real her. Do you know who his mother was?”

Jonah knew. “Larissa Child, the actress. She starred in the first holo I ever watched,” he added, remembering sneaking into the theater on Belamonte when he was a child and watching her float across the screen, a goddess in white and gold.

“Larissa. Garrett’s a lot like her. Beautiful, smart, captivating. She could make you believe anything and make you do almost anything as well. I was never sure why she agreed to marry me, honestly. My family has influence, but she didn’t need our help in that arena.” Miles shrugged. “But she did marry me, and we had Garrett, and then she killed herself. It took a long time for me to let go of the guilt I felt over that. I don’t think I actually managed it before I spent a year with Gare and got to know him, to really know him. He’s one of the most complex peopleI’ve ever met, and I don’t think anyone can really understand everything that goes on in his head. Or anyone’s, really.

“A parent is responsible for their children, but an adult can only truly be held responsible for their own decisions, not the decisions of the people surrounding them. It was hard for me to accept, being career military and very accustomed to telling people what to do. I got it eventually, though, thanks to my son.” This time when Miles smiled it was easy. “We do love our children. They make us become better people than we thought we could be.”

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