Page 14 of Long Road Home

“Ten…ten fucking years.” I pressed my hands to the countertop. My knees shook. Shit. I could pass out. Breath wouldn’t come, and thoughts wouldn’t clear. Everything whirred in my brain like a train and my vision blurred. “You left and hid my kid from me?”

A tortured groan ripped from my throat. Good God, I’d never made such a sound in my life and it pierced my ears at the same time she flinched.

What in the hell did I do with this?

“Jordan—”

Her voice ripped from her throat was almost my undoing. I lifted a hand without lifting my head. “Give me a damn minute.”

“I’m sorry.” Her apology was so damn quiet, so sad. Another time, another place, I would have yanked her into my arms and threatened to kick whoever’s ass it was that made her sound like that.

But this was her own damn fault and the apology meant nothing.

I yanked out a chair at the small dining table and collapsed into it. My elbows hit the table, my head hit the palms of my hands.

Ten fucking years. Mykid.Holy shit. I had ason. A fucking good-looking one at that, who handled a basketball like he was born with it and she’d ripped all of that away from me. The ability to teach him how to play. To watch him walk. To send him off for school.

Grief for what I’d lost, what she’dstolenfrom me hit me hard and fast, unbearable no matter how hard I tried to beat it back.

The clamor of pots and pans echoed, but it felt like she was miles away, banging around in the kitchen, opening and closing the fridge. Outside, quieter, the bounce of the ball of asphalt and the slam of it as it hit the garage grabbed my attention.

A decade of memories I could have had with him—

Gone.

“Why? Why did you do this?”

“I don’t have a good answer anymore,” she said. No fucking shit she didn’t. “At the time, it made sense, Jordan. We were so young. And I was so scared.”

My fingertips pressed into my closed eyes so harshly I feared I’d pop them straight back to my brain.Scared? Young?

We’d planned everything. A family being one of them. It was all I wanted—her, kids, my life on the mound.

Fucking hell.

A violent shudder rolled down my spine, shaking my entire body, as I struggled for restraint.

With an inkling of control, I finally lifted my head, caught her at the counter, twisting that kitchen towel, tears streaming down her cheeks and some blonde hair stuck to the wetness there.

“Tell me everything. Now.”

“Tillie knew before I did. I threw up one morning, didn’t have a fever, and then after it was fine. I shrugged it off, but it happened the next day and when I got back home, Tillie handed me a test.” She shook her head, and I caught the pain in her eyes, reliving that, or what she’d taken from me. “She had a sister in Houston.”

Houston. A different kind of warmth hit my veins. I’d wondered. For years I wondered where she’d disappeared. Did everything I could to find her the first two when I could never get her out of my head. But she’d never had social media. Never found her name mentioned on an online search.

But she went by Jane. I’d never checked that.

I realized she’d kept talking while my mind wandered and I clued in when she said the wordcruise.

“What?”

“She hated cruises,” she said. She dropped the towel to the counter and shook her head. “I lived with her sister, Suzie, when I left. Suzie had a two-bedroom apartment in Houston. And after…” Her eyes flicked to me and back to her knee. “Well, after, I stayed there. Tillie came down every year to see us. Always went on a cruise with Suzie out of Galveston so she wasn’t lying to folks back here. But she hated them.”

Hearing how Tillie kept up that charade sent my pulse thumping until I felt it in my neck.

“Came over here,” I said, trying as hard as I possibly could to keep all that anger controlled. “Almost two years I’ve been here, weekly, taking care of her lawn, grocery shopping for her, dinner…do you know how much it pisses me off to know how many times she lied right to my damn face when I asked about you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Jordan. At the time, it seemed like the right thing. I was me.” She shrugged and let her shoulder fall. “I was me and everything I’d been raised with, all that shit from people around town, I couldn’t do that to my kid. And you were you. What would people have said, how would they have treated him…what would you have done if I had come to you and told you? Give up your scholarship for me? I’d never have been able to live that down.”

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