Page 58 of Speeding Hearts

I handed him the cup of water the nurse had left next to his bed.

Dad had never once talked about his own life with any kind of introspection. Any kind of dissatisfaction about where he was. But of course he was dissatisfied. Who would be happy with the life he lived? A gloomy, unkempt apartment. A failing business. All but alone.

After he’d settled, slurping the bottom of the cup of water I’d handed him, we sat in silence for a moment.

“Did you know you asked for Mom? When you got here?”

Dad stared at me so long I thought he was ignoring me, willing me to walk out on him. Then, he looked out the window, onto the view of Cass Harbor. “She was the only one who knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Knew about what happened to me. Why you getting into that crash was my fault.”

“Your fault! You always said it was Colin’s for leaving his track unattended. Mine for being an idiot.”

“Those things are still true. But it was my fault you did it. You know how I know? Because my father was just like me, and I was just like you. I broke my goddamned back on that track in the woods.”

His old injury. He’d never once told me how he got it.

“My father was an asshole, just like me. But now I understand that he didn’t know how to not be one. I lost everything, Dean. Every damn thing by clinging onto my own stubbornness. I lost your mother. I lost my best friend. I lost you, too. It was never your fault, that crash. It was mine.”

I sat back in the chair, too stunned to speak.

“Colin was your best friend,” I said finally, finding the most neutral thing to latch onto. I knew they’d been friends. I just didn’t know they’d been close.

“If you find one of those, you do whatever it takes to keep them in your life. They’re as important as the ones you love.”

They are the ones you love.

“I lost my best friend,” I said, before thinking better of it.

“The girl.”

I looked at my dad. “How did you know?”

He slurped at his water again. “Your mother.”

“You’re talking again?”

“Here and there. Since you’ve been back.”

I wasn’t sure I could be any more shocked. But that was the clincher. “You two have barely spoken for a decade, and now you’re analyzing my love life?”

“Who said anything about a love life?”

My mouth was dry. “I did,” I croaked out.

I stood up and strode to the window. On the other side of those hills was the town I loved. A little further down, past a creek where a little boy used to love to catch frogs, was a woman.

The woman I loved with my whole damn heart.

“All I ever do is hurt the people I love,” I said, my voice low, barely there. “I can’t stand the thought of hurting her.”

My dad laughed. The sound was like pebbles in a can. “What do you think you’ve already done, you ninny?”

Chapter 18

Stella

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