Page 129 of Fierce-Jax

“I’m not,” she said. “But I’m not showing it. How would you like to go to the doctor and see them shaking and moving around the room full of nerves with a scalpel in their hand?”

“Good point,” her mother said, checking her watch for that tenth time. “Five minutes. Can we just walk in slowly at this point?”

“Fine,” she said, shutting the car off. They’d had it running with the air conditioning on full blast so she wasn’t sweating through her clothes.

Dillion wasn’t as cool as she was coming off.

The two of them climbed out and walked into the restaurant, said they were meeting someone and then were brought over to a booth.

Alec’s mother was sitting there and looked nervous when she approached and wasn’t alone.

“Martha Cannon?” she said.

Martha stood up. “That’s me. You said it was only us.”

“This is my mother, Leigh Patrick. She’s a mother too. And a grandmother.”

Martha looked uneasy but sat back down after they shook. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”

Alec’s mother looked meek, kind of like Alec behaved at times.

She felt a little bad.

Only a little.

This was her and her daughter’s life being uprooted. Alec’s parents could have gone on without contacting her.

It’s not like they tried for years to seek out Alec if he’d been gone four years by the time they even found out.

“I want to know what you’re going to do,” Dillion said. “What you hope to accomplish. Alec told me he had no relationship with his parents. He told me what happened to him as a child. I have to protect my daughter.”

“Alec exaggerated things,” Martha said.

“That is your word against his and he’s not here to dispute your claim. The fact you haven’t been part of his life for almost two decades and just discovered he’d died proves you weren’t trying much either. It leads me to believe him.”

“What did he tell you?” Martha asked, frowning.

She looked at her mother. “That he was physically and verbally abused by his father and that you didn’t stop it. You let it happen.”

She secretly feared that Gianna’s temper tantrums revealed a touch of her grandfather’s nature.

An anger issue.

As a doctor, she wondered about her daughter’s genetics and what could have been passed on also, but she never spoke of those fears out loud.

Martha’s shoulders dropped. “Luke had a drinking problem for years. When he was drunk he’d get angry. He couldn’t control himself.”

“That’s not an excuse,” her mother said.

“It’s not,” Martha said. “But it’s the truth. Luke would sober up for periods of time and then relapse back again.”

“After he was arrested he’d relapse?” Dillion asked. She wanted it known that she had them looked into. That Martha should be aware of who she was dealing with.

“Yes,” Martha said. “But that was years ago. The last time he was arrested, Alec was a senior in high school.”

“He hit Alec,” she said. “Punched him in the face, didn’t he?”

She’d been told that one night when Alec had taken a sleeping pill to help him rest. He was half awake and had a nightmare and she tried to find out what was going on.

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