Page 84 of Burning Love
“So she knew she was pregnant when she left?”
“No. She says she didn’t. My father believes it. He said the timing was there. He’d only dated my mother for a month. He liked her a lot. They had a deep connection, but my father went back to college. It was his last year.”
“If he knew she was pregnant, would he have gone after her? Would he have tried to take you?”
“The man I know would have never hurt my mother that way. He would have found a way to be in my life and support me even if they didn’t work out.”
Which was obvious considering all that Dean Rigby did for Jace.
“You have that now. I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but your father could have had any kind of reaction not like that. He could have walked away when you turned eighteen. You could have gone into foster care and been with a stranger too.”
“I thought of all those things. My mother wouldn’t have done that. My father said he’d talked to my mother for a good month before we met. She would have made him promise not to leave me. Then they talked every day when I was in school, even if itwas on the phone. He wanted to know everything he missed in my life, but more important who I was at that point in my life.”
“Maybe he thought he could find out more about you from her, about your younger years, and was more concerned about helping you through your grief.”
“Yeah,” he said, taking another sip of beer. “I said a lot of hateful words to my mother before she died.”
And this was where the problem most likely was. “Did you ever get to say you didn’t mean them before she died?”
“Oh, I meant them. Looking back, I think I still mean them. But I shouldn’t have said them. She died thinking I hated her. I hated what she did, not her. I can’t ever fix that.”
The tears were flowing out of her eyes. She stood up and walked to him and put her arms around his waist.
“Jace, what you were feeling and what you said was normal. Would she have wanted you to keep that all bottled up inside?”
“I don’t know. My father got closure. My mother absolved her guilt with my Dad. He said he can’t hold a grudge against her. He’s spent the past twenty years trying to make up for me not having him in my life. Not just financially. He paid for me to go to college and I dropped out after two years. I’d always worked for his business on breaks and in the summer. I ended up doing that full time.”
“I bet he loved it.”
“He did. It will go to me, Kelsey, and Janey someday. I thought they’d be mad, but they weren’t. They don’t really want much to do with the business, but that could change at some point. I wanted something of my own and that is how I became a fireman. I remember my mother broken down on the side of the road with me once and a fire truck was coming back from a call. They pulled over and fixed her car. It just overheated.” He snorted. “Simple enough, but they helped and I thought tomyself, I want to be someone like that. I want to give hope to someone who might not feel as if they have it in that moment.”
There was so much to him that no one ever got to see.
And Talia had a tiny bit of hope that maybe there was a future with him since he let her in.
25
NO EXPLANATION NEEDED
Jace had no idea why he’d talked as much as he had.
Looking down and seeing Talia in his arms told him no explanation was needed.
She leaned back, the tears in her eyes now rolling down her cheeks.
“Don’t cry for me,” he said.
“It’s hard not to. You’re this big tough guy that no one gets to see. You’ve got issues, Jace. Don’t doubt that.”
He snorted. “We all have issues.”
“We do. I’ll be the first to admit it. You’re not alone in this world though sometimes I think you are.”
“I’ve never felt alone.”
Which was a lie.
Right after his mother died, he had.
