Page 89 of To Belong Together
He filled a glass and sat across from the girl, waiting until her gaze lifted from the screen to meet his eyes. Her shoulders hunched with guilt, but she looked from John to the screen as if she wasn’t sure she should stop.
He tapped the air next to his ear.
She obeyed the signal and removed the headphones. “Yeah?”
“What’s your mom up to these days?”
Her mouth scrunched, eyes round. “What? You don’t want me here?”
That was a leap. Poor kid. “Nah, you’re no trouble.” He’d hardly been home, anyway.
She gazed at her screen longingly. “Mom doesn’t think so.”
“She told you that?”
“Basically. Dad says she only thinks about herself, but I think he said that because he’s angry he’s stuck with me.”
“What makes you think he’s stuck with you?”
“I hardly ever saw him before, and as soon as Mom sent me to him, he brought me here. Like, he didn’t even take any time off work. I’m a big problem for him. And all because I asked to be Mom’s maid of honor. She said no and sent me to Dad.”
Bingo. “Your mom’s getting remarried?”
“She’s getting re-everything. She’s starting a new family, so she can’t keep me because I’m part of the old one. So now I have to live with Dad, but he hates me and brought me here, and my friends don’t even miss me.”
Tears welled in her eyes, and John didn’t know how to stop them. Her father ought to be talking this through with her, but Tim seemed to be handling all this as poorly as Isabella was.
“She called me baggage.” Her voice dipped low with dejection.
“Sometimes, people say things they don’t mean.” Ordidn’tsay things theydidmean.
She pursed her lips again and shook her head. “I was an accident.”
That statement wrenched him as badly as the tears had. “No matter what anyone says, God made you and He loves you, which means you’re no accident.”
She peered at him through puffy eyes. “Dad says you’re a Christian.”
Tim wouldn’t be John’s first choice to speak on behalf of John’s faith. “What else does he say?”
“You and Gannon are out of touch with reality, but someone must be smiling down on you because your lives are so good. Did someone you know die?”
The first person who came to mind, Fitz, a guitarist whose run with the band had ended badly, wouldn’t want to bless Awestruck. “It doesn’t work like that. What we have is from God.”
And thank God for that. Without Him, they hadn’t stood a chance.
She waved off his words. “God doesn’t love everyone the way He loves you.”
“We can’t judge His love by what we have or don’t have. Our hope is in heaven.”
She scrunched her mouth like a baby about to spit out a mouthful of peas. “Do you know how much work my dad has to do here? When we can go home?”
Tim and Isabella didn’t have to be there at all, but with this insight into what had brought them, John might be able to coax his manager into spilling his side of it. “I’ll talk to him.”
Sometime after they found Erin’s dad.
28
Erin woke at four thirty, much earlier than necessary to be ready for John to pick her up at six.
