Page 86 of If You Fight

Chapter Twenty-Six

Serena

My mother and I met three days a week at a tiny, out-of-the-way inn a few miles away from her house so no one would know I’d found her. I reserved the room for four weeks, hoping she’d stay there and finally leave that house my father had consigned her to, but every time she insisted on returning in the belief that if she didn’t, he’d take it out on me.

I didn’t know if he would or not. I just wanted her to be free of him.

The Two Cross Inn sat off the road a ways and never seemed to have many guests staying there, so it had an abandoned feel to it. The peeling dark green paint around all the windows only accentuated that. We made sure to hide our cars behind the building every time we met. The room we met in, Room 9, was dark and old, with heavy forest green draperies covering the windows and ensuring our privacy.

My mother settled in to a brown upholstered chair next to the old TV on a metal stand as I crossed my legs and got comfortable on the bed. “This place has cheating spouse written all over it, don’t you think?” she asked with a chuckle.

I looked around at the deep beige walls and strange geometric brown and green patterned bedspread beneath me and cringed. “Maybe in a horror movie. I’d hate to be the woman whose guy can only spring for this place for our rendezvous. Talk about killing the mood.”

She laughed louder at my comment, and I watched as she became more beautiful with each time she smiled. Warm and inviting, it lit up her face.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t get to see you all those years. I think about how many times I would have felt so much better just seeing your smile.”

A blush made her cheeks pink, and she sighed. “I wish we had gotten to have all those times together, Serena. I try not to think about it, though, because it makes me sad.”

“Well, don’t be sad. That’s in the past, and now, we can make up for lost time,” I said in my cheeriest voice to cheer her up.

She smiled, but it didn’t go all the way up to her eyes this time.

“Is something wrong, Mom?”

Shaking her head, she said, “I’m just worried he’s going to find out what you’ve been up to. I don’t want to see you get hurt, honey.”

“He has what he wants now, so I hope he wouldn’t even care.”

Her eyebrows drew in with concern, and she leaned forward toward me. “What do you mean has what he wants now?”

I took a deep breath and searched for the words to explain what had happened with Ryder a few nights earlier. Unable to find the right way to say it, I simply said, “He has Ryder back working for him, so I think he’ll be happy for at least a little while.”

“Why is he so obsessed with him, Serena?” she asked, her expression even more worried now.

Shaking my head, I answered truthfully, “I don’t know. He found Ryder when he was fighting in his underground fights and brought him home one night. He used to even refer to him as his adopted son, showing him off at parties like he used to with me and Janelle. When he caught us together a few months after he brought him to the house, he sent me away and made sure Ryder was beaten in his next fight so badly that he ended up in the hospital. Then he offered him a job as one of his men when he got out, and Ryder took it, but just recently, he decided he wanted him to fight for him again. Now, as of a few days ago, he says he can’t fight ever again and he has to work for him as security again. I don’t know why, and I’ve never understood his obsession with Ryder.”

“I want you to be careful, honey. Your father’s obsessions never end well for anyone but him.”

“Has he ever done this before with anyone else?” I asked, curious to know my father through her eyes.

Frowning, she nodded. “I remember a man named Anderson Jarrett. This was before you were born and when Janelle was only just walking, so she wouldn’t have been even a year old. Your father became fixated on him. It was almost as if he fell in love with him. He was barely into his twenties and had come into a company that worked with your father’s mining business when his own father died. I don’t remember what the company did, but I don’t think it was that important. But your father talked day and night about this Anderson person and his company. Serena, if it had been a woman, I would have been sure he was cheating with her.”

I’d never heard the name Anderson Jarrett before, not from my father or from anyone associated with him.

“What happened with this person?”

“Nothing good for him,” she said with a sigh. “Your father practically courted him like a mistress for over a year, and then one day Jarrett disappeared from our lives. He used to have him at the house a few times a week for dinner and drinks, and then never again. I even asked your father what happened to him, and he waved the mere mention of him away like it meant nothing to him. But he was obsessed with him. I found out later that Anderson Jarrett lost his company to your father and swore until the day he died a few years later that your father stole it from him.”

“Died?” I asked, sitting up straighter at the mention of his death. “I thought you said he was only in his twenties.”

“He was. One night he was found floating in the pond behind his house. It was ruled an accidental drowning, but in the weeks leading up to his death, he began making a lot of noise about how he believed your father had no right to his company because he stole it from him.”

As much as I hated to believe it, this story sounded very much like what I’d heard about my father’s business from Ryder. I didn’t want my mother to know that the man I loved and the father of my child and her grandchild could be involved in something like that, though. Ryder was more than just one of my father’s men.

“So you see, that’s why I don’t like to hear your father is so preoccupied with your boyfriend, Serena.”

I slid my palm over my pregnant belly, wishing more than she could ever know that Ryder and I could escape my father’s obsession. “He knows we’re together and doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. I was hoping that meant his interest in him had started to wane.”

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