Page 145 of Failure to Match

“Keep going,” he whispered.

“I know why you don’t believe in love,” I murmured. “Better yet, Iunderstandit. How could you, after everything you witnessed between your parents?”

How could he, when his own mother had told him outright that she didn’t love him? That she wouldn’t have given birth to him if she hadn’t needed to? Jackson was a sacrifice she’d made to secure the lifestyle she wanted, and she hadn’t allowed him to forget it.

I couldn’t imagine.

The amount of respect and gratitude I had for Mabel and Molly, for Bensen and Mikey, and for every other person who’d cared for him and shown him love was overwhelming. They’d banded together to protect Jackson as best they could, especially after Bensen was fired.

A good chunk of their scheming had been detailed throughout Molly’s journals. They had secret phones and pagers, a guy on the security team who monitored the cameras for them, and various methods of distraction and hiding spots for Jackson to utilize when his father was throwing one of his rage fits.

No wonder Jackson had kept every last one of them around.

“I know all of that, and I know about the abuse you suffered, but please,pleasedon’t force me to say it out loud. I’m sorry I snuck in here and looked at things you didn’t want me to see. I take full responsibility for it, but… don’t make me list it all out.”

Maybe one of the reasons Molly didn’t want him reading the journals was because she hoped he’d forgotten some of it, and I didn’t want to remind him.

He swallowed roughly. “Fine, then we’ll just talk about the one.”

The one? Which one? “What d’you mean?”

“You said the journal talked about Bensen getting fired.”

I nodded, watching him carefully.

“Did it say why?” he asked.

“You showed up to your secret piano lessons in pain from… an injury, and he took you to the hospital.”

His jaw twitched under my palm. “And what was the injury?”

My eyes searched his, my heart stuttering as something softly clicked into place in the back of my head. “Cigarette burns,” I muttered.

He said nothing, just held onto my gaze and slowly reached for the buttons of his shirt.

I knew. Before his fingers had worked through the buttons, before they pulled the fabric apart to bare his chest, I knew.

My heart crawled inside my throat. Slowly, I dropped my hands. Slowly, I allowed my eyes to travel down. There, on the left side of his chest, were the small circles of marred skin. A dozen of them, at least. Etched right above his heart.

They were spaced out and organized to form a structurally perfectD.

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Some of thescars were more prominent than the others, as though they’d suffered overlapping burns. Some of them were white, others tinted just a little pink. But all of them looked stretched out, like they’d grown with their owner.

That was the part that made my breath catch—the evidence that they’d once belonged to a child. Without thinking, I reached for them. Jackson tensed when the tips of my fingers brushed his skin, but he didn’t pull away.

My throat ached, my heart heavy as I traced the dots. How bad did the original burns need to be for their scars to last this long? And why the shape?

As though he’d read my mind. Jackson cleared his throat. “It’s not an initial, doesn’t have anything to do with anyone’s name. The D stands for discipline, something I severely lacked at thirteen, according to my father.”

I tried to swallow the emotion lodged at the base of my throat, tried to blink back the wetness blurring my eyes. “They look... they must have been deep.”

After a short pause, he said, “I earned one whenever he thought I was slacking off... or if he’d had a little too much todrink and decided that the way I was breathing wasn’t to his liking.”

I brushed my fingers over the ones at the beginning of the curve. They were noticeably worse than the others. Bigger, deeper, more marred.

“Sometimes he completed the D before I’d had a chance to fully heal, so he’d just start going over them again.”

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