Page 8 of Everlasting

“Jay, I received a package. I need you to come to my house immediately.”

“What the fuck kind of package?” He asked, concern dripping from him as I heard the uptick in his breaths while he ran to his bike.

“Calm down, it’s just pictures, but you need to get them to the club.” I hung up so he could drive safely. While I waited, I took pictures of the envelope, the pictures themselves, and made sure to save them to my phone, the cloud, and even sent myself an email with them attached. I might have to hand them over to the club so they could use them to track whoever had Deck, but I’d be damned if I didn’t keep copies in case they couldn’t find him on their own.

Not for the first time since my husband had gone missing, I wondered if I should involve the police instead of the club. At the very least, I thought about hiring someone whose job it was to track people. I thought about what Jay did for Redemption Inc. He was more involved with concerts and celebrity security, but I knew they had a team who tracked people that didn’t want to be found. I would give the club a head start, but if they didn’t get results soon, I was going to bring the women of S.H.E. onboard to ensure the job got done.

Chapter 7

Another Letter

Lucy

When I came out of the bathroom, I was surprised to see my youngest daughter there. “Anna, what’s going on? Is everything all right?”

“Momma, why didn’t you push him harder?”

“What?” I asked her, genuinely confused about what she was talking about. Anna then held up the letter I left beside my chair. The one from CJ that I had been reading.

“Why didn’t you push Daddy harder? I know that I didn’t understand the dynamics back then because you kept me sheltered from things, and also because I was a little naïve girl lost to my own world, but you knew what was going on the whole time. Why didn’t you push him to do better for her?”

“Honey, in the beginning, I had to push myself just to do right for Ever. It was a very tough time for us. The adjustment was a little overwhelming. I never wanted to think about your father being with someone else, much less creating a life with someone. I know that’s not a fair thing to even think considering I was in a relationship with a man during the time we were separated and very nearly had a baby with him too. It’s just that, there was a world of difference between something being a possibility and something being in your face and real.”

“Okay, but then you were the best mom to her for years, but you still let Daddy treat her that way. Why?”

“It wasn’t about letting him or not letting him, Anna. He was a man with his own thoughts and ideas. I encouraged him, I tried to help sway him, but it was another time in our lives that damnable brotherhood was more influential than I was. He allowed them to taint the relationship he could have had with Ever. There was no changing that.”

“You could have booted his ass out the door until he came to see the light,” she offered.

I gave her a grim smile. “I very well could have, but I had two more people to consider in that equation.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever wasn’t an only child, sweetheart. I had both you and your brother to consider too, and he wasn’t being awful to either of you, so I worked harder to make sure Ever knew she was loved and wanted, even when your father could only do that for you and your brother.”

“You sacrificed straightening him out so that we didn’t lose our time with him?” Anna asked me, shocked at that revelation.

“Of course.” She didn’t seem to understand though. “Parenting isn’t something we get a manual for, as you well know by now. We do our best. We make decisions that might not be the best option for one because it’s the only option for the other children. I couldn’t take your dad away from you guys, and honestly, if I had, it would have just caused him to resent her more. He would have seen her as the problem, and the reason and the assholes at the clubhouse during that time would have helped him right along with that thought process.”

“I guess I never thought about it that way.”

“I had hoped you would never have to think about it at all. It’s not a proud time in your father’s life, and it’s a very difficult one for both Ever and myself. We all tried, in our own ways, to shelter you from all of it.

Anna held up the letter in her hands. “Did you let her read these?”

“I’ve only just now read it,” I admitted.

She scrunched her face in obvious confusion and then looked back at the dated pages. “But,”

“Your father never gave them to me to read when he wrote them. They’ve been boxed up and hidden away in the garage. I only dug them out recently, while he’s been away, because I missed him and needed to hear his voice in a weird way. And also, because I just, I don’t know. I guess with Deck missing, a part of me is worried about all the things we may regret never having done. You know?”

“I do know that.” Anna hummed the words out. “I’m so worried for Deck and for Ever and the girls, Momma. What do we do? How can we make it better?”

“For Deck, we let the men do their thing and hopefully, bring him home. For Ever, you just be there for your sister when she needs you. I have a feeling this is going to get harder on her before it gets better. She’s expecting their baby and he can’t be there for all the things that he made it to for the girls. That’s going to hurt her in ways she can’t even comprehend right now.”

“What if he doesn’t come back?”

I sighed heavily, letting my own personal fears about that come to the surface for just a moment. “We’ll deal with that when the time comes, Anna. I don’t want to dwell on that particular ‘what if’, because it feels like we’re giving up on Deck if we do.”

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