Page 35 of Defending Casey

He shook his head and turned toward her. “Case, no matter what, I’m going to love-”

“No matter what,” she echoed his words, but there was a deep resonating pain in her voice, “you’re going to love Nora and that’s what matters, Hale.”

He wanted to argue, but that wasn’t going to work with Casey. She was as stubborn as he was in that regard. So, he sat quietly, waiting for her to speak, wondering what could be so horrible-

“It was after the night that we… that you and I were… together.”

Okay. He had to let out a breath if only to have something to do.

“Your dad came into the diner when I was working. He took the corner booth in the back which was part of my section and it kind of scared me, you know? He’d avoided me like the plague ever since we’d started dating and suddenly, a couple of days after you took me to your mom’s place? After we…”

He clenched his jaw for a moment. Was it really so hard to say what happened? That they’d made love? Or maybe that was part of the problem.

“It felt like he knew,” he could hear the soft tremor of fear in her voice, “and I worried that he’d come in to make a scene. I mean, could you imagine if he’d just stood up and told a crowded diner that I’d just spent the night with his son? I’m pretty sure that would have been enough to make me a pariah.”

“He would have been exposing us both, Case. But I don’t know how he could have known. I told him I was going there to do some work on the house. I had been there a number of times since my mom passed. And he knew how much her house meant to me.”

She shrugged and made a helpless gesture with her hands. “How would I know what he intended to do? I hadn’t said more than a dozen words to him in my life and he’d said even less to me. But you have to understand that seeing him there, watching him walk through all of the tables and past the counter where he always sat and walk right into my section, was more than a little unnerving.

“God, I felt like I had something written across my forehead saying I’d lost my virginity to his son.” She visibly shuddered. “It was worse than Hester Prynne with her embroidered badge marking her as a whore.”

He wanted to stop her and remind her that Hester’s shame was because of adultery, but Casey didn’t need him mansplaining a thing to her. She knew what she felt and that’s what he was listening to.

“It got even worse when he told me to sit down in the other seat. I tried to tell him that I was working, but all it took from your dad was a stare at the room and everyone turned away.”

Hale knew that look. He’d been on the receiving end of it many times and even though it was his dad glaring at him, he’d never been afraid of his dad when he was yelling, but when he was quiet and focused a stare at him, he was afraid.

“It turned out that he’d heard about your acceptance letters. I don’t know how, but you know that in a town this small, news like that gets around. He started in reminding me of exactly who I was. A daughter of a nobody in Fool’s Gold.” She must have seen his glare and managed a soft smile. “Thank you for being upset on my dad’s behalf, but you don’t have to, Hale. I think your father was trying to make me feel as small as possible. And he succeeded. He went on talking about what a mistake we would be making, staying together. He made it clear that you were meant for better things in life, Hale. Better people.

“He told me that if I didn’t let you go…”

As Casey continued to speak, Hale was finally able to put all of the pieces of his past together.

It had never made any sense to him that Casey would change her mind and break things off with him. After months and months together, working up to that night, loving her in the bed he’d bought for that house. The bed that he’d decided would be the one their children were conceived in.

And that’s when it all clicked.

If his father had known of his acceptances to three of the colleges that he’d made Hale apply to, he probably knew that the deadlines to register were coming up and Hale hadn’t made a single move to pick one, or any of them.

Looking at Casey, sitting beside him, her face full of guilt and regret, he knew exactly what his father had done.

“In all of that talking that my father did that day, Casey, did he tell you that my mother’s house would have been mine in a few short months?”

He saw the shock on her face, and he didn’t have to wait for an answer, she’d already given it to him.

“I’m sure he told you more lies. Cutting me off from my mom’s estate? Cutting me out of the family? What else? What other lies did he tell you, Casey? How did he convince you to walk away from what we had?”

Tears spilled down her cheeks before she laid her face in her hands. Sobbing, she managed to tell him the rest of it. Told him that his father berated her for being too childish to understand, too self-involved, and too damn selfish to be worthy of Hale and his mother’s legacy.

“He told me that if I really cared… If I really loved you that I wouldn’t stand in the way of you going to college and becoming the man you were destined to be. How you couldn’t do it with me hanging around your neck like a millstone.”

The tears she cried broke his heart.

Casey had always been too gentle and kind to withstand the tornado that his father could whip up when he felt like he was justified.

And that happened all too often.

Something had happened to his father when his mother had died. He hadn’t just become grief-stricken. It seemed like he was determined to kill any remaining joy in their lives.

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