Page 52 of Defending Casey

“No!” Hale pushed away from the wall and slammed his hands down on the back of the sofa. “You don’t get to turn your back on this… on me!”

“Why would you think that if I married Casey that it wouldn’t work? You barely even knew her then.”

His father looked up at him and the dark anger in his gaze was frightening. “It wasn’t even about her!” He sagged back in the chair and shook his head. “It wasn’t even about her. I knew how much you loved her, Hale. You loved her like I loved… like I still love your mother. And I knew that if you two stayed together, I was going to lose you to her. And then what? Then I’d just be sitting here, alone. My world would be even smaller.” He balled his hand into a fist and smacked it on the armrest. “I knew if I told her, if I convinced her that it was for the best, then she’d do it. She’d do it because she loved you.”

Hearing it said didn’t make him understand it anymore. But hearing it stated so clearly drove another knife through his heart. “You used her love for me to hurt me, thinking that I’d what? Go to college, become a hero, and come right back home? That I’d live here? Just you and me? How the hell did you think all of that was going to work?”

Hale shook his head again and again. It just kept going until it lost its meaning.

His father finally spoke as he got up out of his chair. “I wasn’t thinking, son. I swear to God it was just this anger building up inside of me. Everything I did was just another step deeper. At first, when you two broke up, I told myself everything would be fine. You’d get over it and you’d come home for vacations. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year.”

“And instead of college, I picked the Army.”

His father nodded as he walked toward the china cabinet. “And when you did that, I let the anger take hold of me again and when Casey came to see me, I turned a deaf ear to her. I thought that she was just trying to get you back, like… like-”

“Like you were.”

His father closed his mouth and he swallowed before nodding. “Yes. Exactly.”

“And when you heard that she really was pregnant. What was your excuse then?”

“I’m not proud of my actions, Hale, I-”

“What did you do?”

His head hung down. “I… I might have told some folks that you weren’t the only boy she was with.”

Hale left the house.

He left before he could do something he couldn’t take back.

He left before he could put his hands on his father.

He left because he knew just how short a fuse he had. And if he stayed, there was a distinct chance that he’d do something he couldn’t take back.

It was a horrible decision to see his father.

Hindsight sucked.

When he got back home, he sat in his truck and looked at the clock on the dashboard.

In just a few hours, Casey and Nora were going to come and see him.

The trouble was, Hale didn’t know if he’d be able to cool his anger by then. The last thing he wanted to do was disappoint Nora, but if she came and saw how angry he was. If she saw him seething with hate…

He didn’t want her to be afraid of him.

He was starting to be afraid of himself.

Picking up his phone from the console, he sent Casey a text, calling off the visit.

He didn’t know what he needed to do to put himself on an even keel again. He had no idea how to pull himself together without hurting someone else or himself.

There really was only one call he could make.

He didn’t even need to look up the number, he had it memorized.

He called his team.

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