Page 67 of Savior

She tipped the glass back with a wince. “I was supposed to go off to college and earn a degree before marrying a man who would ensure I never had to work while I raised our two children. I would’ve thrown myself into church fundraisers and country club lunches…only, I didn’t want to go back to being the girl who followed all the rules. I didn’t want to be my mother.”

I snorted back a sudden laugh. “And here I’ve done everything by the book to avoid becoming you and letting Nan down. Well, until Nate, that is.”

“But are you happy, Kate? My only goal as a mother was to raise my kids to think for themselves and to chase their dreams, no matter how crazy they seemed. I thought by giving your grandparents the money, it would give you the courage to do just that.”

I studied the patterns in the wood. “For a long time, I think I was just checking boxes, fighting to make sure that no matter how bad things got, it always looked perfect from the outside. Do you ever think about what your life would’ve been like had you not gotten pregnant?”

To my surprise, she nodded. “Yeah, there were days where I found myself thinking about where I would’ve ended up had I just gone to college and married a man that my parents approved of. Then, I realized by doing so, I’d erased the only things in my life that I was sure about. If I’d made different choices, then I would’ve spent the rest of my life wondering where Jamie was and imagining what our children would’ve looked like.”

“That’s how I feel about Nate,” I blurted out in response. “I wasted all my time checking off boxes and creating the ideal partner in my head. Do you know that Nate didn’t meet any of my criteria? Not one thing. And nothing about our relationship has been perfect—”

“Who wants perfection, though? I want passion.” My mother placed a hand over her chest. “I want to feel it here. I want to know that if I fall apart, he’s willing to go to the ends of the earth to pull me back together.”

I couldn’t imagine Nate going to the ends of anything for me.

He would’ve left it to the police, distancing himself from the entire thing. I shoved the thought back to the dark recesses of my mind before approaching a topic my mother had shied away from for too long. “Did he go after the men who hurt you?”

Now that I knew the truth about how we’d ended up with my grandparents, I fought through my drunken haze to recall the things Dakota had said over voicemail the night I left Nate. “They didn’t just hurt you, did they? They raped you.”

My mother’s mouth twisted up, and she let out a sharp breath before quietly admitting, “It’s been sixteen years and sometimes, I still wake up convinced that they’re in the room with me.”

I saw the face again in my head, grinning down at me from above, felt his hot breath against my neck. The shakiness returned, and I tugged the afghan up around my shoulders again as if doing so would ward off the image.

“Your father…” She bit her lip. “He was my talisman. I could reach over and just lay my hand on his arm, and the world righted itself.”

I pushed past the weight that had settled over my body, and reached for her hand, doing my best to communicate that I was with her as she recounted the night she lived through hell.

With each revelation, the walls I’d built to keep her out came tumbling down. Another long-held belief proved to be false.

My mother hadn’t gambled out of compulsion, but because someone had been stealing from us.

Her nostrils flared out with a forced exhale. “Hawk was the one taking the money, Kate. He knew I was desperate to keep it from your father, and got me into some underground blackjack games. I was too naïve to see that I was rubbing elbows with every one of your father’s enemies. When they figured out that he wasn’t dead, but in hiding—”

“They came after you,” I said

She gave me a shaky nod. “Hawk… he helped them break in one night. They demanded to know where your father was, but that was the thing; I never knew where he was going next. When they realized they wouldn’t get any information out of me, they decided to send a message. All I could think about was the fact that you and Dakota were less than twenty feet away. My only thought was to keep you both safe.”

The biker hadn’t merely disappeared because he went to watch over another family…

Her mouth continued moving, but all I heard was a high-pitched ringing in my ears as she confessed what she’d lost at the hands of my father’s enemies. Men who hadn’t used words to send messages but their bodies.

“Weak men hurt women like that, Kate,” she said softly, turning the jelly jar until it caught the light from overhead. “It’s a hard truth that I desperately wanted to shield you girls from.”

My vision blurred as a fresh round of tears fell from my eyes, and I chastised myself for being so weak.

When I was seven, two police officers showed up to tell us that my father had been killed. I remembered feeling as if nothing would ever be right again.

Hearing the truth of my childhood and knowing what we were up against now, it appeared as though that feeling had been correct.

Good existed only in fairy tales.

* * *

“Morning, Counselor.”

I jerked my head up from the file folder in front of me, wincing at the volume of his voice. “What are you doing here?” I said, fighting through another wave of nausea.

I was never drinking tequila again.

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