Page 125 of The Truths that Deceive

All my fantasies seem to have become particular. They all sound and feel and smell like Calista.

I know what she was asking in that hospital room, when she asked about her and me.

She wanted to know if we could ever work. Shit, I saw her face after I got shot, before I collapsed. And it was bright with fear and fierce with love. Love she had no idea about.

“The girl’s twenty-four.”

Calling her a girl should make me feel better about the decision to push her away, to pretend I don’t crave her, want her, need her. But it doesn’t. What it does is make me feel old and perverted.

Which, I guess, I am.

She just deserves better. She deserves a life.

With me, even with Jones’s proposal, it’s another prison. New York’s big, but she’d be stuck with me and the Knights.

For her, it isn’t a life.

She’s leaving at the end of next week. Norway, apparently. I’m not sure why, but she chose it. I know because everyone’s falling over their fucking selves to let me know what Calista does and exactly when she does it.

I check my watch. It’s almost time.

Blowing out a breath, I stop, stand in front of the CCTV feed from the street. There she is. Girl of the hour.

She buzzes the intercom, and I let her in. I switch to the elevator feed that’ll take her to my apartment.

Normally I don’t watch people in my elevator, as I’m not that voyeuristic. But this is an unusual event. And each second’s a special kind of agony.

I want it to take forever. I don’t want it at all.

But the elevator dings and swishes open.

“Hey.”

“Smith…” My daughter runs her fingers down the front of her jeans, and she looks about as thrilled by this as I feel. “I…”

Dakota looks around, then at me. “Jaxson’s waiting downstairs.”

“I’d be disappointed if he wasn’t.”

“Where is she?” Again, she glances around the apartment.

I frown. “Who?”

“Your girlfriend.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

She ignores me and moves past, into the kitchen where she helps herself to some cold water from the fridge.

“Then you’re the idiot I always thought you were. Look.” She stops, her defiant, almost arrogant tone is ruined by the need, the uncertainty on her face, and I’m hit by a rush of love so strong I almost fall.

This is my kid and over twenty years are gone. Wasted. Lost.

“We’re never going to be close,” I say, feeling like this is an echo of other conversations we’ve had. “And I get it if you don’t want me at the wedding, but…”

“You want to come to my wedding?” Her eyes are big, cornflower-blue pools of need, of mistrust, of wishes scattered and broken. And hope. I can see a tiny bit of hope in the depths.

I don’t cross over to her. As much as I want to. “Dakota, I did this to us, and I’d do it again. Because by keeping you at a distance, I kept you safe.”

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