Page 125 of Lies Like Love

“Then how could she have done it?” I stand, out of breath and feeling like I’m going to faint. “How?”

“Because I asked her to.” The voice coming from behind me makes my stomach float before it plummets.

He’s gone.

He can’t be here.

I spin so fast I almost fall, and everything inside me breaks as reality shatters like glass around me.

Standing in the doorway is my dead father—except, he isn’t dead at all.

39

Fel

Myheadswims,andI’m sure I must be hallucinating. Someone must have slipped something into my drink because reality cracks like old paint on walls so quickly every illusion of my childhood ages ugly in front of me.

Dad is standing in the doorway in a crisp button-down shirt and khakis. A casual expression that is borderline smug, yet devious because he acts as if he hasn’t changed my entire view of him in the span of one sentence.

“Dad.” It’s foreign on my tongue.

It’s been years since I’ve said it out loud, years since I’ve seen his face. A face that was frozen in photographs, while this man in front of me has aged.

I wait for him to respond or walk toward me. I wait for him to wrap me in a hug and comfort me like I remember. But just as reality shatters, so do my memories of him.

Mom used to chastise me for glorifying my father, saying I only remembered the good in him because he was dead. And now, I see it. The hugs he never reciprocated with more than a pat on the back. The long work trips. His empty seat at the dining room table.

She warned me not to idolize him, but it’s all I did.

And like him crawling from the grave in front of me, every truth of my childhood slowly reanimates as I stare into his eyes. Visions of a future I could have had if I’d never lost him blur, while what he said cuts through.

“You asked her to?”

The room snaps back into focus, and he becomes clear as day. He’s not the calm, comforting man I remember, he’s the wolf hiding under the guise of family.

He’s just like she was, and for the first time the curtain is pulled back.

“I asked a favor of my wife, and she understood my reasons.”

I shake my head. “She wasn’t even your wife at that point.”

“She was always my wife.” Dad’s tone has a rough edge for the first time since walking into the room. “A piece of paper doesn’t change that. He wasn’t interested in her anyway.”

Because he was interested inme.

My stomach twists, the words lodging in my throat. It’s sick, and what’s sicker is that they knew and allowed it.Acceptedit even.

“I don’t understand.”

“I kept an eye; nothing would have happened that I didn’t approve of.”

The way he says it makes me believe him. If one person has held control these past eleven years, it’s him. Something I’m certain Jude didn’t know either.

While we were both too busy focusing on the obvious threats, there was someone else out there all along. Someone who should have loved me as his family and blood but didn’t.

“Why?” I choke out the word and it dies in a room where truth doesn’t exist. “How could you do that to your daughter?”

“Because he’s not a good man, Fel.” Jude turns the corner and pauses in the doorway.

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