Page 78 of Burning Love
“What did you want to say?”
“You have to let go of the guilt at some point.”
“She is the one that should feel guilty.”
“And she did,” his father said. “Until the day she died. She was wrong and she knew it.”
“You should be pissed off and you’re not.”
“I was,” his father said. “I was livid. She robbed me of seventeen years with you. I’ve done everything I could to make it up the past twenty years.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I don’t want your appreciation,” his father said. “But you didn’t need to see my anger either. Your mother was dying. What use was it to make her feel any shittier than she was? Her mind wasn’t even with it much those last two weeks.”
Jace didn’t need the reminder. Not that he visited with her much. He’d kept his distance in the house and wouldn’t go talk to her.
What did she expect after she’d dropped that bombshell on him?
“It wasn’t right,” he argued.
“It absolutely wasn’t,” Dean agreed. “But it was done. If she didn’t come to me when she had, I’m not sure I’d even know you existed. She did the right thing in the end.”
“Would you really have taken me from her?”
It was a question he’d never asked before and wasn’t sure why.
Maybe because once he moved in with his father and Lauren and the girls, he’d only lived there a few months before he left for college. Then when he was home on breaks, he was working.
There wasn’t a lot of time for them to have heart-to-hearts like this while Dean gave him space to accept the loss of his mother and the new life he’d be living.
Even the new name that he’d taken.
“No,” his father said. “Never. Do I think my mother might have tried to convince me to go for custody? Yes. My mother was that way, but I wouldn’t have done anything more than try to get joint custody. And thirty-seven years ago, that was rare to happen. The mother almost always got the child with the father getting visitation.”
Times had changed and fathers got more of a fair shake now.
Jace wasn’t going to say his mother was wrong in her thoughts because he didn’t know.
It served no purpose to assume anything so many years later.
“I don’t know why she did it. And I’ll never know.”
“That’s right,” his father said. “I’m not saying your mother and I would have made it work, but she left me. We dated for about a month and then she moved. End of story. She said she was returning to her hometown and didn’t give a reason.”
“You didn’t want to go after her?”
“I was in college. It was my last year. She was living in the area working. We were dating, nothing serious. If I’d known she was pregnant, I would have. But she told me she didn’t know she was pregnant until a few weeks after she was home.”
“Do you believe her?”
“Based on the timing of your birth and when she left, I do.” His father sighed. “She told me that she overheard my mother saying I could do so much better and that she couldn’t wait until I was back in college and away from Stella. My mother did say that to me. More than once. I had no idea your mother overheard that.”
It was the first Jace was hearing this. “Then I don’t blame her for leaving. No one wants to stick around where they aren’t wanted.”
“That was my mother’s opinion, not mine,” Dean said. “Again, it’s in the past and done with. I think the bigger issue now is that you were hurt and felt betrayed. You reacted to that and then lost your mother shortly after and never got to apologize.”
“She was the one in the wrong.”
