Page 375 of Branded
Knew it would all be okay.
No matter what happened when the plane landed.
Because I would make it okay.
Forty-Four
Jules
Tall pines covered in snow.
A winter wonderland that had once brought me peace, but as Cas drove us through the roads, the snow piled up high on the sides of the road from the plows, the mountains that were home and life and pain grew closer.
And closer.
My dad was dying.
But he still hadn’t reached out to me, not even after all this time, not even when he was dying, and I didn’t know what in the fuck I should be doing, should be feeling.
He’d hated me.
He’d treated me like shit.
And I was dropping everything to run to the airport, jump on a plane, and see a man who hadn’t loved me enough…if at all. Uprooting my life, bringing my son.
Putting him at risk.
“This is a mistake,” I whispered.
Cas glanced in the mirror, probably checking on Ethan. But my boy had fallen asleep almost the moment he’d been buckled into the booster seat at the airport. A moment later, he glanced forward, back at the road again, and reached across the console, lacing his fingers with mine. “I think you need to do this,” he said, keeping his voice soft, making certain not to wake my boy. “Not because it’ll all work out and you’ll necessarily get the father you deserved. There’s nothing he can do or say to make up for the childhood he gave you.” A squeeze of his fingers. “But I think you need to get closure, need to see him and make peace with it all.”
My lungs inflated on an inhale, released on an exhale. “Make peace with what?”
He paused at a stop sign, glanced at me. “That none of what went down in your childhood was your fault.”
I froze as the words washed over me, his fingers slipping free to complete the turn onto the even narrower road. The road that was painfully close to my childhood home. The road that I’d walked on and driven on enough times growing up that my body automatically braced for the turns.
But even as I distantly recognized that, the words were…
Something I’d thought before. Something Lake had told me more than once. Hell, even Nate had told me the same during the good times we’d had together.
But there was something about Cas telling me right then that struck hard.
Maybe because I was in a different place in my life. Maybe it was because Cas had come into my life and Beth and Smitty and Theo and Ace and Joanne and the others, and I finally felt what it was like to be in a family that wasn’t dysfunctional.
Maybe it was because I had Ethan and I knew, knew I would never treat him the way I’d been treated.
“I don’t know what it will be like now,” I whispered.
His hand coming back to mine. “What do you mean, gorgeous?”
“I mean,” I said, still soft, “I just…” A breath. “What if I walk into that house and I become her again?”
That little girl who was broken and vulnerable and took her father’s vitriol at face value.
Who thought I was to blame for my mother’s death, for everything that had gone wrong in our lives.
Cas knew exactly what he meant.
