Page 32 of Chance
“I didn’t want to put more images of that night in your head than you already had.And honestly, I was so out of it, I didn’t know what was real and what was a hallucination until I saw him again last night.”I shrugged like this wasn’t one of the most life-changing conversations we’d ever had.It wasn’t simply about my failed self-elimination attempt.Our father had died that night, and it had, in fact, changed our entire lives.“Vaughn came to pick up Abi, and all the memories flooded in again.Not long after he arrived, he and Abi took me aside while Chance was at the bar getting us drinks, and they told me their side of everything.”
“What do you mean, their side?”
I reminded her of how she’d been reckless while looking for solutions to rescue me, told her about how Vaughn had found her, Abi talking him into offering his assistance, and why he was willing to involve himself in our troubles.Vaughn/Ghost was a vigilante who focused on taking down human trafficking.I was still struggling with the reality of William being a key player in such a horrific crime.“I never knew William was responsible for that, Evy.I never suspected.”
“Of course you didn’t suspect anything,” she readily defended.“He was keeping you locked in a house with limited outside access.You didn’t even have a phone.The only television you were allowed to watch was Netflix, and even then, he had a freaking parental lock on the mature content.All your homeschool lessons were prerecorded.You had no control, Evie.How could you possibly have guessed what he was capable of?You got a side of him that no one knew existed.”
“I should have, though,” I argued, feeling sick.
“Why?”she demanded.
“Because… I don’t know, okay?I just should have known.He manipulated me into thinking I couldn’t leave the house.Made me think it was my fault, that there was something wrong with me.And I believed him.”Self-deprecation filled me.If I’d paid more attention, if I’d been smarter, maybe I would have figured it out and found a way to leave.“I never once questioned him, not until after our mom died.When he said you couldn’t come live with us, that was when it started to dawn on me that something was wrong.I was stupid.Gullible.Naive.”
Nothing.Always nothing.
Shut the fuck up, William!
“God, it makes me sick how easy it was for him to bend me to his will.”
“You loved him,” she said so gently it broke my heart a little.
I had loved him.
And that knowledge was a spear to the heart every dang day.Maybe some deep, shattered piece of me still did.He was my father and the only person who had been a constant in my life for twenty-one years.
But my hate overpowered any love that still lingered.
It was easy to give away my heart—to my dad, to Chance.
It was so damn hard to keep it safe.
Chance
Mom was stewingby the time I pulled into her driveway.Her SUV was back at the hospital, but she and Dad could figure out a way to get it later.For the moment, I didn’t care.Evie had wanted her gone, so I was making sure that happened.
“You’re picking some girl you’ve barely known a day over your own mother,” she threw at me, not for the first time.
“I’m not picking anyone, Ma,” I tried to reason.“If Everly attacked you, then you need to be away from her and the whole situation.”
“If she attacked me?”she said through clenched teeth.“If?I showed you the wound on the back of my scalp, Chance.There is no if!”
“Okay, Mom.”
“I can’t believe this.You don’t even care.My son, my only child, is taking some dirty whore’s side over mine.”She looked at me with a mixture of disgust and betrayal.“Out of everything I’ve been through today, that is what hurts me the most, Chance.”
Squeezing my fingers around the steering wheel, I breathed in slow and deep, counting to ten in my head before releasing it.Whenever she would get into disagreements with anyone over something that Dad refused to get in the middle of, she would tell me I was the only one who cared about her—which never failed to hit my father right in the gut.Matt Reid lived for his wife, but when she did something he didn’t agree with, he told her.But he also didn’t allow himself to be pulled into any drama, never picking sides.I almost always took her side.It didn’t matter what it was about, if she was right or wrong, I had my mom’s back.
On the rare occasions I didn’t, she tossed out that little bomb to make me fall in line.
Every damn time.
I hadn’t noticed it when I was a kid.Back then, it was a rare occurrence, but over the years, it happened more and more.She began to manipulate me, trying to guilt me into regretting my choices.Like when I patched into Angel’s Halo.Or I decided to become an electrician instead of going to college.And when Reid, Elias, and I partnered to build the apartments, she was pissed for months.
Her reasoning was that I was choosing the MC or working at Barker & Reid or my cousins over her.It always came back to me not being loyal to her, when I’d never once given her a reason to think otherwise.Over the years, she’d alienated more than just Jos.She’d stopped talking to Raven at one point because Max and I couldn’t get along.To this day, I wasn’t even sure if Max and I hated each other so much because of our own shit, or if it was some petty argument that we’d had that had pushed our moms to pick sides and the cycle had simply never ended.
Then came the Casey thing, with Mom deciding Casey was who I belonged with.No matter how many times I told her to leave it alone, to stop pushing the nurse at me, she never listened.Not long after Casey had moved in to one of the apartments, I started the low-contact with my mom, and that had only escalated the whole “out of everything, you hurt me the most” mantra she had adopted.
I knew what she’d hoped to do by going into WomanLand to “talk” to Everly.Everyone in town was aware that I was being different with Evie, and someone must have told her.Probably Dad or any number of people taking pictures and videos of us the night before.Ma had mixed up the twins, thinking Everly was the one I was involved with.Whether she planned on things turning physical or not didn’t matter.It had, and yes, I was pissed that Everly had put her hands on my mom.But I was enraged with Mom for attempting to intimidate and cause discord between my woman and me.
