Page 80 of Slow Burn
“I couldn’t,” he said softly, his mind distant. “I had a daughter.”
Those words ignited within her, a new kind of burning that scorched, and that cold was suddenly gone. “I was your daughter, too. But I hope to hell you were a better father to her than you were to me.”
He spun and stepped toward her. “I didn’t know! She didn’t tell me!”
Incensed, Jocelyn moved forward, too, one finger stabbing in his direction. “Because you chose someone else! Why do you think she left? Why she didn’t tell you?”
He looked away, the muscle in his jaw jumping again.
“She only came back because she had to.” Her voice softened as the pain touched her words. “And they all treated us like the trash you left behind.”
He took a breath. “She never was going to tell me. But she didn’t have to. Everyone knew the second she showed back up with you.” He turned his sad face to her. “I didn’t want that for you. I tried…”
When he didn’t finish, she prompted him. “Tried what? Paying her to take me somewhere else? To hide?”
“You would’ve had a good life! I would’ve made sure everything was taken care of, and you wouldn’t have had to deal with the whispers.”
She’d overheard the conversation, lying on the floor coloring while they’d argued on the front porch. She remembered how mad her mama was that he never looked at his own child, never tried to be her father.
“She didn’t want your money.”
“No, she didn’t. She wanted what I couldn’t give her.” Regret softened his tone. “What I wasn’t willing to give her at the time.”
Jocelyn wrapped her arms around herself as he rubbed a hand down his face, looking less and less like the golden boy of Cedar Hollow. He was a pillar of regret, of bad decisions and miserable circumstances.
“I was just trying to do the right thing. But every decision I made was wrong. Everyone has suffered for it. And I don’t know what would’ve been better for any of us. Because you and your sister… If I hadn’t married Lydia, where would they be?”
She wanted to hold onto the fury, the righteous indignation, but she couldn’t when he put it like that. Natasha deserved to have a family, too. And Jocelyn realized she could never fully understand his motivations or the circumstances that led him down the path he’d walked. She knew nothing of who he was, nothing of where he came from. Her short conversation with Errol had been the most she’d ever talked to the man, or anyone on this side of her family.
What history formed the man before her today? He’d been young when all of this happened. Stuck between two women, and only one who’d told him he’d fathered her child.
“You did the best you could.” It cost her to say it, the words bruising and scraping at her throat as they went.
He glanced up at the acknowledgment.
“But she still died that day. And you were there.”
Moisture shimmered in his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
She slashed at the air as if to knock his useless apology away. “I need to know if you remember anything that could help me find out why.”
Something shifted in his expression, like it was the first time he’d considered it might not have been an accident. Heraccusation earlier had probably seemed like a wounded child throwing out barbs to cut her absentee father down a peg.
“You don’t think it was just an accident.” It wasn’t a question, and she could see him flipping through the event in his mind with a new lens.
That sense of intensity skated through her as it always did when someone gave her a platform. “The reason I came back was to find out what happened and why. It’s been suspicious from the get-go, but no one is willing to look into it.”
His face hardened. “You talked to Eric?”
“Eric Ward?” She snorted. “Fat lot of good that did me. He promised to give me more information then blew me off.”
He sighed. “He’s going through a divorce.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Not really anything new.” He shrugged and continued as if this was important to the conversation. “They’ve separated many times.”
She squinted at him.
