“Baby.”
I loved it when he called me baby and pretty girl.
“It wasn’t always bad,” I began. “I mostly took care of the office work for him. Took his calls and scheduled his lunches and dinners with associates. Some people I scheduled lunches with were… questionable. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize he wasn’t a good person. He wasn’t a good mayor.”
I looked back up into his eyes. He was looking at me with a patient expression on his face, and that eased my nerves a little.
Other than Blue, people got impatient when I talked.
“I didn’t really notice at first. The, uh, abuse. It started so gradually and was so small at first that by the time the first blow-up happened, I was reeling and didn’t know what to do. My mom loved him. Mostly because he was giving her money.”
“Why was he giving her money?” he asked.
“Because we don’t have any. My dad, when he was alive, didn’t have a head for business. He’d lost a lot of his inheritance by the time he died in a car accident.” I closed my eyes. “I was in the car with him.”
“Jesus. How old were you?”
“Eight.”
My mind came to the image of him in the driver’s seat. “The car flipped, and because of how the crash happened, he took most of the impact. He was bleeding, but he wasn’t dead. Not until twenty minutes after the ambulance arrived. All I got was a sore knee and a few scratches.”
“Baby, it wasn’t your fault. You were a child,” he said.
“My mom blamed me for it. Before the accident, I had thrown a fit—I don’t even remember what it had been about. Dad was trying to calm me down, which made my mom angry. And I guess, to get away from the fight, he took me out for a night ride. Things were okay, but… but that truck came out of nowhere. One moment we were on the road, and the next, the car was on its side, while he fought for his life.”
It’s okay, cupcake. Daddy will be fine. Breathe for me. Listen to my voice. Breathe in, breathe out.
I blinked, and the memory dissipated.
Kai came back into focus.
Breathe in, breathe out.
“I guess I had been trying to make it up to her. Because I took away her husband.” Kai frowned and shook his head, but I spoke before he could say anything. He would just tell me again that it wasn’t my fault.
Blue had told me countless times that it wasn’t my fault.
“She wanted me to come home to Sacramento,” I continued. “I was in Boston after I graduated from Smith College. Things weren’t… they weren’t good. I was away from Blue, and I didn’t know how to make any other friends, so I was lonely there. She told me to come home to work for Uncle William, and I agreed because Blue was here. And after the first blow-up, I didn’t feel like I could quit.”
“Did he know the bastard hurt you?”
“Blue?”
Kai nodded.
I shook my head. “Not until after he died, and I had a nightmare from my time there. I was sleeping at Blue’s at the time, and by then, I couldn’t really hide it from him anymore. I wished I didn’t in the first place. Never had I felt so isolated in my life.”
I blinked, and Kai made a low noise in the back of his throat.
He swiped away the tears that fell. I didn’t even realize I was crying.
I swallowed around the lump in my throat.
“How bad?” he asked.
He didn’t need to clarify.
I grabbed his hand and placed it on the back of my head. His brow furrowed a little as he tried to figure out what I was trying to say—until he found the bump.
