The words landed hard. I blinked, trying to process them, my mind suddenly blank. The Anthony Cassaro I'd constructed in my imagination—the businessman too busy for his secret family but who cared enough to send money—wavered like a mirage.
"What do you mean?" I asked, my voice sounding distant even to my own ears.
Jackson's thumb traced circles on the back of my hand. "He hurt Meredith. Badly." His voice dropped even lower. "Grayson and Leo... they stopped him."
My breath caught. Hurt her? My mind reeled, trying to reconcile the man who sent checks and birthday cards with themonster Jackson was describing. The father who'd promised to come back for us someday. The man whose absence had shaped my entire childhood.
"Stopped him," I echoed, the phrase tasting like blood in my mouth. My fingers tightened around his, seeking an anchor as the bed seemed to move beneath me.
"They weren't part of this world before that," he added quietly. "Leo's family took them in after. Protected them."
I didn't speak. Couldn't. My chest ached with something sharp and unfamiliar—grief, maybe, but not for Anthony. For Meredith. For Grayson. For the children they must've been when everything shattered. For the version of my father I'd spent years constructing in my mind, now crumbling like sand.
"What did he do to her?" I asked, the question burning.
Jackson hesitated, his free hand coming up to brush a strand of hair from my face. "I don't know all the details. It's not something anyone talks about openly. But from what I've gathered, it was bad enough that Leo and Gray felt they had no choice."
I stared at the ceiling, blinking back the sting in my eyes. The shadows played across the textured surface, forming patterns that shifted and changed like the truth I was chasing. "Did my mom know?" I asked the darkness. "Did he ever hurt her too?" I knew he wouldn't know. It wasn't a question for him.
The hand in my hair stilled. "I don't know," he said.
"I can't ask her. Not like this. She's too fragile." My throat tightened around the words. "But... it might be the only way I'll ever know."
He didn't try to fix it. Didn't offer false comfort or empty platitudes. Just pulled me closer, his arms wrapping around me like a shield I didn't know I needed. I felt the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against my cheek, solid and real when everything else seemed to be dissolving.
"What if they're right?" I whispered into the darkness. "What if he deserved what happened to him?"
The thought had never crossed my mind before—that the father I'd spent years missing, years resenting for his absence, might have been someone worth fearing instead. That the half-siblings I was jealous of for their privilege might have suffered in ways I couldn't imagine.
"People are messy, difficult to understand sometimes," Jackson said after a long moment. "They can be monsters in one life and saints in another."
I thought about the monthly checks that had kept food on our table. The occasional visits. Had that been guilt? Obligation? Or had there been some version of love there, however twisted?
"I came feeling like they had it all," I admitted, my voice small in the darkness. "Jealous of Grayson and Meredith for having everything while my mom and I struggled. For inheriting what should have been partly mine." The confession felt like pulling out splinters—painful but necessary. "i had a thought at one point that they may have even killed him for his money."
Jackson's hand traced slow patterns on my bare shoulder. "And now?"
"Now... I just feel stupid." I closed my eyes, feeling tears slip down my temples into my hair. "If what you're saying is true, then maybe they were just trying to survive him. Maybe my dad was a monster. My mother is dying, and my father was a terrible man. Quite a fun family cocktail there," I muttered. Coming to Ironstone was stupid, a last ditch effort to help her."
His arms tightened around me. "I know."
"I thought if I could find him, make him face us, he'd help. When I learned he was dead, I thought maybe his legitimate children owed us something, that they could help." I laughed, a hollow sound. "God, that sounds awful now. They didn't owe us a thing."
"It sounds human," Jackson corrected gently. "You were trying to save your mother."
I let myself sink into him, the weight of everything pressing down until I couldn't hold it anymore.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" I asked, not really expecting an answer. "How do I face Meredith knowing what her father—our father—did to her? How do I look at Grayson without thinking about what he must have gone through?"
"You don't have to decide anything tonight," Jackson murmured against my hair. "Just breathe."
I tried, drawing in a shaky breath that caught on a sob. He held me tighter, one hand stroking my back in slow, soothing motions.
"What do I do now? When I've been wrong about everything?" The question was vulnerable and raw, everything I felt in those few words.
"Then you adjust," he said simply. "That's all any of us can do."
My eyes drifted shut, my cheek against his chest, and for the first time in days, I let myself rest. The questions would still be there tomorrow—about my father, about my siblings, about what I was going to do next. But for now, in the circle of Jackson's arms, I allowed myself this moment of peace.
