“No.”
“It sucks,” I said.
Two puffy breath sounds came out back to back. That was almost a definite laugh.
* * *
2:00 A.M. in the morning
Kate
I tried stuffing the sleeping bag in my mouth to quiet my sobs. I had woken up an hour ago and all of it came crashing down on me. The officers coming into the precinct to tell me my father had been killed in the line of fire. The shock and heartbreak threatened to take me to my knees only to be crushed again by the specific details.
A drug deal gone bad. A drug deal he’d been involved with. Not in stopping, in coordinating. Then it all came out. The years of corruption and crimes. Until finally it caught up with him and killed him.
Leaving a wake of devastation in its place. People assuming I was a part of that life. My partner not believing me when I told him I knew nothing about it.
Kate, how could you not know? He’d been dirty for years. The whole time you were growing up. Do you know how many innocent people went to jail because of your father?
That’s when the guilt would creep in. The questions. Did I know what he was? Had I simply overlooked it? He’d had a ridiculous close rate as a cop, but I always assumed it meant he was the best cop ever. Which was exactly what I wanted to believe.
What had I missed? More importantly, what did I not question that I should have?
The combination of loss, doubt, humiliation was crushing. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to recover from this.
The tears continued to fall, but I hoped they were silent. Jackson was breathing deeply and evenly on the floor next to the bed, but he wasn’t snoring. So I couldn’t be sure he was asleep.
I had my answer when his hand shot up next to me.
“Squeeze it, Kate. It will help.”
I was so torn up, I did. Pulled my hand out of the sleeping bag and searched until I found his. I squeezed it as hard as I could, and it did help. Made me feel not quite so alone in the world. Beyond that, it felt like an injection of strength inside me.
I would recover from this because I had no choice. For better or worse, my father didn’t raise me to be a person who would give up when faced with adversity.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out. Even as I used my other hand to wipe away the tears.
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“No, you don’t understand. There is so much guilt. You’ve been so nice to me and I’ve been using you this whole time. I used the tickets to escape my town. Last night…I wanted to escape again.”
“Not complaining about last night, Kate.”
I swallowed and squeezed his hand again. “I’m still sorry. What if you had picked some other profile? You could be here with someone for the right reasons. Someone who had better intentions.”
“I’m here with the person I want to be with, Kate. Don’t doubt that.”
I let go of his hand and even that was hard to do. Harder still not to ask him to crawl in this bed with me and give me whatever version of the sweet he thought I needed. But it wasn’t fair to him, and for that reason and that reason alone, I was able to resist.
“I’m good, Jackson. Thank you for listening.”
He grunted, and I translated that to say,it wasn’t a problem.
* * *
Jackson
The crying was brutal. I honestly don’t know that I had ever heard someone so sad. All over that piece of shit father, too. If he wasn’t already dead, I would have killed him myself.
