The Good Father (21 page)

“I left before the love you felt for me turned to hate.”

His words called her back.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

B
RETT SAW
E
LLA
slide forward on her chair—to reach out to him? Or go in?—and panicked.

He blurted what was on the tip of his tongue before she did, either. “If you wanted so much more than I had to give, why did you stick with me all through college?”

He was curious. And curiosity killed the cat. Much better to have understanding and move on.

“I don’t know.” She gave the nothing answer, but she sat back again. So he waited.

“You exude.” She’d gone back to sipping from her beer. And he was glad.

“There’s an energy about you, Brett. A goodness that permeates the air around you.”

He should have asked the question long ago.

“And, as we’ve already said, before we were married, and for the first year or two afterward, you shared more. You used to talk to me.”

They used to discuss the world’s problems. And find solutions for a lot of them, too. He remembered the conversations. Missed them.

“I never quit talking to you,” he said. But he had, of course. In the way she meant.

Until the last horrible few months of their marriage they’d had great discussions about anything and everything that didn’t pertain to intimate, personal emotions.

And they were back where they’d started. He was a man who could be a potential domestic abuser. As his dad had been.

“My dad was a great guy once. I told you that.” The boat swayed, and he shifted. Unbuttoned the top of his shirt as he started to sweat in the cool night air.

“Yeah.” The man was a first-class dick, and Ella knew it. She also knew that discussion of him was off-limits. Even in college, he’d refused to talk to her about his old man. What she knew, she’d learned from Jeff, and he had it on good authority that Jeff had told her very little.

His beer was more than half gone, and he wasn’t tired.

But maybe he could talk himself to sleep. Maybe he owed Ella this—understanding. A way to set her free.

“He and my mom, they were high school sweethearts.” He’d never told her that, either, though he knew that Jeff had done so.

“Both of them products of abusive homes.”

He drank. “Time out of time,” she’d called their weekend. He damned sure hoped she was right. That he’d be himself when he got home the next day.

Himself with one hell of a headache—not from three beers, but from the tension climbing up the back of his neck.

“That’s what brought them together.” He wasn’t as careful about his word choice as usual. “The dark secret they shared. The shame.”

Shame. Brett could feel it, even now, descending upon him. Like humidity from the air, it clung to him. Making him sticky. Heavy.

“They promised each other that they’d never have an angry word in their home. Because they both knew the cost, the pain, they trusted each other like neither of them would ever have trusted anyone else, to keep the violence away.”

He heard an intake of breath. And knew that he was giving Ella something she’d deserved long ago.

“It worked right up until I was ten years old.”

There were so many ways that it had worked right. Little League. Summers at the beach. Dinners at Uncle Bob’s. His father had taught him how to in-line skate. And let him ride behind him on the back of his motorcycle...

“What happened when you were ten?”

He knew she already knew the answer to that question.

But he didn’t want her to go up to the cabin. To leave him out there all alone.

He did, of course. But he didn’t.

“My little sister was diagnosed with leukemia. And because my dad was spending so much time with Mom and us, while they figured everything out, he lost his job.”

“What about the Family Medical Leave Act?”

He forgot. He was talking to a nurse.

“It had just been signed into law a couple years prior to that, and I don’t know what happened. I was only ten.

“The story’s a classic from there,” he said. “Dear old Dad started drinking, and anytime he found out Mom had another bill to pay or Livia needed another test, he’d hit something. Started out with the wall. Then Mom.”

And eventually him.

But never Livia. That was the only hope the old man had of ever meeting up with a saving grace. He’d always been good to Livia.

“I thought he just started getting physically violent when you were in high school.”

He’d forgotten that she just knew basic facts.

“After a couple years of tests and treatments, Livia went into remission. And Dad found another job. A guy we met, whose kid was going through the same treatment as Livia, offered him a job. It lasted as long as her remission did.”

And the second time around, life had been pure hell. For all of them. Ending with Livia’s death. His mother’s unbearable grief. Her anger. His father a drunk who eventually ended up in jail.

An imploded family.

* * *

E
LLA COULDN’T SPEAK
. Her throat was choked up with an effort not to cry, even as her eyes filled with tears.

“Without help, boys who witness domestic violence in their homes growing up are far more likely to become abusers.” Brett’s quote was uttered without inflection of any kind.

That’s when she found her voice. “You had help.”

She wasn’t ready for his fountain of words to dry up. Not by a long shot. He owed her a good ten years’ worth of them. At the very least, another ten minutes.

“So what you’re saying, then, is that every boy who grows up in an abusive home is destined to live life alone, or become an abuser?”

“Of course not.” She heard the disdain that time.

“So why are you putting that on yourself?”

He didn’t respond. Typical. But disappointment filled her anyway.

Along with a load of compassion she couldn’t afford to carry.

If Brett had talked to her about this even a little bit years ago, so many things would have been different.

Not everything, but maybe the process of splitting up wouldn’t have been as hard.

Maybe she’d still be married, or married again, instead of on her way to spinsterhood.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to live with the fact that your husband didn’t trust you enough to be completely open with you?”

The pain that filled the darkness scared her. She hadn’t known there was so much of it left.

“Do you think I wanted to hurt you? That I felt good about it?” Brett sat forward. Lifted his beer and set it back down again without drinking.

She wanted to drink. Seemed to be the way of dealing with the darkness. Which was why she put her bottle in a cup holder on the next chair.

“I saw what I was doing to you, and the sadness in your eyes ate away at me until I couldn’t stand to live with myself anymore. I had to do something...”

His hands were inches from her knees. She stared at them. With very little effort, even a rocking of the boat, she could be touching him.

“You could at least have told me before you talked to a divorce attorney.”

“You’re right, of course.” Not the answer she’d been expecting.

“So why didn’t you?” Not a question she should have asked.

“Because you would have understood and loved me anyway,” he said, his voice raw with honesty. “I couldn’t trust myself not to be as selfish as my old man and let you talk me into staying.”

She’d asked. Maybe forgetting that nothing with him had been easy.

“You knew I loved you enough to do that, and then turned your back anyway. Why throw it all away when there was as much chance that it would be good as that it could go bad?”

“Because it was already bad, El. I had a knot in my stomach every single morning. I couldn’t be the man you wanted me to be and the more I tried, the more tense I got. And with the baby coming... It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time an abusive situation started when a pregnancy was thrown into the mix.”

She’d read about triggers. Some men with control issues—and out-of-control jealousy issues—sometimes felt threatened by the introduction of a child into the relationship. This could trigger the start of a domestic-violence situation. And didn’t describe Brett or their relationship at all.

“The tenser I got, the more chance there was that the tension would get the better of me someday,” Brett was saying.

“If you’d talked about it, we might have been able to work through it. Loving’s not easy.”

“No, and it’s not a guarantee of happy-ever-after, either.”

Had he just said what she thought he had? That he
did
love her? At least that he
had
?

Was it possible that someplace, locked away in that heart of his, he’d loved her the way that she’d once believed he had?

He’d asked her why she’d stuck with him through college.

A better question might have been
why
had she married him
?

She knew the answer to that.

Ella had tied her life to Brett’s because his life was the only one that felt as though it was the other half of hers. She’d married him because she’d believed he loved her as much as she loved him.

It had taken years to crush that belief. Even after his initial rejection of their child. He’d been unprepared when he’d come home from work one day as usual to find her there, gushing happy tears, holding a home pregnancy kit result out to him. He’d seen her tears, not understanding they were happy tears at first, and then, in the confusion of her explanation, had been unable to mask the look of horror on his face. Still, she’d told herself that it was just the shock. That it was normal for a man to be nervous about being a father. It wasn’t until he’d told her he’d seen a divorce attorney, that he’d lost her.

Up until then, she’d believed that, deep down, her injured warrior needed her to believe in him.

You’d have thought that moment, the one when her husband had so backhandedly told her he wanted a divorce, would have been the one to sever all her faith in him.

But no, it had taken another couple years for that to happen.

She’d lost too many years of her life to this man. She couldn’t afford to go back. To care if he’d ever loved her.

She couldn’t afford to lose her heart to him ever again. He was who he was. A product of his childhood, just as he said. She was listening to him now. Believing him. Oh, not that he’d ever lift a hand to her, or would have to their child, but believing that he’d been irrevocably scarred by his father. Emotionally scarred. She might have continued trying to work on him the first time, if he’d given her a chance, but not now. Because she was older, wiser and knew that there were some battles she couldn’t win.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

H
E WASN’T GOING
to sleep. And didn’t much want to spend the night sitting on the porch.

“Let’s take her out,” he said, standing.

“Take who out?”

Brett was already at the front of the boat, reaching for the key they’d left in the ignition.

“The boat?” Ella asked, joining him up front. “Are you kidding? It’s almost midnight. We’d wake up the neighborhood.”

He heard one thing. She hadn’t said no.

“It’s not the speed boat, El. It’s not going to be any louder than a car starting. We’re far enough away from the cabin that the noise won’t carry, and who else is in the neighborhood besides us? In case you hadn’t noticed this afternoon, most of the places around here are closed up.”

“It’s dark. We can’t go out on the ocean this late. Who knows what’s out there? And no one would know where to look for us if something went wrong.”

When had she become so cautious? The Ella he’d known had had a wild streak that he’d found captivating.

He suspected he was in large part to blame for its loss.

Which made it vitally important all of a sudden that he get her to agree to do something slightly crazy.

That and the fact that it seemed clear to him that neither of them was going to sleep, and the cabin was way too small for them to pretend the other wasn’t close by. Taking the boat out seemed the safest option.

“We’ll stay in the lagoon.”

She stood next to him by the driver’s seat, looking up at him. If they didn’t get going, he was going to kiss her.

“Move over, I’ll drive.” Ella touched him, but not in the way his mind had been imagining. She pushed him aside and sat down.

Standing behind her as she reached for the key, Brett waited until he heard the engine start before jumping onto the dock to free the pontoon of her restraints.

* * *

T
HE WIND CHILLED
Ella’s face and fingers and blew softly through her hair, tossing it lightly around her arms and back. She’d had it tied back earlier in the day when they’d been out on the water, but had taken out the ponytail for bed. Brett stood wordlessly beside her, watching the front of the boat.

Her lookout, she assumed.

He gave no direction. No suggestion. Just rode where she took him.

The ocean beckoned. They’d taken the speed boat out earlier in the day, only for a few minutes and within sight of their alcove, but not the pontoon.

“It’s suicide, taking a pontoon on the ocean,” Brett said from above her. Before she’d even headed in that direction.

In some ways he knew her so well. There was comfort in that.

The lagoon was over a mile long. She had plenty of space to travel.

And knew that she would never have enough room on earth to get away from him. Brett Ackerman was her one and only.

She’d known so. Had spent years convincing herself she’d been wrong. But now, after seeing him again, she could no longer doubt herself. Or the truth her heart had made clear that day on her college’s campus when Brett met up with her and Jeff as they arrived with a carload of stuff, and helped unload Ella’s in her dorm room before heading off to the apartment they’d agreed to rent with two other guys.

She understood something else, too. Just because she’d found her one and only didn’t mean that she had a happily-ever-after in her future.