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She continued to stare at the table.
“Baby, look at me.”
“I can’t.”
“Nebraska—”
“I can’t,” she hissed. “If I do, I’ll fall apart. Please, just give me this.”
This being allowing her to lock her emotions away.
I hated it but I had no choice.
“Anything you need.”
There was a beat of silence before she whispered, “Anything I need.”
Maybe. Hopefully. Possibly she was finally fucking getting it.
TWENTY-FOUR
I was numb. Totally and completely.
It felt like I was outside my body watching from a distance. Like it wasn’t my life or my mother that was being discussed.
Badger found Anna.
Found her thirty miles from my current location. Which had me thinking—how many other times in the twenty years had my mother been close without me knowing it? Had I passed her on the street?
You have no idea how hard it was for her to leave you.
You think she wanted to leave you?
I promised to keep her secret.
I vowed to protect you.
And Charlie, had he seen her?
The woman I love.
I was in an impossible situation between the only two women I’ve ever loved.
Charlie loved Anna.
That explained why in all the years I’d lived with him I’d never seen him with a woman.
I couldn’t process the rest and not because I didn’t want to face it I truly didn’t have the mental capacity. I’d listened to Zane, I’d listened to Easton. I now understood what they were trying to explain about family and how something wrong could really be right depending on the motives.
But I was all out of headspace. I couldn’t think about my phone call with Charlie or what he revealed without having a breakdown. What shocked me was Easton hadn’t pushed, he’d given me what I’d asked for even though I knew it was killing him to watch me shut down. I wasn’t stupid. I knew it was nothing more than a reprieve, but it meant a lot to me that he respected me—which translated into him trusting me to know what I needed, which made me trust him.
That meant that part of my out-of-body experience I was in the process of having, included admitting that even though I wasn’t processing the knowledge, I did trust Easton. Further, I cared about him. I wasn’t fool enough to believe that sex equaled love but there was also respect, admiration, and an inkling of adoration. Maybe the first blushes of love. I couldn’t know because I’d never loved anyone. But the way he’d kept his promise of going gentle, and the way he took care of me, the way he stuck with me when I had a shit attitude, and the way he stayed even though he knew I was terrified and could run at any moment, made it difficult not to start to fall in love with him.
There was a lot going on around me in the conference room of Z Corps. A lot of talk. A lot of planning. All of it had to do with me, yet I was sitting there next to Easton not paying a lick of attention. And I could do that, because I trusted Easton. I could lock myself away and know all the way down to my soul that he and his team would handle the situation.
How had that happened?
I trusted Dutch and Badger and even Charlie (though now Charlie only had a smidgen of trust) but I would never zone out and let them talk about me. I’d suck it up, lock it down, and participate.
