Page 73 of Dirty Fighter

25

Jason

Rowan offered to leave.

I follow her out to the living room where we set her time capsule on the shelf beside a framed photo of my dad with his parents and me barely coming up to his hip. Rowan teases me about calling this “our” escape, like I hoped she would. I tease back, working to make her smile.

Wanting to ease things for her. Be her escape.

Only something different is taking root in my head. The idea that maybe this woman needed an escape, a real one… from well before we ever met.

I rub a hand over my chest, watching as she pokes at a log.

Her eyes cut my way. “You can ask. Whatever it is.”

“Marsha. Your mom.” I take the poker and lean it against the hearth then draw her back to the couch with me, pulling her into my lap. “What did she care if we were friends? Dad had already married her. You’d think us getting along would have been the goal.”

I’m leaning into the corner of the couch, Rowan’s head resting against my shoulder, my arms supporting her back on one side and draped over her knee on the other.

She sighs, her fingers playing idly with the button on my shirt. “My mom. She’s very… protective of her security. She doesn’t handle perceived threats well.”

“And you and I being friends would have been a threat?”

“You and I would have looked like an alliance. Two against one, at least in her mind. And then what if Ed had been more connected to his son than to his new wife?” She gives me the smallest shake of her head. “She doesn’t see things the way most people do.”

“I don’t understand how someone thinks that way. My dad loved her. At least back then. And hell, he stayed with her to the end, despite all the ways she revealed herself to be something other than the woman he first met.”

Rowan bites her lip, seemingly debating a response with herself. “It isn’t actually about love with my mother.”

I’ve known this for a long time. Suspected it even longer. But never, in a million years, would I have expected Rowan to be the one to confirm it.

“Money.”

“Yes, obviously. But… Okay, it’s about a lot of things. Money is a big one. But it’s also about something more than that.”

The only thing I can imagine meaning more to Marsha than her bank account is Rowan.

Marsha wasn’t the best mom, or even a good one. But she’s still a mom.

“Providing for you.” It’s the one thing I could understand.

I don’t know what to make of that stunned look on Rowan’s face, like she’s never even considered it.

And worse, once she has, the hollow laugh that follows. “That would have been nice. But, Jason. That’s not how she’s built.”

Not how she’s built?

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have grown up with a person like Marsha. I’ve always wanted to believe that as shitty as she was to me, as thoughtless as she was toward my dad, that part of that behavior was based around prioritizing her daughter’s needs. Protecting her.

But what if that’s not⁠—

I look at the woman in my arms, reminding myself she isn’t really mine even as I pull her closer. Hold her tighter.

I think about what she said about that night she was lost in the storm when she was seven.

The night I found her stranded in the rain after a baseball game three towns away from her home.

The way she’s told me that if she got in her mother’s way… it would have been “bad” for her.