“Why not?”
“Because the way the lines flow and converge on the page gives off an angelic, ethereal quality I’m not sure I possess in real life.”
Jackson tilted his head as he let his eyes slide slowly down her frame. She was dressed in a pair of fitted jeans and another one of those V-necked women’s T-shirts that exposed enough of her cleavage to make him want to lean in and see where that sexy dark-brown line between the swell of her breasts led. Her tiny braids were piled high on the top of her head in some sort of messy bun. But instead of looking haphazard, it drew his eyes to her face and neck, giving her a more regal glow. She wasn’t simply angelic; she was the queen of all angels as far as he was concerned.
“Aja, I don’t lie. My job doesn’t always allow me to be as truthful as I’d like to be. But in real life, I don’t lie. Lies destroy. They corrode.” He took the drawing from her and ran his fingers slowly across it, hoping some of her depicted glow would somehow jump off the page and chase away the cold shadows of his past. “The truth is important to me. So if this drawing makes you see yourself as angelic and ethereal, it’s because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Besides, I’ve never been that imaginative when it comes to drawing. I just draw what I see.”
She was quiet for a moment. He couldn’t tell where her thoughts were going, only that she was piecing something together behind those deep-brown eyes. In the short few days he’d spent with her, he’d come to realize her intellect, her ability to puzzle things together until she had a working explanation in her head, was one of her greatest superpowers. Well, that and her ability to both bless and curse you with her tongue.
“You’re so talented. Why don’t you do this more often?”
A long sigh slipped from his lips as he slid down in his chair. “My ex-wife didn’t much care for the garage full of sketch pads and art supplies I stored over the years. She said it was a silly hobby I was too old to indulge in.”
Her brows furrowed, and the need to run his fingers across those creases and smooth them out almost overwhelmed him. “That seems unsupportive. No wonder she’s your ex.” Her eyes widened, and she placed her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. I had no right to pass judgment like that. I never want to be someone who villainizes the woman who came before her.”
Jackson shook his head. “Making a truthful assessment isn’t the same as passing judgment. Lana had good qualities. When things were going well, she was fun and generous. She effortlessly managed to be a bright spot wherever she went. But when things were bad, she changed into another person. That Lana wasn’t supportive. Not of things she didn’t feel there was a tangible benefit to anyway. You’d think her lack of support might have made me walk, but no, it wasn’t. I left because—” He searched for the words to express as much of the truth as he could. No one wanted to bare their scars to the world, but after proclaiming himself to be a purveyor of truth, it felt wrong somehow not giving Aja exactly that. “She’s my ex-wife because she lied to me, and those lies ended up killing someone.”
He glanced up to witness the quiet shock written across her face. Jackson wasn’t surprised she didn’t know about it. What was big news in a small hick town rarely made it on the mainstream wire. The anonymity of a small town in the South was the only thing that had saved his career after Lana’s unthinkable crime.
The light brush of Aja’s palm on top of his registered somewhere in the back of his mind, and he looked down to see her holding his hand carefully, as if he needed a delicate touch.
“Jackson?”
She didn’t have to ask the actual question for him to understand her meaning.
“About thirteen years ago, I married the mayor’s daughter back in my small hometown. Lana was a party girl. I’d always known that. Hell, everybody in town knew that. But as an adult, I wasn’t aware that the wild partying had turned into something much more ugly and uncontrollable than her silly high-school antics. After college, I did a stint in the military. By the time I came home for good, I figured she’d grown up like the rest of our peers. But I was wrong.”
He took a deep breath and cleared his throat, trying hard not to sound like the victim in this scenario. Because no matter how bad things got for him, he was still here, still alive. That wasn’t true for the real victim in this story. “Apparently her father threatened to cut her off if she didn’t get herself together. That meant no foolishness in public—she had to settle down, or he would snatch away everything his power and local celebrity offered her. Forever a daddy’s girl, she figured out how to play him and still do exactly what she wanted. And when we dated, she learned to play me the same way.
“Lana was an alcoholic, and even though I lay next to her most nights, I never knew it. By the time I figured something was off, she’d been so deep into her addiction, there was no way she could get out of it on her own.
“I tried to support her the best way I knew how. I put her into rehab, threatened to leave her if she didn’t give the program a serious try.”
Aja squeezed his hand, letting him know she was there for him, and the easy way she comforted him both soothed and stirred something deeper he wasn’t willing to acknowledge at that moment. “I’m guessing you sending her to rehab and threatening her to straighten up didn’t work.”
He shook his head. He’d hoped like hell it would, but none of it helped. “No. She smiled and made me and her daddy believe she was doing her best to get a handle on her problem. But the truth was, Lana hadn’t cleaned up her act. Instead, she learned to get smarter about when and where she drank and whose company she kept while doing it.”
“Jackson, addicts are very good at hiding in plain sight. Until someone is ready to address their problems, there isn’t enough outside motivation in the world to make them stop. They have to do the work for themselves.”
Again, she was right. But in his own arrogance, he’d believed he could pull Lana out of darkness with tough love and support. But it hadn’t worked. Nothing he did worked.
“What happened, Jackson?”
“We’d been arguing all week about something or other. It’s strange—as important as the subject seemed then, I can’t remember for the life of me what we were actually fighting about. All I remember is telling her I got called out on assignment and I wouldn’t be home that night. Somehow that bit of information escalated whatever else was going on. From what I can gather, because Lana never remembered, she went on a bender and decided she would give me a piece of her mind face-to-face.”
He laced his fingers through Aja’s, somehow needing an anchor to the present while his past sought to draw him into pain and guilt. “Halfway there, she drove the wrong way up a highway exit and slammed into another car. It was a young family. Parents and a toddler. The parents were pretty banged up. The little one died on impact.”
“My God.” She let go of his hand only to walk around the counter and stand next to him. Once she reached his side, she burrowed her way under his arm and wrapped him in her tight embrace, reinforcing the invisible cracks that were spreading through his foundation.
“Her blood alcohol content was more than double the legal limit. Even her daddy couldn’t get her out of the trouble she’d landed in, landed us all in.”
“You mean the legal and civil liabilities that come along with something like this?”
She was sharp, Jackson had to give her that. “Lana had two previous DWIs that her father paid the fines for quietly and kept her records buried. But with her killing a child, even her daddy couldn’t get her out of that unscathed. She was sentenced to twenty years and must serve at least half that before she’s eligible for parole. She was also fined ten thousand dollars. And that was just the legal penalties. The family sued us and was awarded a hefty sum in damages.”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide, filled with compassion as she calculated her own conclusions. “You lost everything, didn’t you?”
He pulled her in tighter to him, kissing her on her forehead. The connection calmed the familiar anger and guilt that whipped around inside him like the raging waves of a stormy sea. “No, that young family lost everything.” Even through all his pain, he still realized nothing compared to the loss of that little one’s life. “I walked away with the clothes on my back and my job. And the only thing that kept me employed was that I hadn’t attempted to cover up Lana’s issues with my badge. Her father didn’t fare so well in that regard. He was removed from office when an investigation revealed he’d used his position to get her lighter sentences for her past transgressions.”
