“Of course she’s not all right, Mason. She’s in the hospital!” my dad barked.
“What happened?”
“She got into the pills again.”
I tried not to sigh. The acid burned in my belly. “I thought you had locked up all the medications—”
“Well, she obviously got into them. When will you get here?” Dad demanded.
I ran my hand over my face, my jaw clenched. I readied myself for battle.
“I can’t come right now,” I told him. I prepared for the blowback.
“You ungrateful little shit. How can you live with yourself after you’ve abandoned your mother when she was so fragile? You’ve put this family through hell and this is the thanks we get?” my dad roared into the phone.
“Will Mom be all right?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Mom’s suicide attempts weren’t serious enough to put her life in jeopardy. Her therapist had told me that she had no desire to die.
I knew exactly what this latest round of pill popping was.
Punishment.
Because I had moved away.
What I couldn’t tell my father was that if I hadn’t left, I would have ended up next to Dillon in the ground. I had been suffocating.
“She’ll be fine. No thanks to you,” Dad huffed, and despite my vow to not let my parents rope me in with guilt, I felt myself being pulled in again. Against my better judgment.
Against what was best forme.
“I can drive up on Friday after work—”
“Well, that’s not good enough!” I cringed at the rage in my father’s voice. Even though he was two hundred miles away, I still braced myself for the blow.
The one that was meant to maim.
“We lost the best son. Thegoodson. Now look what we’re left with,” my dad muttered just loud enough for me to hear him clearly.
I was all too familiar with my father’s disappointment and regret where I was concerned.
“I’ll come up on Friday,” I told him again.
“We wouldn’t want to put you out,” Dad remarked drily, his anger abating just a bit. The truth was he couldn’t handle my mother on his own. He needed me. Even if he wished he didn’t.
“You’re not. I can leave straight from work. Maybe get off an hour or two early.” There went my fucking weekend.
“Fine,” Dad snapped. “We’ll see you then.”
Then he hung up. And I was left feeling like I had been beaten up and thrown away.
I put my phone down and stared at the pile of papers I had planned to read before bed. The words swam in front of my eyes and I closed the file, my head no longer focused on the elusive hacker and the unsolvable case.
Talking to my parents always threw me. It took me hours to feel okay again. It was hard to remember a time when my family had been healthy and functional. Once I had been able to talk to my dad on the phone andnotfeel bad afterward.
Once my mother had been happy and whole. She hadn’t spent her time dwelling on a tragedy she could never change. She wouldn’t have contemplated using my twisted emotions to make me feel even worse.
Once we had been a family that loved and supported each other.
I hadn’t thought that Dillon would be the one to unravel it completely. I had thought we were strong enough to get through the horror of what had happened—together.
