SIXTY-FIVE
Jez
THIS... COULDN’T BE. I was looking at my mother, but through the frosted glass of eight years’ passage of time. Her lank, dark blond hair, always swept back in a bun or a braid, was now cut to bob length and peppered with silver. She was thinner than I remembered, deep lines of stress and worry cutting across her brow and cheeks.
“Mom?” My voice sounded high-pitched and unsteady, like a child’s.
Like a thirteen-year-old girl’s.
“Oh, Jezzie,” she said, the words riding on the back of a jagged breath. “You’re here. You’re actuallyhere.”
We both moved at the same time, staggering toward each other like two people caught in an earthquake. Then we crashed into each other, and bony arms wrapped around me with the strength of a mother’s love.
I wrapped her up in turn, hating how hollow and birdlike her jutting bones felt.
“Mom...” I choked, since that was apparently the only word I still knew.
Her fingers combed through my hair, the movements nearly frantic. Through the bond, three presences hovered as thoughtrying not to intrude; alpha protective emotions held tightly in check.
“I never stopped looking for you, baby. I swear I didn’t!” My mom buried her face in my neck. “But there were no leads... it was like you’d disappeared from the face of the earth! I talked to the police... tried to hire a private investigator—”
“It’s all right, Mom,” I interrupted, but she shook her head sharply. The tears on her cheeks matched the tears on my own.
“No,” she said. “It’snotall right.Hefound out what I was doing. Kept me trapped in the house for weeks; wouldn’t let me near a phone or a computer. He even smashed the TV so I couldn’t watch the news.”
There was no need to ask who ‘he’ was. I squeezed her tighter.
“I would have come back home,” I whispered. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”Not while my father was there. The final part went unsaid, but it echoed still between us, deafening.
How had she gotten away from him, even so many years later? Had she managed to run? To get a divorce?
“Are you and he still—” I began, hesitant.
“He’s dead,” she said, the words dropping like boulders. “An accident. He was drunk. He fell down the stairs.”
I jerked backwards, my hands on her shoulders to steady both of us. The sudden suspicion in my own mind echoed back and forth with a similar suspicion from my bondmates.
“He... fell?” I echoed cautiously, scanning my mother’s face.
Her expression hardened in a way that was completely foreign to my memories of her—the righteous, unyielding planes and angles of a monument to Lady Justice.
“Yes,” she said, her tone absolutely flat. “An accident. He fell down the stairs.”
Inside the doorway, Gage let out a low whistle.
“Guess the apple don’t fall far from the tree,” he said under his breath.
“I got his money, eventually,” my mother went on, still stony-faced. “I’ve been searching for you ever since. For seven years and four months, I looked everywhere I could think of. Hired people, tried to get the news channels interested, lobbied every politician I could find.”
Her shoulders slumped beneath my hands.
“And I got nowhere, until a lawyer contacted me a few days ago and gave me Mr. Knockley’s number.”
My eyes flew to Knox.
“I’ve had people searching since we discussed the matter, before your last heat,” he said. “It took a little longer than I would have liked—sorry about that.”
“I changed back to my maiden name,” my mother said. “That probably made it harder.”
