His answer made me tremble.
“Did you—”
“I . . . not exactly.”
A small sigh of relief.
“I hate violence, and I could never be with someone who—” I said.
“What? You mean like James?” he pushed, looking me right in the eye.
“Why’d you do it? What’d the principal arrange?” I changed the subject hoping to get an answer.
“We didn’t have any other choice,” he said, getting up.
I watched him reach a big solid wood door and knock on it.
“You better get back in the car now.”
I nodded. This time he was right. I was an idiot for wanting to get in the middle of something that was so much bigger than me.
I went down the stairs and was rushing toward the door when Jackson stopped me.
“Can you come here for a moment?”
I frowned. “What now?”
I became worried when I noticed some concern in his aquamarine eyes.
“Grandma, I’m coming.” Jackson brought his iPhone to his chest then turned to me. “Can you talk to him?”
I crossed my arms. “Now you need my help?”
“Look, I’d never stoop so low as to admit something like that, but I get the feeling that he’ll listen to you,” he murmured, flinging a bathroom door open.
Calling it a bathroom seemed like an understatement. Its mammoth dimensions made it look like a presidential suite. The shower and whirlpool bath only took up a little bit of the otherwise empty giant space surrounded by marble walls. I’d hadn’t expected to find James. I’d thought he’d left.
I froze at the threshold and met his cutting stare in the big mirror on the wall.
“You know something, James?”
“Nobody asked you,” he quickly shot back as I closed the door behind me.
He was hunched over the sink.
“They trust you. Your friends.”
He raised an eyebrow. “So what?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t trust them.”
“You go from meddler to shrink in one second flat,” James said with a sneer.
I kept my dig at him to myself and ignored his defiant stare.
“And you should. You should trust them, because this weight’s too heavy for you to carry all alone and it’ll break you sooner or later.”
He turned to give me a sharp glare.
