He fought, but I fought harder. The night ended with him leaving and me spending years thinking one day he’d show up and tell me he was done roaming.
He never did.
We were a flash-in-a-pan love story I’d tricked myself into believing was once-in-a-lifetime romance.
“You didn’t tell him,” Cap finishes.
“I did not.” I sigh. “I thought I was doing the right thing—protecting us all. Panicked. Irrational. Scared.” I throw the ball again for Frank. “Seeing his reaction today ...” My voice trails off while I relive how Nash’s instant hurt made me feel like a piece of trash. “Not so different than Mom, I guess. Maybe if she would’ve told you, everything would have been different.”
Cap adjusts his hat then sags deeper into his chair. “Might not have gone that way.”
I straighten. “You wouldn’t have followed her if she told you she was pregnant before she left?”
“Meh,” he says, not letting me force him into the pretty answer I want to hear. “Hard to say what our past selves would have done, ain’t it? I loved your mom—would have loved you—but that wouldn’t have stopped me from wanting that treasure.”
I sink back into my chair, letting this reality sink in. My dad who didn’t know about me might not have made a different choice if he had.
“Would you have showed up if I knew you existed but never called?” he asks, the coarseness of his voice at odds with the vulnerability of the question.
“Hell no,” I admit, making him snort. “I didn’t want to come to begin with. Lucky for you, my life turned into a catastrophe, and your gold obsession offered a solution.”
Frank brings me the ball, and I throw it again.
“You think Nash will hate me?” I ask. “When I tell him about Bennie, I mean? You don’t seem to hate Mom. You barely seemed shocked when I showed up.”
“Takes a lot to shock your old dad,” he says with a laugh followed by a cough and deep sniff of oxygen. “And you could probably set a match to this house and Nash wouldn’t hate you. Pretty sure he’s still in love with you.”
“Are you kidding me?” I scoff. “Did you not see how mad he was today? And seeing someone.” Nash’s convolutedYou’re wrongechoes. I let the sun warm my eyelids until Frank nudges me with his nose and drops the slobbery ball on my chair. “He thinks us being married is a game.”
Cap closes his eyes and tilts his face toward the sun. “Stand by what I said, kiddo. You fight like that, means you have something worth fighting for. All that hullabaloo at the tree.” He opens one eye in my direction.
“Hullabaloo?” I repeat flatly.
“What it was. And you know I’m right.” He closes his eye then opens it again. “And you’re probably engaged to the wrong man.”
“You don’t even know him,” I defend.
“Know he ain’t here. Know your life’s a mess and you’re handling it alone. Know Nash rearranged his life to help even after you told him not to.”
That ... is an annoyingly great point. “You sound like Mom.”
“Smart lady.”
Frank settles in the middle of the yard, aggressively chewing the ball.
“She has a brain tumor,” I admit, picking at a string on my shirt as the inevitable shot of emotion knots my throat. “It’s benign, but she needs surgery.” At the amount of effort it takes for me to say it aloud, I get why she never told us. I also get how hard it must have been for her to carry it alone. “She’s a pain in the ass. Even her non-life-threatening illness is dramatic.”
He chuckles then says, “If it wasn’t a tumor, it’d be somethin’ else. Bodies get old, kiddo. Ain’t no outrunning it, no matter how fast you are. You live your life, do the best you can. Make right choices and wrong ones. Carry regrets and wish the good days lasted a little longer. Wish for more time. Wish for different time. Wish you’d spent more time with different people.” He gives me a pointed look. “But we get what we get, and it all ends the same. All ends too soon.”
He talks about mortality like it’s as easy to accept as the sky being blue. With his next drag from Penny, he offers it to me, and I wave it off.
“Doctor suggested it,” he says. “Said it would help.”
My brows raise. “With?”
“Gettin’ stoned.”
His lips twitch; this bastard is being funny. Against my best efforts, I laugh.
