“No. I don’t want anything that’s connected to him. And I don’t need anything from him either. I have a father in my uncle Bran.” He squeezed my hand. “Are you thinking about looking for more of your dad’s family?”
“No.” My answer was immediate. “I’m still reeling from looking the first time.” I suddenly decided to be as honest with Chase as I could, maybe as a way to balance everything I had to conceal. “Part of me wishes that I hadn’t done it at all. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find out things about my dad that I can’t reconcile with my life.”
“What things?”
I shook my head. “He did something…really awful and painful.” I took a deep breath. “But there’s something else that he might have done that is infinitely worse, something I don’t think I could ever forgive him for.” If he knew about Brandon and had hidden him… “The possibility alone is enough to make me feel sick every time I look at my dad, but if I keep digging and discover it’s true…”
“You can’t ever go back.”
“I can’t.” I looked up at Chase. “The worst part is that I found something good too, something completely amazing,” I said, thinking about the fact that Sel and I had a brother. “But it’s all tangled up in something that will hurt a lot of people, people I care about, possibly in ways we can’t ever recover from. I can’t tell them about the good without revealing the bad.” Chase’s gaze never left my face and under his stare, warmth started to spread through my body, hitting but not thawing the knot of ice in my stomach. He was one of the people who might get hurt. I started to pull my hand free, but he stopped me.
“Would you want to know?” Chase asked. “If it was someone else in your position right now, would you risk the bad for the good?”
Initially, I’d have said no, that it was better to be ignorant than in pain, but that was before I’d met Brandon. Whatever else had happened, he was a good thing. My voice was soft. “I would.”
“Then you have your answer.”
I smiled, but it didn’t reach my eyes. I wanted to tell him the whole truth and see if he still felt the same way, but for Brandon’s sake, I couldn’t. And I wasn’t ready to risk losing Chase when I’d only just found him.
Before I could slip my hand free, I heard my name from across the parking lot.
“Dana?”
My breath froze. I turned to see Jessalyn and Sadie walking over. This time Chase didn’t stop me from pulling my hand free, though my friends were close enough that they had to have seen us holding hands. Jessalyn was going to give me so much crap. Not only had I blown them off—blown Sadie off when she could have used all the support she could get—to be with a guy that I hadn’t told her about, but I was giving her further proof that I didn’t have even potential feelings for Nick. I’d have to talk with Nick. I really didn’t want to hurt him, but based on how things were going with Chase, wise or not, I needed to be honest with Nick. I’d have preferred to do that without Jessalyn looking at me like I’d cheated on him—I hadn’t—but she and I were going to have to talk too. Just not in front of Chase.
“Hey.” I pushed off the tailgate to stand when they reached us, glancing quickly at Chase when he moved to stand beside me. “Guys, this is Chase. Chase, these are my friends Jessalyn and Sadie from my softball team.”
“Hey.” He shook their hands in turn. “I hear you guys are really good. What positions do you play?”
“Pitcher,” Sadie said.
“Shortstop,” Jessalyn said, eyeing Chase without any of the subtlety Sadie had used. “And how do you know Dana?” She was annoyed and didn’t bother to hide it.
“We just met the other day,” I said. “He helped me out with a low-blood-sugar situation, so I thought I’d return the favor and show him how to hit.”
Jessalyn slid her eyes to me. “Yeah, Dana hits hard when she wants to.”
I pleaded with her silently to be nice, and she did dial it back a little. She stopped frowning, but I could tell by the tight way she held her mouth that she wasn’t just mad at me; she was disappointed too.
We chatted another couple minutes before they went in. Alone with Chase again, I worried that he’d comment on the semi-awkward meeting or the way I’d dropped his hand as soon as I’d seen my friends, but he didn’t. In fact, the last thing he said to me before I got in my car was, “When can I see you again?”
* * *
Mom was still working when I got home that night and Dad was in the shower, so I was able to slip into my room and turn the lights off, ostensibly to go to sleep. They’d be able to see my car in the driveway, so I didn’t even need to give the cursory “I’m home!” shout-out.
I didn’t drift peacefully to sleep. I lay in the dark staring up at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers Selena and I had put up when we were little and shared a room. They barely glowed. I’d been gone almost the entire day, and they’d had no light to absorb. I felt just as dim.
It’d been easy to avoid Dad today, but tomorrow would be different. We had another game, and afterward Selena would sit us all down and share her very-likely-not-good news or she would have told me already. I’d be expected to talk to him, civilly, as though he hadn’t cheated and possibly done the unforgivable.
I decided to think about Chase instead, and the warmth of his hand in mine. When I closed my eyes, I could still feel him on my skin. Without realizing it, he’d given me permission to hurt him…but he’d also given me every reason not to.
CHAPTER 16
Jessalyn did not do cool and composed. She did loud and in your face—or more specifically, my face.
“Seriously, Dana? Seriously?”
She hadn’t even bothered to get in the pizza line for lunch the following day. She was standing next to it in the quad when I saw her. She also didn’t wait for me to get close enough to keep our conversation private. I was still twenty feet away when she started.
