Page 157 of Deacon

His answer took a little longer.

Jackson: Don’t get carried away. I ain’t doin it because we are suddenly best friends.

Jackson: I’m doin it because he loves you and I love you and that creepy little bastard is startin to piss me off.

Despite myself, I smiled.

Lila: He’s starting to creep me out too.

Jackson: Then me and Matty will handle it.

Jackson: Together.

I read that last word twice.

Lila: That actually makes me feel better.

Jackson: Good.

Jackson: Now go to sleep before I start talkin about that bath again and make us both miserable.

A laugh slipped out of me.

Lila: Goodnight, Jackson.

Jackson: Night, Princess

I set the phone on the bed beside me and let the quiet settle.

Jude still bothered me. Something about him had been wrong often enough that even I was done calling it coincidence. But Jackson had reached out to Matty, and Matty had agreed to sit across from the man he had spent years hating because they both cared what happened to me.

That should have been the thing I carried to sleep.

Instead, Jackson’s earlier message stayed with me.

No more keepin things from you if I can help it.

There it was again. If I can help it.

The doubt wasn’t about his love anymore. I believed that now, probably more than was safe. It lived in the way his face changed whenever Dad or Matty came up, in the anger he swallowed and the explanation that always seemed to stop one step before the end.

Something was still missing.

For months I had treated that missing piece like proof I needed to keep one foot outside whatever was rebuilding between us. Except tonight he had drawn me a bath, cleaned my kitchen with our daughter, left when staying would have been easier, and called the brother who hated him because I was uneasy about another man. None of it erased what he had done seventeen years ago. It did make pretending I felt nothing increasingly ridiculous.

I had never really fallen out of love with Jackson. I had learned to build a life around loving someone who wasn’t there, and I had built a good one. That mattered. Choosing him now couldn’t be about filling some hole in me or pretending the years without him had been incomplete. It had to be a choice made with my eyes open.

Now he was here, giving me reasons to make it.

I didn’t need to decide tonight whether everything between us could be repaired. I needed the whole truth. What happened after he dropped me off that night. Why my father’s name still put that look in his eyes. What he thought he had been protecting me from. Why Matty carried so much rage, and what Jackson still couldn’t make himself say.

Then we could decide what came next.

Dad would have feelings about it, and Matty and Jackson had years of anger to untangle. Jackson would have to trust me enough to finish the story. Jade, judging by the way she already called him Dad and teased him like she had known him forever, had apparently skipped several steps ahead of all of us.

For once, I wanted to catch up. I looked at Jackson’s name glowing on the screen and let myself smile, because we still had too much left to face before I could call us healed. But I was done pretending I didn’t want us to get there.

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