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I started to get mad.
“What do you want me to do in this situation?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t have much choice here. I’m lucky that Tara and my father haven’t taken an interest in her yet!”
“Then why did Tyson keep her at all?” he countered. “Why not give her up for adoption? Why not go drop her off at some random fire station? At least then nobody would be able to find her. She might have a good life.”
I looked away. “You don’t think I haven’t thought about that?” I asked. “Because I have. A lot since it happened. But my family watches my every move. Watches Tyson’s every move. They know. They know everything. And if they saw how much we cared about her…they’d take an interest. And I don’t want them to take an interest.”
He looked at me with pity in his eyes, and I absorbed that.
Hell, I even pitied myself.
My life sucked.
There was nothing good about it except for one bright spot when it came to my daughter, but even that was tainted.
“I should’ve never had her,” I whispered softly. “It would’ve been less cruel. I should’ve found a way.”
“Kids are miracles,” he countered. “We’ll figure out a way to make this work. I’ve…already been doing that. My dad and I have already been looking into it. I’ve also been in contact with a few men that are in a nearby town. They are friends of some of the guys in our club. They specialize in making families disappear.”
“Your dad?” I smiled softly. “Sounds like you got one of the good ones.”
His face changed slightly.
“I can’t have kids. Thanks to my dad.”
I looked over at him in surprise. “What?”
The gasped half screech/half outraged murmur that came out of my mouth was near comical.
“Beat my ass so bad that I got an infection that wracked my body for days. I laid on the floor of my bedroom for four days with such a high fever that I nearly died. When I came to on day six, fever free, it was to find out that I was in the hospital after my mother finally thought I might die and not make it. Killed all my swimmers,” he answered.
I looked at him oddly.
“The man that you’re working for beat the crap out of you, and you’re still working for him?” I asked incredulously. “Asking him for help. Genuinely spending time with him and asking him for help. What the hell?”
Liner’s lips twitched.
“Does it make you feel better to know that, at the time, he had a brain tumor that was making him say and do things he would’ve never said or done if he was of sound mind?” he asked.
I…might have to think about that.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not sure. Should that be something that’s forgiven?”
Liner shrugged. “Dad knows exactly what he did now. After the brain tumor was removed, he remembered exactly what he’d done when he was in that altered state. He feels terrible. I still catch him looking at me like I’ve ripped his heart straight out of his chest.”
“Why’d your mother wait so long to bring you to the hospital?” I asked. “And what happened from there?”
“My mother was scared,” he admitted. “Of my dad, and of my dad getting taken away. She’d lived with him for twenty-two years with him being the perfect, devoted husband and father. And then he turned into a maniac for about two weeks. When they arrested him, my mother got a lawyer for both him and me. The lawyer had a psych hold put on my dad, and while they had him, they did a couple of scans of his brain and found the tumor.” He paused. “It helps that I was sixteen at the time and didn’t want to press any charges. I’d lived with my dad that long, too. I knew that he would’ve never done that under normal circumstances. I also was dumb and allowed him to beat the shit out of me because I’d done something stupid.”
“What was that something stupid?” I whispered.
“Totaled his car after a night of joy riding, drinking and smoking marijuana,” he admitted, looking flustered. “I also ran over our cat.”
My mouth fell open.
“That’s…awful,” I finally admitted.
And it sounded like it was a lose-lose situation. That nobody in that entire story had won.
“Clusterfuck,” he agreed, reading my face. “And the cat lived, if you’re wondering. We called him Lucky after that.”
I just shook my head.
“That’s just…a tragedy,” I admitted. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
He shrugged. “Nothing to say. I’m just saying that you don’t always know what’s under the surface. But that aside, I think that if we’re going to make you disappear, you need to disappear with your kid…give her a chance to have a life that both of you deserve.”
