Dax interrupts, his brow furrowed low over his eyes. “Did they ask for Juliet or Jules?”
“What does it fucking matter? They meant her.” Eric grumbles curses under his breath. I catch a few slurs and silently beg Carlo to shut him up again, but Dax doesn’t even seem to notice. He strides across the room, grabs Eric by the throat, in much the same way as Eric grabbed me earlier, and shoves him hard against the wall, smacking his head twice and cracking the plaster.
“Juliet or Jules?” he yells.
“Jules…They said Jules!” He cries out. Dax leans in and whispers something in his ear. I don’t hear it, but Dad’s eyes flick to me and widen. The first thing I see there is fear, but I know my dad well enough to see that spark, too. The spark he gets when he’s figured out a new way to hurt me.
I don’t plan on letting him hurt me or those kids ever again. I turn to Dax. “What now?”
“Your father goes to jail.”
“That’s it?” Carlo shouts.
“He might fall down every flight of stairs between here and the lobby.” Dax shrugs. “It all depends on how helpful he is.”
“Fuck you!” Dad spits. “Fucking cocksucking—”
Carlo stomps on his leg, pressing down until he screams.
“Stairs it is then.” Dax pulls out his phone. “Have you got this for a moment?” he asks Carlo. Cue nods. Dax walks towards the front door to make his call. I stand there. Useless. I’m numb.
“Is she mine?” Carlo asks. Eric laughs again, it is a hard, pained sound and entirely mirthless.
“She didn’t tell you?” he grunts. “Fuck me, this is gold. You knocked the bitch up and vanished,Big Shot. Just fucked off and joined the Foreign Legion or what-the-fuck-ever. She had no one until I picked her up off the street. They’d be dead without me. I was the father you never were. Mind you, your fucking mutts deserved putting down. I should have drowned them both in the Esk River.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I mutter, but Dad—Eric’s—so well attuned to my voice that he hears me.
He chuckles evilly. “Don’t like it, Juliet? Don’t rate yourrunaway daddy? Personally, I think it’s ironic. Your real father was paying me for the pleasure of making you work in his bar. Best part is your whore mother couldn’t sneak in and out of the bar with you there. Two cunts, one cockblock.”
Carlo reaches breaking point. He lifts his leg and kicks Dad across the face. I hear something crack as Dad smacks off the floor and is out cold.
“I didn’t know,” he tells me after a minute of pacing. “Fuck, kid. I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I,” I mumble, looking at Mum who fluctuates between curling in on herself and throwing me defiant looks. “Is that it then?” I ask her. “The reason you hate me so much?”
Carlo reaches out a hand as if to touch my face, but I take a step back. “Your mum doesn’t hate you J—”
Mum’s bitter voice is so sharp it cuts through Carlo’s misplaced concern and straight into the heart of me. “If you’d never been born, I wouldn’t have needed to rely onhim. I’d have never married him, if not for you. So yes, I fucking hate you. He hurt me because of you and the constant reminder that I belonged to someone else first. If he wasn’t threatening you and using you against me, he was beating me for any minor mistake you made.”
Silence hangs thickly between us all, but Mum isn’t done. Her focus shifts. Her cruel, frosty glare softening to regret as she turns to eye Carlo.
“I thought he was decent. A good man. I couldn’t wait for you to come back, and I didn’t know how to contact you. We…You…” She frowns at him. “…You said we were done.”
“You were lying to me. If there’s no trust, there’s no relationship,” he mumbles, but it sounds like something he might have said a long time ago, rather than something he believes.
“You left. I had her alone. I struggled on my own for months with a premature baby and no money.”
Premature? Since when? Is she bullshitting to get Cue’s sympathy, or was this just another thing I was never told?
Mum continues without a shred of explanation for me.“When Eric said we’d pretend she was his, and he’d raise her, I thought it was my only lifeline. A kindness.”
“How could you leave me in the dark? I’d understand if we didn’t get back together, but after we reconnected…and Casey…God! You should have told me. I don’t know anything about my own daughter. What she likes, hates, what classes she takes? Does she have a middle name? Fuck, I don’t even know her birthday.”
“Marie, after my grandmother,” I answer, swallowing the word grandmother thickly. Turns out she was never mine. I stumble over my date of birth, trying to distract myself from the deluge of consequences and questions piling up in my head. “August 30th”
“November 28th.” Mum says at the same time. I stare at her in stunned silence until she explains. “You were premature at 33 weeks. You spent months in hospital because of complications with your lungs. I met Eric while I worked part time at the Feelan factory. He was kind to me, letting me take hours off to be with you at the hospital. It was his idea to change your date of birth. We pretended you were his, so his family would accept our rushed marriage. You were so small it was easy to say you were younger than you really were. He got you a new birth certificate made up…I didn’t ask how. I was just grateful to be able to afford to feed and clothe you.”
“N…no.” I stutter. “I’m twenty next week.”
