Explain what? That she made a deal with the same black shit that’s eating me alive from the inside out? That she decided I didn’t deserve to know?I can’t even look at her face.
“My parents are fine, by the way,” she tells me like I don’t fucking already know. “Thanks for asking.”
“I know they’re fine.”
She passes me the cigarette.
“I met the nurse you hired,” she adds. “When were you planning on telling me about that?”
“It slipped my mind.”
She laughs disbelieving. “Slipped your mind.”
“You don’t get to fight me on honesty today,” I say.
She leans closer. “Millie wasn’t home.”
My hand stills around the cigarette.
“She went back to work,” Sisk says carefully. “I can’t stand the thought of her back there again.”
I nod once, but it’s automatic. Millie can wait. This can’t.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask finally. “Ten fucking years. And you didn’t think to mention it?”
She looks at me. “I didn’t know how to tell you,” she admits. “You were always pushing me away as it was. If I had told you… if I had admitted we were tied by something that dark, you would have never looked at me again. You would have used it as another excuse, another reason to say this was too dangerous, that I needed to get as far away from you as possible. It would have sealed our fate.” She takes a shaky breath. “Then I thought your father had told you already. I thought maybe you knew and just… chose not to say anything.”
“My father?”
“He helped me.”
“Helped how?”
She swallows, and I see the fight it takes to get the words out. “I had to take measures, Jax. To make sure it would never happen.”
“Measures?” I repeat. “What did you do?”
I glance down at my hand. The blood dripping from my knuckles has slowed and it’s now darker and thicker, but her next words pull my focus back.
“I went to him,” she says quietly. “After. I asked him to do surgery, to do anything to prevent it from happening.”
I lean back against the brick wall. “What surgery?”
She hesitates. “I wanted him to take them out. My ovaries. Anything that would make it permanent. I didn’t tell him why,”she says. “I just told him my life wasn’t the kind you bring a child into.”
I can’t think straight.
“He refused,” she rushes. “He said there were alternatives. That I was young, that it wasn’t something you can undo later.”
She swallows. “I wanted to tell you,” she says. “So many times.” Her fingers tremble around the cigarette. “Every time I tried, I thought… maybe not now. Maybe when we’re steadier. Maybe when we’ve figured our shit out. I kept waiting for the right moment.”
I’m trying to process everything she’s saying.
“I was selfish,” she says quietly. “I was terrified you’d walk away. That one day you’d want a family. A child. And I wouldn’t be able to give that to you.”
The words affect me more than I think she realizes. This is something she’s been carrying alone for a decade. Something she’s been bracing for. I look at her differently now. Ten years of her swallowing this every time I talked about the future like it was some abstract fucking concept. I hadn’t even realized how light I’d always treated that word: family.She’s been living under a sentence.
“For the record,” I tell her, “there was never a version of my life that didn’t have you in it. If I ever wanted a family,” I say, “it would’ve been with you, not instead of you.” I steady my voice again, shoving the emotion back down where it belongs. “So what did my father do?”
