Page 69 of Thunder

I'm shaking everywhere, but I get it out. "I'm the one who wanted it secret. I begged him to keep it quiet. I was scared, and my family had just blown apart, and I couldn't—I couldn't take one more thing detonating, so I made him promise. If you're gonna be furious at somebody for the secret, then be furious at me, because the secret was mine before it was ever his."

It works, at least halfway.

His hand loosens on Thunder's cut.

He steps back, breathing hard, and turns to face me full on, and now I'm the one getting the whole weight of that stare, and God, it's so much worse aimed at me.

"You," he says, and his voice has changed, gone rough and wounded in a way that scares me more than the yelling.

"You kept this from me too."

"I—yes. Yes, I did."

"After everything." He shakes his head slowly. "After what secrets did to this family. After what my secret did to your sisters, to Shiver, to you—you watched all of it, you lived it, you know better than anybody in this world what a secret costs when it finally comes up. And you looked me in the eye at Sunday supper and kept one of your own."

And there it is.

What's actually breaking him.

Not the club, not Thunder's hands on me, not even the ink.

That I did to him the exact thing he did to us.

I look at my father.

Really look at him for the first time since he came around that corner, and under the fury I finally see the rest of it.

The lines around his eyes are deeper than they were in the spring.

His hands aren't quite steady where they hang at his sides.

This isn't a man protecting his daughter's honor or defending his club's chain of command.

This is a man who spent two years watching one buried secret rot his family from the inside, who finally got most of his kids back in the same room, who thought the worst was behind him.

And here I am, the daughter he took in late and tried the hardest to make room for, showing him the rot got into me too.

That I learned the family trade after all.

Keeping things in the dark.

Looking him in the eye and letting him believe a lie because it was easier than the truth.

I want to tell him it wasn't like that.

I want to tell him a hundred things.

And the sheer helpless need to make him understand shoves the first words up out of me before I've thought them through.

"That's not fair." My voice is climbing now, wet and unsteady. "Pops, that's not—the situations aren't the same, you can't⁠—"

"Aren't they?"

"No! God, no, they're not, and if you'd just let me⁠—"

"You stood in my kitchen." He's not shouting now. Somehow the quiet is worse. "Not two months ago. And you let me go on thinkin' I knew what was happenin' in my own family, on my own ranch, with my own daughter, and the whole time you and my sergeant at arms were⁠—"

"Because I knew you'd do this!" I throw a hand at the two of them, at Thunder pinned a second ago against the shed, at all of it. "This exact thing, Pops, this is why, because the second you found out you'd⁠—"