Page 135 of Always: A Legacy Novel

He couldn’t do that.

Calisto’s hands wrapped around the rolled down window, and his knuckles turned white from the pressure. “Cross, talk to me.”

“I’m going to head to Zeke’s for a couple of days.”

There, he let them know.

They didn’t need to worry.

He told them.

“Exams—”

“Finished the last one today,” he interrupted.

Maybe he should have expected this, and not let it surprise him so damn much. It had been looming anyway, this spiral he was currently in.

“Cross.”

Cross bet his step-father could see it in his eyes, if only because what he felt was reflected back in familiar dark irises. Pain and sadness and insecurity. Weakness he didn’t want shown to someone else; a wound he needed to staunch before it bled just a little too much. Calisto could see it. They shared the same eyes, after all. Soul-black and way too deep. He hid nothing there. He didn’t know how to.

And he had already been hiding it for two long weeks.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Cross muttered, putting the Rover into reverse.

“You’re not fine.”

“I am.”

“Son—”

“She keeps breaking my fucking heart,” he uttered, wishing it came out lower than it did. Instead, his voice was broken and hoarse, but clear and aching. “Okay, she keeps doing that, so fuck it.”

Calisto let go of the window.

Cross made sure his tires smoked on the way out of the drive.

The last few days of school were a special kind of hell for Catherine. She finished her exams on the first days of the last week, which left three more days that she had to go every day, whether she wanted to or not.

It was go, or stay at home and do nothing.

She was only allowed her phone at school, and that was to call someone if she needed something. At home, she handed it back over to her father.

There was a tension in her home that she hadn’t felt before, too. A silent fight that constantly brewed between her mother and father, fueled by resentment and stubbornness. The two didn’t speak, or when they did, they spoke very little.

Her mother took Michel to Detroit the first week of June. Dante chose to stay home with Catherine.

Catherine’s guilt was a killer. She felt like everything that was happening around her, was entirely her fault. And it was.

She didn’t want her parents fighting over her, yet they were. She didn’t want to hold her father back from taking Michel to Detroit like he had planned for an entire year, yet she had. She didn’t want breakfast and supper to be loaded with silence and shifting stares.

This wasn’t her family.

Not at all.

Maybe if all her sadness was focused on just her parents, then Catherine could deal. She could make things better, do what she needed to do, and be who they wanted her to be.

Except it wasn’t.