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My body started to vibrate with fear that I’d never experienced in my life. I felt as if I’d been walking happily, and this phone call had hurtled me off a cliff I didn’t even know was right beside me all along.
“No, we’re all fine, Violet,” Mom’s words were warped, as though she spoke from underwater, muffled and low.
It took me a second to process them.
“You’re fine,” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said firmly. But that gentle, ominous edge to her voice lingered.
My mind ran quickly through all the possibilities, stuttering on gray eyes and the man they belonged to.
“Is El—everyone at the club okay?” I demanded to know, an edge of panic leaking from my heart into my tone. My mother was still unaware of any connection I had to the biker old enough to be my father. Yet in the midst of my panic, I was still protecting that secret.
“Everyone at the club is fine,” Mom reassured me.
I let out a long breath, my limbs still taut.
“It’s your father, honey,” she sighed.
My heart thumped against my chest. My fingertips numb. “Did he hurt you again?”
Fire crawled up my throat.
“No!” she yelled through the phone. “I’m really not good at this,” she muttered. “He was found this morning… He’s gone, honey.”
I gasped at the news, processing it.Gone. A euphemism for death, I deduced.
Dead.
I chewed at my lip.
My father was dead.
My breathing returned to normal soon after my heartbeat did. My limbs relaxed.
“Violet?” Mom’s voice was saturated in concern and louder than normal. I got the impression it was not the first time she’d said it, trying to get my attention.
“I’m getting on a plane,” she declared. “I’m coming to get you.”
My body jerked. “Mom, you are not getting on a plane. You’re about to give birth to your baby.”
“I have two babies,” she corrected. “And one of them just lost her father.”
Lost. Like I wanted to find him in the first place. Like he was something precious to me.
Maybe he had been.
Or maybe the idea of him was.
“He wasn’t my father,” I stated bluntly, my voice colder than I’d intended.
“Sweetie… Yes, he was,” Mom’s voice was thick with hurt and grief. Not for herself, surely. My father had beat her for years, tortured her and almost killed her. My mother was a good person with a great heart, but even she would not be grieving that man.
The hurt was for me.
“No,” I told her, staring at myself in the mirror of my room. My cheekbones were high, sharper than normal because I was overloaded on classes that were getting harder and harder. I was existing on processed snacks and black coffee. Hence the dark circles under my eyes which, contrasting against my ivory skin, made them seem an off purple hue, similar to my irises.
`“We’ll get you on a plane, sweetheart,” Mom pressed on. “You can come home. I know your grandparents will be having a service—”
