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He nodded. "Yeah, he knew I was coming. He handed me enough money for a hot meal and told me if I wanted something more suitable, I could find him at a diner across the street."
She watched his gaze shift.
"I'd been told that many times and people never meant it. Once they found out why I was on the street, they didn't want me around. I feared the same with your father."
"Why wouldn't people want you?"
He looked at her, and she quickly shut her mouth. She knew … one story at a time.
"I was hungry, and I had nowhere to go that night as the police had run off those of us sleeping in boxes in an alleyway behind a busy restaurant. Good steaks there, I’m assuming, since we only got scraps from the trash.
“So I went to the diner. Your father was in the back, and he'd already ordered me a meal. He didn't even ask me anything, just handed me a fork."
She smiled. She could see her father doing that. From everything she read, he cared deeply about Strap.
He sighed. "He took me home and prepared a bed for me. It took me a while to get used to him, but over time I did."
"Why were you a pocket picker?"
His face fell. "Because I'm tri-natured."
She wasn't entirely sure what that meant, and Strap swallowed.
"It means I'm not just one shifter. My parents got together, and they were from different species. They weren't supposed to."
She blinked, confused. "That's not common?"
He shook his head. "No, and when their clans found out, they threw them out. My mother died soon after my birth, and my father abandoned me because I looked too much like my mother. He ended up dying a few years later when I was about eight."
"When did you start picking pockets?"
"I was probably four. I was living in different homes, and people grew sick of me, so I finally took it upon myself to stay on my own and take care of me."
"That's why you feared my father wouldn’t want you? Because you're different?"
He nodded. "It hadn’t been the first nice gesture I had received, but it was the most meaningful. Your father housed me and kept me around for a long time."
She looked outside the window. "You know, when I was little, I always thought my father was some kind of superhero, and that was why he was never around. Then as I got a little older, I started to think he just never wanted to know who I was. My mother always spoke highly of him, but as time went on, I wanted to hear less about him."
Strap reached his hand over, wrapping around hers. "I don't think he knew. All of the time I was with him, he never mentioned kids, but he wanted them."
She nodded, knowing that now. "I know. I read his journals. I had to be just out of high school when he found out about my mother's pregnancy. He wrote about it in one of his journals. How he wished he'd known, but he thought it was too late to interject himself into my life."
She felt his hand squeeze tighter. "He had looked me up online. He wrote how he was overjoyed I made the dean's list at school and that I had a full ride to college. He wrote how he read all of the published works I did for college."
She remembered finding the journal during the third week of living in her apartment. She'd been so angry and was throwing the journals around when one of them landed open, and she'd seen her mother's name. She ended up staying up late, reading the journal.
She read all about how her parents met and how her mother had left. He wrote about how he loved her, but he knew she deserved better. Not a criminal with no chance of redemption. He wished her the world.
Mickey had cried, reading how he loved her as a daughter even if he'd never met her. And that even though he didn't know her, she was in his heart.
She wiped at her eyes, feeling tears well. "I guess he wasn't entirely terrible after all." Strap had gone quiet, and she looked at him. "My father cared about you too. I read all about you two. He loved you like a son."
He glanced at her before he glanced back at the road. "I thought that, too, for a long time."
"And now you don't because you went to jail?"
His eyes widened. "You know about that?"
