“You’re right,” she said softly. “You shouldn’t have drunk that night, but Lexi shouldn’t have driven, and I shouldn’t have let you go. I knew there was going to be drinking there. What was I thinking to trust drunk eighteen-year-olds to make wise decisions? Why did I just assume that we couldn’t stop you from drinking? And … Mia should have had her seatbelt on. There’s blame enough to go around.”
“It’s my fault,” he said, and although Jude had heard him say it before, she felt the weight of his burden for the first time. It shamed her that she’d been so focused on her own grief that she’d let her son carry his alone.
She went to him, took him by the hand, and pulled him to his feet. “We all carry this, Zach. We’ve carried it for so long it’s reshaped our spines, bent us. We have to stand up again. We have to forgive ourselves.”
“How?” he asked simply. In his green eyes, she saw Mia, too. She’d forgotten that somehow, in her grief; her babies were twins, and Mia would always be alive in Zach. And now there was Grace, too.
She put a hand on his face, seeing the faint scar along his jawline. “She’s there … in you,” she said gently. “How did I forget that?”
Twenty-six
“Come on,” Lexi-Mommy says, holding out her hand. “You want to live with me, don’t you?”
The hand turns black and long yellow nails grow out from the fingers like hooks, and Grace screams—
“I’m right here, Princess.”
She heard her daddy’s voice and threw her arms around him. He smelled like he was supposed to, and the nightmare faded away until she remembered that she was in her own bed, in her own room, just where she belonged. There were no wild things here.
Her dad held her close and stroked her hair. “You okay?”
She felt like a baby. “Sorry, Daddy,” she mumbled.
“Everyone has bad dreams sometimes.”
She knew that was true, because when she was little, she used to hear him screaming in his sleep, and she’d go to him and climb into his bed. He never woke up, but he stopped yelling when she was with him. In the morning, he’d smile tiredly at her and say something about how she really should be a big girl and learn to sleep in her own bed.
“Don’t make me go away, Daddy. I won’t lie anymore. I promise. And I won’t sock Jacob in the nose, ever. I’ll be good.”
“Ah, Princess,” he said, sighing. “I should have known your mom would come back for you. I should have prepared us both. It’s just … I tried not to think about her.”
“Cuz she’s mean?”
“No,” Daddy said, and it scared her, how sad he sounded. “She’s the opposite of mean.”
“Maybe she got mean when she was a spy.”
“She’s not a spy, Princess.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
Grace bit her lower lip nervously. “What’s she like?”
Daddy shook his head. For a long time, he was quiet. Grace was about to ask something else when he said, “I met your mom in high school.” His voice was weird; it sounded like he had something stuck in his throat. “I would have asked her out on that first day, but she was already Mia’s friend. So … I tried not to love her … until one night … she almost kissed me. That changed everything. I couldn’t stay away from her after that.”
“Girls aren’t supposed to do that,” Grace mumbled around her thumb.
“Your grandmother would tell you that girls can do anything. That’s what she told my sister, anyway.”
Grace frowned. Daddy seemed all … gooey, and his eyes were shiny. He was acting like he loved Mommy, but that was stupid because he said she didn’t like him. None of this made sense. “But she didn’t want me,” Grace said. “She left me.”
“Sometimes people don’t have a choice about what they do.”
“Is she gonna visit me again?”
Dad looked down at Grace. “Your mom is really special, Princess, and I know she loves you. That’s what matters now. The reason she’s been gone is … well, really it was my fault, too. I let her be the one who was wrong. But I was wrong, too.”
“Wrong about what?”
He acted like he was going to say something, then he must have changed his mind. He kissed her forehead instead.
“Daddy?”
“You go to sleep, baby. This is all going to work out. You’ll see. We’re going to work all this out.”