Page 20 of Jonas (Silver Team #4)

“You keep saying that,” he noted. “Something to know about me, you can ask me anything. If I don’t want to answer, I’ll tell you.

But you don’t need to keep apologizing for asking and you don’t need to worry about offending me.

There’s nothing about my childhood I’m proud of, but I stopped being ashamed of it when I came to the realization my mother’s husband was fucked.

The uncomfortable truth is, my mother was too weak to protect Adam and I.

That’s not me blaming the victim of spousal abuse, it’s just the plain truth and it started before she married Ed.

My dad took care of her, and by that I mean he took care of everything.

He loved her so he didn’t mind, or if he did, he never showed it.

She didn’t work, but it was my dad who went to the grocery store, it was him who cooked most of the dinners, it was him who cleaned the house and did the laundry.

Honest to God, thinking back, I don’t know what my mother did with her day.

She put me and Adam on the bus and was out front waiting when we got home from school.

How ever she spent her time, it wasn’t picking up after her boys or going out and getting stuff for our lunches or dinner.

It wasn’t making sure we had clean clothes to wear.

She was just there. I noticed all the ways my dad took care of all of us, but I didn’t, not really.

Not until I was older did it occur to me that while my mom was kind and sweet and loving she was lazy.

She couldn’t be bothered to take care of a family, and if she didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom, go out and get a job.

My dad wasn’t the type of man who thought a woman’s place was at home.

He would’ve supported whatever she wanted to do.

It was her who didn’t want to work. It was also her who didn’t do a damn thing to help her kids get over the loss of their father.

She went through the motions, but the most she did was hug us when we cried.

She didn’t step up and take control of the family, she left me and Adam to figure it out. ”

I didn’t know what I hated more—Jonas losing his father or his mother’s inability to be a mother.

I knew a thing or two about weak women, the only difference was none of the women I grew up around were lazy.

Most of them worked harder than the men.

My mother included. Her weakness came in the form of selfishness.

She chose to save herself and left her children to the wolves, knowing we’d be eaten—especially me.

She left me knowing that one day my father would choose a man to give me to and that man would be nothing less than a monster.

“Ed killed Adam. Then he walked out the front door waving a gun at the cops who had responded to the neighbors’ nine-one-one calls, and died by suicide by cop. He couldn’t even do it himself, he forced some cop to bear that mark.”

At the news his stepfather killed his brother, my heart did this weird flutter thing that I’d never felt before. As if for just a moment my heart had stopped before it performed a double beat to get back into rhythm.

“When I got home I was treated to seeing my mother on her knees next to her dead husband while the son she’d grown in her womb and pushed out of her body lay dead in her kitchen.”

Red hot fury suffused my insides. Anger like I’d never known, not even at my own mother for leaving me or my father for beating me or towards my brother for turning into a man I despised, came in an overwhelming tidal wave.

The kicker was, this devastating hatred was geared at a stranger—but she’d hurt Jonas and that was all I needed to want to rain hellfire down on her until she felt every dram of pain she’d caused him.

“Jonas,” I whispered.

“Whatever respect I had for her, and there wasn’t much, died that day. I stayed to put Adam in the ground then I left and haven’t seen or spoken to her since.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen. Adam was seventeen. We only had a few months until he turned eighteen and we were leaving.”

My heart hurt for a young man who had a plan to rescue his brother from abuse but didn’t live to realize their liberation.

“I’m sorry you lost him, especially the way you did,” I muttered my understatement.

“I am, too.”

There was nothing I could say to Jonas that would help ease his pain; like mine it was embedded in his DNA. Tragedy had woven itself into the fibers, seeped into the marrow of our bones, fundamentally changed who we might’ve been.

Like me, he was an orphan—his by death and choice, mine out of that same choice but also out of fear and misfortune. My only wrongdoing was being born into dysfunction—a crime I’d paid for, a transgression that had left me alone in this world with no family.

But unlike me, Jonas had found his people—a new family built on loyalty and respect. Something I had yet to find. No, something I hadn’t allowed myself to seek out.

It was better to be alone.

There was no disappointment, no fear, no beatings, no guilt, shame, or sorrow. Alone was just alone and it was so freaking lonely.

But at least it was safe.