Page 33 of Perdition

“The hell?” he snapped, shocked.

“Seriously, Dad. Give her some space. When she’s ready to talk to you, you know she’ll come around. Mom stews, and once she’s done, she’ll have all her words lined up, ready to go. Then you can take your licks and bend the knee, and give her all the chocolate.”

He chuckled. “Did you just make a Game of Thrones reference?” he asked, fully willing to acknowledge that he’d watched the show with Em, as dedicated to the plot and characters as any diehard. That show was the shit—at least until the last season.

“Yes—but the books, not the show,” Sorsha admitted in a haughty tone.

He chuckled again, smiling for the first time in two days. “Right.” He sobered quickly at her next words.

“I love you, Daddy…but you did wrong,” Sorsha asserted, a sadness in her voice he’d never heard before.

You’ve never hurt her mom before—not like that, at least. He wasn’t perfect; their marriage wasn’t perfect, and he wasn’t a perfect parent. For the first time in his baby girl’s short life, her daddy had done something that disappointed her. And it crushed him.

War was no different; telling his dad, a man he looked up to, that he wasn’t happy with how he’d hurt his momma.

His voice thick, cracking, he replied, “I know, baby.”

“Make it right.”

She ended the call before he could tell her he loved her, too.

And again, that crushed him.

His baby girl was mad at him, disappointed in him, and wary of him. She’d lost trust in him, her faith in him as a man, as a father, as a husband had failed.

And he could guess—correctly—that Em was feeling the same way.

“Fuck,” he spat, right before the cell in his hand began to ring again.

When he checked the screen, he cursed again.

Sarah.

Motherfuck.

He hit IGNORE, then headed toward where he parked his bike, feeling lost.

In the forty years of his life, he’d never, not once, known what he was supposed to be doing, what his next steps were. Even as a teen, he knew he wanted to join the Army, then he wanted to use what he’d learned to start a business, raise a family.

With Emily.

Even before they’d become a couple, it had been Emily.

He just hadn’t known it until years later, when she was laying on his chest, both of them bare, both of them sweating after two rounds of hard, frantic fucking—the kids had just gone to bed, he’d just come home on leave from Fort Drum, and he and Emily were making up for lost time.

There was almost four years between them, and that had never bothered him before, but he knew, even back then, that when he was looking at eighteen, and she was still fourteen, people wouldn’t be too keen about him paying too much attention to her.

But it hadn’t been like that between him and Emily, not then.

They’d grown up together; their grandparents were neighbors and friends, and Em and her family would be over all the time, especially during the summer when she was out of school. They lived in a rural area, so there wasn’t much to do, and there weren’t many people their age to hang with, so more often than not, Em and Mads would spend long days together, just the two of them, getting themselves in and out of trouble. He was the older one, so he made sure she never really got hurt, because it was his job to keep her safe. Keep her happy.And Em’s smiles, even on her twelve-year-old face, lit him up so bright on the inside he nearly burst with it.

It was still that way. Except now, her smiles were so far and few in between, he was pale, lifeless, and wasting away in the darkness where he light used to shine.

When Em hit fourteen, his feelings were still platonic—they were best friends, neighbors, confidantes, and dream weavers. He couldn’t remember how many nights they’d lain in the grass outside the old barn and spun stories about what their lives would be like. Each dream, each story, was a little different, but one thing about them always stayed the same.

Em was in his stories.

Mads was in Em’s stories.