You and Everything After (Falling #2)(90)

“I appreciate what you said the other day…that you stood by Cass like that. It was…maybe a little surprising,” he says, his head cocked to the side as he looks at me with a knowing smile, one eyebrow raised.

“Thank you…sir?” I’m a dead man. I feel like a dead man.

“But I just wanted you to understand something, and please…don’t take this in a bad way, like I’m attacking. I…I just get the feeling that you and my daughter might be a whole hell of a lot more serious than her mother and I thought you were, so I thought this was important for me to say,” he says, and I can feel the sweat run down my back.

“The choices I made for my daughter, with this Paul Cotterman guy…they aren’t the easy route. You insinuated I was taking the easy route, but let me be clear—nothing about what I’ve done concerning that man, my daughter, and this case has been easy. Every fiber in my being wants to drag that * through court—to spread his story through every front page I can get to print it, to have him become viral on social media and the punch line for late night television shows. I want to spend months digging through his list of old girlfriends, hiring private investigators to uncover dirt, to make a case so strong that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that my daughter is right. I know she is. God, Tyson—I’ve known it all along. But what would that do to her life? Dragging this story out, making it bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until it followed her forever? She’d have to live this. So as much as it kills me to let that * off the hook, as much as it killed me last year to appease the talking heads at her high school district, I struck a deal, and paid them all to keep their mouths shut. Forever. Because my daughter doesn’t deserve a media circus, and I have the means to make her nightmares go away.”

He’s looking down the hallway again, his jaw flexing, his teeth gritting.

“I think you should share that with her. I think she could really use hearing it,” I say.

“No, she needs to be angry at someone, until she’s done feeling angry,” he says. “And I’ll take the hard way, Ty. I’ll be that person she’s angry with. As much as it breaks my heart, I’ll be it for as long as she needs.”

His head hung low, he grips the handle to the door and takes a deep breath, trying to replenish his energy, his spirit—so that way when he walks into that room with his daughter, she has no clue how broken he is on the inside. I let him go in first, and I listen to his now-booming voice, confident and strong, and I move forward to watch him lean forward and kiss his daughter’s head. She shuts her eyes, wincing when he does. And I know that breaks him even more. But he sits down in the chair next to her and waits, all the while his jaw muscle clenching, biting his tongue, being that person.

For as long as it takes.





Chapter 29





Cass


The nausea was better this round, maybe because I was expecting it and didn’t eat anything that would make things worse. After five days, my flare-up seemed to be under control. My vision was back to normal, and steroids always leave me feeling strong and full of energy, so my wobbly legs were once again dying to run.

Ty’s heading back to Louisiana today; I don’t want him to go. I’ve said all along that he’s magic. Since he’s been here, my family has never felt more like…well, mine. Ty was really interested in my car, so my dad and I took him for a spin out along highway 101 at sunset a couple of nights ago. The farther north you get, the less crowded the roadway is, and my dad gave me the nod—the one he saves for when my mom isn’t looking. I hit about one-ten before my dad put his hand on my arm, warning me to slow down.

I was back to that innocent sixteen-year-old again, the one who learned how to change her own oil from her dad the day she got the keys to Uncle Lou’s Charger. Paige got a new Mazda, and she apologized to me over and over, feeling bad that I was slighted with the used car. My dad and I never laughed about it in front of her, but on our own, in the garage, we’d cut loose. I’d been eyeing this car since I was five.

Ty being around somehow brought those feelings back. And I’m afraid as soon as he goes life at my house is going to go back to lectures about my health, orders to quit playing soccer, and…the Cotterman issue.

“You know, I still haven’t seen the beach. I mean, up close,” Ty says, holding his coffee mug up to his lips, blowing the steam away. Even my mother is in his pocket now, as she runs over with two ice cubes to cool it for him. “Thank you, Mrs. Owens.”

“Diana,” she practically sings.

I shake my head at him, amazed at his skills.

“What?” he shrugs.

“You can charm the pants off anything, can’t you?” I say, regretting it immediately as I watch his smirk curl above the steam from his coffee. “Don’t even think about saying it.”

“What, me? Cassidy! Always the pervert, you are,” he says, sipping and slurping loudly just to annoy me.

“You wanna see the beach or not?” I ask, mostly to get out of his razzing.

“Let’s do it,” he says, sliding his mug on the counter and pulling his McConnell baseball hat low on his head. I love that hat on him, the way it barely shades his eyes. He’s downright sinister looking, but in the sexiest way.