Stay with Me (Wait for You, #3)(136)

But she didn’t give me the option.

Mom walked away, going to the back door, and I knew this was her way of saying no touching. She was leaving and with my heart firmly lodged in my throat, I watched her open the door—the one she had picked the lock to open.

And then I thought of Mona’s.

“Wait,” I called out, holding the papers close to my chest. And I knew it wasn’t so much my concern for the bar that had me calling out to her. I was delaying the inevitable. “What about Mona’s—the bar?”

Her dark brows pinched. “What about it, baby?”

Okay. I doubted she had forgotten about it. “The bar, Mom. What are you doing with that? If you’ve left me the house, did you sign over the bar, too?” Because that bar only passed to me in case of her death, and I sure as hell didn’t want to say or think that.

Mom shook her head. “Baby, I don’t own the bar anymore. I haven’t in . . . a year or so.”

The floor shifted again. “What?”

“I sold it for . . .” She barked out a dry, weak laugh. “That doesn’t matter. I sold it and it’s in good hands, baby.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose and a weird rush of goose bumps raced across my skin. I suddenly thought I should be sitting.

“And you’re in the same good hands. I always thought that . . . you and Jackson would be perfect for one another. He’s a good boy. Yeah, a really good man. He loves strong and he cares, really cares,” she went on as I reached out, bracing myself by putting a hand on the back of the dining room chair. “He’s been good for the bar. He’ll take care of it like he has been.”

I drew in a sharp breath. “Jax owns the bar?”

Mom nodded and her hand tightened on the door handle. “I don’t want that kind of life for you. You’re going to be a nurse, right? You’re going to make a difference in people’s lives. Good things. That’s your . . . it’s your path.”

I blinked. Wait. What? “How did you know that?”

She opened her mouth and then her stringy hair bounced around her cheeks again. “I gotta go, baby. Be good. I know you will, but be good and . . . and be happy. You deserve that.”

Then she was gone, slipping out the door like a wraith, and I stood there, caught between too many emotions to even move. Mom was gone. She was really gone now, and before she’d left, she’d given me the world.

And she had also rocked a very large part of it straight down to its now-cracked foundations.

I felt like an idiot.

Gathering up the papers Mom had given me, I took them with me to the couch and picked up my phone off the coffee table. I wished I had my car. Since the back window had been shattered and there were a few unnecessary holes in the body of the car during the Pennsylvania version of the O.K. Corral, my car was in the repair shop for the second time around, and I doubted these repairs would be a freebie. None of that mattered right now, though. I just wanted to get out of here. I needed to do something, because my head was spinning and there was pressure building in my chest.

It was almost eleven. Jax should be home soon, and as I eased up my grip on the phone, I considered texting or calling him. Instead, I dropped the phone on the coffee table.

I was so damn unobservant and stupid.

All of it made sense now and I should’ve known that Mom hadn’t had anything to do with the bar anymore. The condition it was in, the way it was running smoothly, and all the legit paperwork in that office screamed that someone else was in control. And Clyde had told me that I didn’t need to worry about the bar. Obviously not.

Mom had sold it to Jax and he had never told me. Neither had Clyde, but I wasn’t sleeping with Clyde, I wasn’t in love with Clyde; therefore Jax’s lack of sharing on that minor little detail seemed way more important.

I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t even understand why he didn’t tell me, especially after the first time I was in the office going through papers thinking I had every right to do so when apparently I had no right whatsoever.

Scrubbing my hands down my face, I stared at the deed to my mother’s house—now my house, my ticket out of the debt Mom had forced me into. That fixed the major problem looming over my head, the one I never forgot but tried not to dwell on because it would drive me crazy, but now . . . now there was this.

Jax had lied to me.

I didn’t know what to feel about any of this and I was feeling too much, because Mom was here and she had left for good, and Jax had kept something so big from me. My trust was rocked. It was shattered, barely held together.

If he lied about this, if he kept this from me, what else had he lied about or kept from me? I didn’t think that was an unreasonable question. From past experience I knew that when people kept things from others, there was more hidden in their depths.

Hell, I was a prime example.

My gaze flickered to my phone as I lowered my hands, then I leaned forward, snatched it off the table, and did something that I’d never done in the past.

I kind of felt bad for calling Teresa, because it was way late and I was sure I might have interrupted some one-on-one time with Jase based on his wrinkled clothing and the current tangled state of her hair.

But like a true friend, she answered the call. Not only that, but she and Jase had driven back over to Jax’s house and picked me up, taking me back to the suite they were sharing with Cam and Avery.