Don't Let Go(74)

“Well, Jules, you don’t seem okay,” he said, pulling up a nearby stool. “And that would be okay if you’re not. You don’t have to pretend anything. That was pretty intense.”
“Intense.” I sank onto a stool and buried my face in my hands. “I am so sorry you had to witness that,” I said. “That thing you said about never knowing how these things are going to turn out—well, I guess I just made your case for the dark side.”
“Not at all,” Seth said, resting his elbows on the counter. “Y’all have been great. And Becca’ll come around. Was she upset about me when you told her?”
I shook my head. “Not about you. I think she was kind of intrigued by the idea, actually. It was my keeping it from her all this time that hit her buttons.”
“Why did you?” he asked.



Chapter 19

Why did I? I listened to my breath going in and out. “I don’t know,” I said. “I told myself I was protecting her, but that wasn’t it. I think it was just more of my mother’s voice saying to keep it all quiet.” I looked him in the eye. “I have no good answer for that.”
“Understandable, too,” he said, pausing. “Can I be honest with you?”
“Absolutely.”
Seth averted his gaze, studying his hands. “She’s a rebel. She’s testing boundaries.” He met my eyes. “Shon was like that, too. Me—I was probably an easy kid, but Shon was hard to follow sometimes. He was always bucking the rules.”
“That’s Becca,” I said.
“My parents were kind of sticklers about rules, too,” he said, blinking his gaze down. “And being the one usually watching the showdowns, I always wanted to ask them to back off a little.”
“I thought you said everything was good,” I said, feeling a frown dip my eyebrows.
“No, no, it was,” he said. “Our house was normal—but normal has chaos, too.”
“True.”
“And it seemed like the more my parents cracked down, the more Shon fought back.”
Our eyes met for a long moment. “What happened to him?” I asked.
“He got in some trouble,” Seth said, looking into his glass as though the story was in there. “I tried to help him, but he needed a different kind of help.”
“What kind?”
“Money to pay off debt—at nineteen years old,” Seth added, bitterness entering his voice. “He got mixed up with bad people, and then thought drowning his problems in a bottle would stop it.” He looked at me. “It did.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
“So he got behind the wheel after partying one night, and ended up dead,” Seth said, upending his glass and draining the tea.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I was twenty-one,” he said. “Just finishing up college. It’s part of what pushed me to join the police academy.”
“How did your parents handle it?” I asked, unable to imagine losing a child that way.
I’d lost one, too. But I knew he was still breathing. And then the most awful realization hit me. I hadn’t known, not really. I guess my mother did, but I didn’t. Shon’s birth mother—she probably had no idea.
“Like you’d expect,” he said. “It was hard to leave them after that, but they wanted me to go after what I wanted, so I did.”
“Do they—” I stopped and took a sip of my untouched tea, then got up to refill his glass. “Do they know you came to find us?”
“My dad does,” he said. “My mom—she’d probably be okay with it, but I just didn’t want to put that on her yet. At least not till I had something to tell. After Lisa bailed on the wedding and all—she would have just worried.”
I smiled. “She sounds like we’d have a lot in common.”
“You’re very similar, actually,” he said on a chuckle. “Eerily so.”
Becca came into the room, looking somber and clean-faced. “I need a note to get back in school.”
“What was your plan?” I asked.
“Hadn’t thought that far,” she said, nothing in her eyes. Nothing in her expression. She handed me a pen and piece of notebook paper. “Just—please write whatever you’re gonna write.”
She knew me. She knew I’d write something like, Please let Becca White back in school today, she was stupid and skipped class without my knowledge.
She knew that because it’s exactly what I would have done. As I looked at the trouble in her face and heard Seth’s words, however, I paused.
I looked at the blank page with its rumpled edges, pulled from some dark cave of her backpack, and started writing. When I handed it to her, she snatched it and walked off, but stopped at the doorway as she started reading. She turned back around with a question in her eyes.
“Really?”
“Consider it your freebie,” I said. “With the school, not with me.”
It would be a little while before we were good again. Her gaze darted to Seth and then to the floor, and she nodded and walked away.
“What did you write?” he asked.
“To excuse her for a family emergency and that she’d be back the next day,” I said, wishing I could put my head in my glass. My face felt on fire.
Seth’s eyes widened. “Wow.”
“Yeah, caving’s not really my thing,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “And I’m not sure how smart it was. Especially after her mouth overloaded her brain like that.”