Down to My Soul (Soul Series Book 2)(81)

“I heard on the news that you were in the hospital.” He takes two more steps in my direction. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Fury elbows my shock aside. Outrage tightens my fingers into fists and boils hot water just below my skin until it overflows, hissing when it hits the surface.

“And what did you think you could do?” I snap. “You didn’t make sure I was okay when you missed my recital. That hurt. Or when I sprained my ankle at cheerleading camp, or broke my wrist in gymnastics.”

“Kai Anne, I—”

“Or how ‘bout this one? You weren’t here when my mama was sick.” My lip betrays a tremor, but I pull it tight. “I could’ve really used your help all those times, but you weren’t there for any of it. So why the hell would you think I need you now?”

“Baby girl, if—”

“Don’t you dare call me that.” Like a riled bull, I force air through my nostrils. “My father called me that, and you’re a stranger. I have no idea who you are.”

“I understand you’re angry.” He shakes his head, his expression helpless at how understated that must sound even to his own ears. “Anger probably doesn’t begin to cover it, but I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing knowing you were in the hospital.”

“I think you’re very good at sitting back and doing nothing. That’s exactly what you’ve done for the last fifteen years. Nothing. And it’s real convenient that you show up now that I’m on television and linked to a very wealthy man.”

“You can’t think . . .” He frowns. “I don’t want your money, Kai.”

“Good, because I don’t have much of my own yet, and if I had millions I certainly wouldn’t give it to you.”

“Maybe this was a mistake.” He directs his words and his eyes to the shed floor. “Carla just thought that—”

“Your mistress?” I slice into whatever crap he almost spouted about that whore he left my mother for.

Anger flashes in the glance he raises to me, but he quells it.

I thought so.

“My wife,” he says softly. “We got married.”

I grab the shelf to steady myself. He married that woman? That somehow makes it worse. She wasn’t some hussy he ran off with on a whim. He committed to her instead of to us. He chose her over us.

Over me.

“I . . . I didn’t realize that. I mean, I had no idea where you went.”

“Vegas.” He crosses over to the work table, picking up a mason jar and inspecting it. “We moved to Vegas.”

“Please tell me you see the irony of the southern Baptist preacher leaving his family with his . . .” The word “whore” hovers over my lips. “Mistress for Sin City.”

“Carla had some friends out there, and we just needed to get far away.”

I bend to finally pick up the cinnamon splattered glass at my feet. As careful with my next words as I am with the shards in my palm.

“Far away from us, huh?”

He looks up, his eyes muddied with regret or some emotion he shields with his lashes before I can fully read it.

“Not from you,” he says softly, swallowing visibly. He opens his mouth and then shuts it before trying again. “Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, Kai Anne. It doesn’t make it right, and I know you don’t care, but—”

“Not so much don’t care as don’t believe it.” I shuffle over to drop the broken glass into a trash can by the work table. Now only a few feet separate us, and there is some pitiful little eight-year-old ballerina in me who wants to fling herself into his arms, who is glad to see him after all these years.

Weak little snot. Sitting on that step in her ballet slippers waiting for him to come home. Waking up on birthday mornings wondering if a card would come. Every recital, secretly thinking this might be the one where he turned back up because he promised he’d never miss. And that little girl in her purple tutu and tights was always fool enough to believe him. Was it a secret hope, a hidden wish that if I made it big, he’d have to come? If I was a big enough star in the sky, it would draw him out from wherever he’d gone, and he’d have to come?

Looks like it worked.

“Mama’s dead.”

I say it just as much for my benefit as for his, a flat, harsh reminder that this man took everything from my mother, who deserves my loyalty. He may look like the man who sat me on his lap and read Bible stories to me, but he is actually the man who left my mother one afternoon and never looked back.

“I heard.” His lips turn down at the corners, and when he lifts his eyes to me I see genuine sorrow.

“Did you ever love her?”

Did you ever love me?

“Of course I did.” He shakes his head, shrugs the broad shoulders I remember thinking could carry the weight of the world. “Things got complicated.”

“Really? Seemed simple to me. You were married and had a family. You don’t f*ck around and leave them for the church secretary.” I offer a careless shrug of my own. “But hey, I was a kid. What did I know? Please enlighten me with your perspective. Tell me how very complicated it was.”

“I deserve that.”

“You deserve worse,” I spit, clenching my teeth around a stream of vitriol that’s been building in me for a decade and a half. “Mama deserved better.”