Just Sign Here - Cara Dee Page 0,51

dog, getting mustard and relish on his fingers. “I had a fight with my mom over the phone. All I did was express worry about being away from them for so long, and she laid into me. Said I should stop treating her like a child, which, of course, made me feel guilty and…blah. It’s a whole thing between us.”

I squeezed his knee and took a bite of my pizza. “Start from the beginning, and then maybe I can help.”

If this was rough for him, he didn’t show it. Hopefully, my reassurance at the pool yesterday had alleviated his fears. He did look very tired, though.

“I’m gonna go with the shortest version,” he said. “Partly because there isn’t all that much to say, and partly because I’m better at answering questions than rambling. Unless it’s about history.”

I smiled softly and nodded for him to go on.

“So, she was a single mom with me for the longest time,” he started. “We made it work pretty well, I thought. But she was lonely and exhausted, working three jobs and so on. There’s no one else—our family’s tiny, even more so after Nana died.” He wiped his mouth on a napkin. “Mom met a dude when I was…sixteen, I think. And by dude, I mean a fucking asshole. He and I didn’t get along whatsoever. He was a dick to Mom, and she refused to see it.”

Having only heard the beginning, it was already easy to see why Peyton had been tired for years. A mental exhaustion that couldn’t be treated with a nap. He’d been forced to grow up too early.

“She’s always liked to drink with dinner,” he went on. “I didn’t see it as a problem. It was how I grew up. But then she got pregnant with Anna, and she kept drinking. I confronted her about it, of course, and that’s when I noticed that she’d covered a bruise on her arm. I was fucking livid. I had no fuse back then—not when it came to her asshole boyfriend.”

He’d stopped eating. Instead, he stared at his hands in his lap. If he’d been a woman, I would’ve thought he was inspecting his nail polish with how he held them out. But he was studying his knuckles. He drew a finger over a scar I hadn’t noticed before.

“You went after him,” I concluded quietly.

He nodded. “He worked at a construction site across town, and I didn’t even think. I just drove over there and beat the shit out of him.”

Christ.

“He was actually fired,” he said. “The official reason was that he drank on the job, which didn’t surprise me one bit. What did surprise me was that he cooled down for a while after that. I’d expected him to come after me, but he didn’t. He ignored me completely, and I tried not to be around when he was home.”

He cracked his knuckles absently and glanced at the horizon where the sun was dipping lower and lower.

“But an abuser never stops when he gets caught,” he murmured. “They just change tactics. I wasn’t around enough to see it either. I was always at a friend’s house or at the Quad.”

I cocked my head. “The Quad?”

“Ah, yeah, a place for teenagers. Usually those who don’t wanna be at home for one reason or another.” He reached for his fountain soda but didn’t drink from it. “About a week after Anna was born, I heard them fighting in the living room. He wanted her to shut the baby up.”

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, instantly flooded with anger.

“Yeah, sweet guy.” He nodded once. “I guess he couldn’t maintain the charade any longer—combined with my eyes opening a bit more. He’d never stopped beating her. He’d just gotten better at hitting her where the bruises didn’t show.” He squinted at something and scratched his forehead. “I’m rambling, aren’t I? Can I blame you for drawing it out of me?”

I ignored his weak attempt at humor and gave his knee another squeeze. “You can blame whoever you want, as long as you keep going.”

He blew out a breath and nodded slowly. “In short, it was a shitshow after that. I alternated between keeping my mouth shut—so I could be there for Anna—and getting into vicious fights with both him and my mom, because this couldn’t go on. I just watched her sink deeper and deeper into alcoholism, and I asked her what would happen once she got fired. When she could no longer keep a job. And