protecting a man who didn’t deserve it. Out of love. Out of loyalty.
But he hadn’t reached out to help her. And she had not reached out to him. To do so would be a betrayal of Nathan. And neither of them would do it.
They were too desperate to do the right thing. To earn the love of the man who withheld it with such ease.
He had always seen his mother as being a faded figure. She had never been deeply involved in her children’s lives. Everything she had ever done had been in the service of her husband. Gage had always felt a little bit disconnected from her. Had seen her as weak and frail if anything. But suddenly, in that moment, he had realized that the two of them had a lot more in common than he had seen before.
It had been something he was unable to shake.
It had lingered with him, even as he had continued to do everything his father asked him to do, continued on the path to become the son his father needed him to be. He had managed to twist it all inside of him. To believe his father’s version of the truth. That being a West, that protecting that name was the most important thing.
They were pillars of the community, after all. Those pillars had to be upheld, no matter what.
Deeper, though, something about that interaction with his father had shaken him to his core. And he had felt the need to push back. To create a situation in which his father would have to prove that loyalty he’d spoken of. And he had. He had done it, and he had swept Rebecca up in it too.
When he had stood before his father, the reality of what had happened laid out before them, he had waited for something. Some warmth. Some sign that his father did any of this out of love. And he realized then that the older man didn’t.
That was when it had all become clear to him. He wasn’t his father. He was his mother. The two of them would destroy themselves for love. For people who would never love them in return. And it wasn’t only themselves they would destroy, it was everyone around them.
That night was the first night he had dared to ask her about it directly. Dared to broach the subject, to even imply that Nathan West was anything short of perfect. He was bruised, he was broken inside and out. There was a girl in the hospital because of him, his father offering to make it go away, not out of love, but of loyalty.
“Why does he do it? Does it have anything to do with loving us?”
She had looked at him, and right in that moment Gage had realized how infrequently she did that. “He has too many things to care for to worry about loving people too much. That’s why he needs us to support him. But,” she said, her expression changing, sympathy in her pale blue eyes. “You have to be careful. Because people like you and me, we’ll give and give until it takes everything from us. We care more than other people, Gage. And it’s the kind of weakness that can ruin a person. And then when there’s nothing left in us, it starts taking from the people around us.”
He realized that that was exactly what he was doing. Already. The revelation about Jack had caused his rebellion, had caused him to act out the way that he did. And he had already started hurting people.
Rebecca had been the first casualty. All for what? To gain the attention of his father? To gain love that very likely wasn’t there?
He saw in his mother that endless forgiveness, that endless ability to put up with anything, and he saw how destructive it was. Because there was no end. His father could never satisfy her, she could never be satisfied. Anyone who was with him would end up in the same position.
And he was an unholy mix of the two of them. His destruction was bigger than his mother’s could ever be. He had all the selfishness, all the inclination to protect himself that his father had. And all of that need that came from his mother.
The terrible thing was, he had run to avoid doing more damage. That much was true.
But he had done more this way. So it hadn’t been the only reason. It hadn’t been for them. It had been