harshly. “When she was diagnosed, she became obsessed with you. You were all she talked about, all she wanted to help and then Dad started looking into everything. They’d talk for hours about you, how to help, what they could do, if anything, and I was so damn pissed. So pissed she was spending all of her energy on someone like…” He paused and shook his head.
When he gritted his jaw together, I finished it for him and hated the pain in his eyes as I did. “Someone like the person who killed your mom.”
“You have to understand what that felt like to me.” His dark eyes were now rimmed with tears and bloodshot. His features made him look like the world’s most furious lion. “You have to understand what that did to me. Melissa was dying. She should have been fighting for herself. She needed to be resting and taking care of herself to give herself a better chance of survival, to conserve her energy.” His tone went ragged as he relived this pain, all that anger he had for his sister turned on me, making him fiercer. And yet as he ranted, as he poured out his truths I’d wanted to learn, I had to beat back the overwhelming urge to go and comfort him. “She should have been taking care of herself and all she thought of was you.”
Tears burned my eyes, my nose, my throat. There wasn’t a single square inch of my body that didn’t burn beneath his hatred for me as well as his pain.
“My mother was dead. My sister was dying, and she kept praying and dreaming of ways to help someone. Help you. Which yes, brought up a lot of anger and memories about how our mom died. So yeah, I was pissed. I was really fucking mad at her for not taking care of herself, spending her energy she needed to live on a cause that had seemed so useless.”
His words slashed at me like a whip. Every one of them hurt. The judgment on his face he’d kept so hidden. Had he ever not seen me like that?
“My parole,” I rasped through the agony whipping through me. I had to know. Had to know how they helped. How deep did their help go?
“Melissa died and made us swear we’d help. She pleaded for months, and finally Dad agreed he’d do whatever he could. I didn’t. I stormed out of her room and a week later she was gone.” He squeezed his eyes closed before pressing his thumb and finger to the bridge of his nose to staunch the flow of tears as his shoulders shook. “My sister died, and then Dad did the exact same thing she’d done—spent months trying to figure out a way to help you.”
Every muscle in my body tightened as his emotions ravaged him from the inside out. His despair so palpable, my fingers burned to comfort him, to throw my arms around him and hold him and apologize for being the one who caused so much turmoil before Melissa’s death. Apologize for being me.
“I’m sorry you lost her,” I said instead.
He stayed like that for several moments, shoulders quaking with such force before he collected himself and licked his lips. When he did, it didn’t seem like he saw me, but was looking through me. “Dad has a lot of contacts, in law and in the justice system here. He had some lawyers dig into your behavior and your record when you were inside. Once he learned you were becoming eligible for parole, he hired a lawyer to help. He wrote a letter, a character reference, and then attended your hearing. He didn’t want you to be paroled to go back to Illinois with nothing, so he tried to get your parole here, so he could keep an eye on you.”
A tidal wave of emotions threatened to drown me. David had done this. From the very beginning when he came into the diner, he’d already known so much. Was that why he didn’t speak much? Too worried he’d get to know me, and I’d ruin this perfect facade they’d seemed to have crafted of me? Had he watched me, kept his distance at least emotionally until he finally deemed me worthy of his dying daughter’s wish?
“Ellen?” I asked before more tears fell. “Did she know?”
He nodded, features slowly softening so he didn’t look so much like a caged animal. “Dad reached out to her once