the memories now. As if in vivid Technicolor, they sputtered to life and began to play and replay over in his mind.
It was ironic, really, the day his mom chose to leave. She couldn’t have planned it better if she’d tried. On the same day she hustled out of town, Jared had been called into the principal’s office. Back then, he’d had nothing to fear from the principal. School had come easily to him. More than easy. He’d excelled in every subject. While his classmates were still working their way through elementary equations, Jared was breezing through work two to three grade levels above. And that was exactly what Mr. Larson had wanted to talk to him about on that fateful day.
You’re gifted, son. Your test results have only proven what your teacher has seen all along. We’re recommending you skip the third grade and possibly the fourth. We’ll need your mother’s permission, of course, but once she sees these scores, I know she’ll be as proud and excited as the rest of us.
Proud and excited. Yeah, that’s what Nancy would be.
Even at eight, Jared had had a hard time not laughing. The last thing his mother had been was proud and excited over her son.
How many times had Jared been forced to listen to how she coulda been something if only she hadn’t gotten knocked up. She’d been planning on going to cosmetology school; she was going to be somebody. Then some bastard had gotten her pregnant, and she had been forced to give up her dreams.
Some bastard. That was the only name Jared had for his father.
From what Jared could see, the only thing Nancy had been forced to give up was having to get off the couch. With Jared around, she had someone to wait on her hand and foot.
Still, even knowing what his mother was going to say, he hadn’t been able to hold back his excitement when he got home from school. But by that time, Nancy was already gone. For two weeks, he’d been able to lie. To keep his mother’s disappearance a secret. But in the end, it didn’t do any good. He never knew how they found out, but one day Child Protective Services had shown up, and just like that, he was thrown into the system, along with hundreds of other kids whose parents hadn’t wanted them.
Jared had always known the truth: Nancy had never cared about anything except her next drink, her next man. But knowing it didn’t make it any easier for an eight-year-old to swallow. While most people might think he’d been given a raw deal—tossed like a Frisbee from one foster home to the next—Jared knew the truth. His mother’s leaving had taught him the most valuable lesson of his life: the only person you could depend on or trust was yourself.
He’d learned quickly how to work the system. Another thing he could credit his mother for. From years of living with her, he knew how to put on a front. How to build a facade that to the outside world looked as if everything was okay. The state, the social workers, even the foster families he stayed with all bought it hook, line, and sinker. No matter how hard people probed or how far they tried to dig, Jared never let them in. And in time, that facade became more than just a pretense. It became who he was.
But somehow Jenny was able to see him clearer than anyone else.
She’d found a way to get to a place inside of him that no one else had. The more he was around her, the more he was beginning to remember all those stupid fantasies he’d had as a kid. Of how he’d wanted to find a home where he could belong . . . where he could fit. Where there was someone waiting just for him, wondering about him. Wanting to hear from him. He shook his head. By the time he was on his sixth foster family, he should have learned. And he had. Until his first year of flight school. He’d come home one day and found the gal he’d been seeing had moved in. He should have told Lisa to leave right then. To this day he still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t. But, in the end, it didn’t matter. Three months later she’d stormed out, telling him he was a coldhearted bastard who didn’t know the first thing about caring for anyone other