remorse hit her. Colton’s arrest had always been her fault.
“Look at me,” Daddy had demanded.
And when she’d looked up, his cold gray eyes had bored a hole right into her middle. “Are you ready to tell the truth?” he’d asked.
She’d met his stare and told him the truth. But he didn’t believe it.
Three days later, he’d sent her away to a strict boarding school for teens with behavioral problems. On the day she’d left, he’d said, “When you apologize and tell me the truth, you can come home.”
“Jessica?” Topher’s voice pierced the toxic fog of her memories. “Please look at me.”
His tone was nothing like Daddy’s now that she thought about it. Her father had demanded. Topher was merely asking. But the words were the same, and it was more than she could bear.
“No,” she raged. “No, I won’t. I won’t look at you just because you demand it. I won’t tell lies for you just because you’d prefer to hear them. I won’t apologize for anything I did. I just won’t.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me lies,” he said. “I can take the truth. Whatever it is.”
His tone was so gentle that she finally met his gaze, stunned by the fact that he was astonishingly handsome, even with the scars marring his face, even with the eye patch. And he wasn’t wearing his anger on his sleeve right now. He wasn’t staring at her the same way Daddy had stared that day.
“That’s better,” he said softly. “I like it when you look right at me. It gives me hope or something, because the truth is, not many people look at me anymore. I’m as ugly as sin.”
“No—”
“Yes. I am. And it’s a kind of armor. Because it means that you could take me to your darkest nightmare and I could endure it because I’ve already experienced the worst that life can hand out.”
“They didn’t believe me,” she said. “And you know what? They weren’t the first or the last ones not to believe me. Sometimes it feels like no one ever believes me. I tell the truth, and it’s like…I don’t know…spitting in the wind or something.” She shook her head as a knot the size of Alaska lodged in her throat.
“Who didn’t believe you?”
“My parents. Daddy.” She hauled in a big breath. “He believed all the gossip everyone told about me. And when I insisted that it wasn’t true, he called me a liar and sent me away to a school for troubled teens.
“It’s worse than that, really. He never let me come back. He insisted that I apologize for things I never did in order to be allowed back into the family.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
“Do you think I should have lied to him?” she asked in an angry tone. A tear escaped her eye and rolled down her cheek. “Because I was so damn stubborn, you know. I was determined to have my truth. And I lost my father because of it. I might have lost my mother too. It took fourteen years before I finally gave in.”
“You gave in? Why?”
She nodded as more tears trickled out of her eyes. “It’s crazy and complicated. The more important question is why I defied them in the first place.”
“No.”
“Yes. But it wasn’t really defiance. I was trying to prove something. You know, my family was pretty religious. We went to church every Sunday, and I got my weekly dose of how important it was to love. To love everyone.
“And when I got older, I decided I’d love Colton. Not the way people talked about us. But, you know, I’d make him my friend. Just to prove something. Just to underscore my father’s hypocrisy. Because he was good at loving certain people and looking down his nose at others.
“And boy, that backfired on me. For a very long time, I thought hate was more powerful than love.”
“Why on earth did you ever come home?”
“Because I don’t really believe that. Believing that hate always trumps love is a horrible way to live.” Her voice shook, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. “And when Momma got sick…” She looked away, unable to say another word.
When Momma had gotten sick, Jessica had been ready for forgiveness. She’d been through therapy, and she’d been willing to accept the lie for a chance to reconcile.
After fourteen years of standing on principle, accepting the lie seemed so simple. And the reward was salvaging her relationship with Momma and Granny.