Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 74875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
“What you said was that you think that I’m inferior, useless, and a waste of space.”
My entire being stilled, and I realized instantly that what I was dealing with now was a wound not made by me, but by a man that was supposed to protect the heart he had control of. By a man that you were supposed to trust with everything.
Hennessy, however, couldn’t. She didn’t even realize that what she had was rotten, and I wasn’t sure if she still understood it.
I did.
I could see that she was ready to fight me over something imaginary that she heard, and that imaginary thing only solidified what she’d already been leaning towards since she’d found out about my fictitious child.
“Hennessy,” I said carefully. “Did your father tell you that you were a waste of space?”
I said it so controlled, I hoped, that none of my anger toward her father bled through.
This was something I was going to have to step around carefully.
There were so many booby traps that her father had been responsible for that I didn’t know where to step without permanently damaging something pivotal.
“My father told me a lot of things,” she laughed humorlessly. “What else do you want to know about how awful he used to be to me?”
My belly clenched, and anger started to ignite in my blood.
That stupid fool she called a father was a sorry excuse for one. Mine had been bad, but hers? Well, he deserved a gold medal for shitty father of the year—hell, of the goddamn century.
As if I needed anything else to hate him for.
I took a step forward and lifted my hand to touch her face. When she didn’t step away, I pulled her face closer to me and stared deep in her eyes.
“Tell me what you want to tell me,” I whispered.
She took a deep breath and stepped away. “To tell you that, I’d need to get drunk.”
I grinned. “Then get drunk.”
***
And she did.
She was drunk as a skunk, as they would say in the South.
She was sitting in the chair at her kitchen table two hours later, her face twisted as she relayed yet another horrible scenario.
This one was when she was eighteen and she’d told her father that she was going with Krisney to college four hours away—out from under his thumb and his rules.
“He thought I was kidding at first,” she whispered, staring at her nearly empty bottle of wine. “Kind of laughed, then went on about his business as he prepared for a sermon. But then, at church the next day, everyone was congratulating him on me getting into UT, and it really hit home.” She paused. “That was the night that he hacked my hair off the last time before I left.”
I gritted my teeth in order not to say anything.
Each time I said something, she went off on a different topic on how her father abused her. Each time she spoke about him, it was even worse than the time before.
I was hanging on by a thread, and that thread was the tears that were threatening to fall each time she explained the next experience.
“Then I had all those blissful years without him,” she whispered. “Since I got the scholarship and school loans, I didn’t have to talk to him but for the occasional obligatory phone call that he deigned to make on Christmas and Thanksgiving.”
“Each year he got more and more angry because his congregation was asking about me and if I would be home that year, and when he said no, they’d get all sad for him.”
Fuck him. He deserved to be treated like that.
In reality, he deserved to have my foot up his ass, but with me being a felon, that probably wouldn’t go over really well with the local police department.
In this fucked up community that we had, everyone thought Pastor Hanes was a fucking sweetheart. He was an old widower.
“I think he cheated on my mother with someone,” she whispered. “My mom was dying of cancer, and she was so sick that she couldn’t get out of bed anymore.” She circled her finger around the rim of the wine glass. “I got home one night after staying at Krisney’s and found a woman leaving…”
She paused for so long that I knew what she was going to say next. “My mother?”
She bit her lip and looked at me. “Yes.”
I closed my eyes and looked down at my lap.
“Goddammit,” I rumbled. “I’m sorry, honey.”
I wasn’t surprised, though. My mother was my mother. There would be no apologies for how she acted. She did what she did and she didn’t care who she offended when she did it, even the teenage daughter of a dying woman that belonged to the man she was sleeping with.
She shrugged. “That was the first time I realized that my father wasn’t a very good man.”