She cocked her head in his direction, her eyes still flat and dull. “How do you know what Jake went through? You two weren’t speaking before he died, Jax.”
Boom. Reece’s jab at the status of his and Jake’s relationship was like a sonic boom in his ears. “Yeah. We damn well weren’t.” And he’d been making it up to him ever since. Taking care of the one last thing he had in his life that kept him close to Jake.
“Thanks to me.”
“Yep.”
Now he wanted to hurt her. For taking pieces of people she had no right to take. Because her whims, her flights of fancy were all that mattered to her. “Did you know just a few weeks after you left your mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s? Do you have any idea how hard that was on your father? You missing, his wife diagnosed with a disease that would eventually eat her brain and a granddaughter with a new father who was half out of his mind with worry about you?”
Jax had seen it all. All the tears, the agonizing mourning Reece’s parents had suffered while they searched for their little girl. “They thought something happened to you, Reece. They spent thousands of dollars looking for you in those first months. They just wouldn’t believe Jake when he told them you just left.”
He’d heard it all after Jake died, and he was as convinced as Jake that Reece wasn’t taken by force or whatever story her parents had concocted in their heads to ease the selfishness that made up Reece.
Reece curled her hands around the bars on the bridge, her cheeks red from the harsh wind. “I didn’t know Mom was so sick until it was too late.”
“That’s what happens when you go abroad, Reece. People die. Babies live without their mothers.” Jax wanted to hurt her the way she’d hurt her parents, Maizy—Jake. He wanted to see her suffer the way everyone she’d left in her abroad wake had.
Still, she didn’t bite. No angry words, no defensive reactions, just straight ahead on a path he couldn’t figure. “But Dad says he still sees Maizy. Thank you for that.”
She’d talked to her father? Why hadn’t Lorne mentioned it? “I make it a point to bring her to see him twice a year, and she calls him once a week. She loves Pop-Pop Givens, and he spoils her senseless.”
Reece smiled then, that dazzling smile—the one that held the secret to everything. The answer to any man’s ills. Except his. Looking down at her now, he couldn’t even remember what she’d been like before today. Couldn’t remember a single thing he’d been drawn to.
All he could see, all he could hear, was how Maizy had been an afterthought to her. How she’d run away and left everyone to pick up the pieces of her broken life.
“I’m glad my dad knows her. What about Jake’s dad? Has he seen her?”
“Jake’s dad has no interest in anything but a case of beer and his misery. He was happy to walk away and never look back.” Just like you.
“Just like me, right?” She mirrored his thoughts.
“So let me get something straight here—even after you knew about your mother’s illness, when you knew Jake was dead, and you knew your dad couldn’t help with Maizy because your mother was so ill, you still stayed abroad? Not knowing what would happen to her? Jesus Christ, Reece! How the fuck could you be so damn selfish? She was two months old.”
“Because I knew.”
“Knew? Knew what?”
“That Jake would take care of everything. I knew he’d make sure his father never got anywhere near her, and I knew he’d take measures to ensure her safety after I left.”
Jax crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her. “Well, look at you. Always so sure everyone would handle your shit for you. Do you have any idea what could have happened to Maizy if Jake hadn’t made sure that will was airtight? If there’d been a single screwup in the language, she could have ended up in the foster-care system.”
But Reece didn’t take his angry bait. Instead, she shook her head, the mass of her red curls whipping in the wind. “Nope. I knew Jake. I knew that would never happen because Jake didn’t make mistakes, except for getting involved with me, and I knew, if my parents couldn’t take her, or if anything ever happened to them, he’d leave her to you. You were everything to him, Jax. He loved you like a brother.”
No. No, he wouldn’t allow that to hurt him anymore. He would pull that damn arrow out of his gut and drop it at her feet. “Until I wasn’t like a brother.” Jake had broken that pact, and it still killed him. “Last time I checked, there was some unspoken rule about sleeping with your brother’s girlfriend.”