Runaway Heart (A Game of Hearts #2) (25 page)

“Hannah…” she dragged out, and it was enough for me to understand.

I stood up. Paced across my room as my heart sent rockets filled with terror through my bloodstream. “Is she all right?” I asked, scared to know her answer.

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly, her eyes following my form back and forth. “Please, sit down, Hannah. You’re making me upset thinking you’re upset.”

“I am upset!” I tugged at my hair. “How… how did she even know how to get in touch with you?”

“She called my dad.”

I stopped. Thought about the only other time she’d ever called Maggie’s dad.

The night
he
hit me.

The night
I
ran away.

My hands were on my dresser, pants and shirts being tossed over my shoulder.

“What are you doing?” She made her way over to me, panic in her voice.

“Looking.” I slammed the drawer shut and opened another.

She bent down with me. “For?”

I found the square piece of paper I was looking for. “For this.”

A crinkled, faded Polaroid—the only picture I had of the three of us.

Even then, when I was a baby in her arms, you could see the faint bruise around her eye. The slight off-yellow color a bruise took when it was weeks old.

A thousand feelings at once stormed my throat, cutting off my ability to breathe. What if she had been hurt? Really hurt this time? She would never reach out to Mr. Fairchild because of the shame she felt. And she never reached out to me. Not since the day I left, because she seemed to accept it. Maybe was even a little bit grateful that one of us got away from him.

And I had just left her.

That easily behind.

Just as easily as he had.

“Oh, God, Maggie. What have I done?”

“Hannah, hang on a second—”

“No, Maggie. I have to go to her. Have to help her. I can’t keep… I can’t keep running.”

“Then I’m going with you.”

My heart stopped just thinking about her being in the presence of that… that man.

“No,” I said, gripping her arms. “You have Autumn to think about.”

“Hannah.” She grabbed me, shaking me slightly. “I understand why you’re concerned. I really do, but you have to remember we are grown women. One little old man with a mean streak doesn’t scare me, and I’ll do everything in my power to show you the same truth.”

She grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight, telling me so many things in her fierce gaze. And I believed her. I felt myself coming back, piece by piece, remembering my own strength.

Sometimes you just needed a good kick in the ass.

I WASN’T GOING TO LIE. Pulling up outside of the house I grew up in felt like walking down a dark alley at night without any sort of weapon to defend yourself.

Only the house seemed smaller. Sadder even.

The siding was covered in algae. The roof almost seemed to sag from the weight of the secrets it supported over the years. My father hadn’t kept it up the way he did when I was younger. He might not have cared about the state he left his wife in, but he damn sure cared about the well-being of our home.

But as I gazed up at it, I couldn’t tell.

“Ready?” Maggie said as she paid the cabbie and opened the door.

Yes and no.

I got out behind her. Straightened my shoulders as I told myself I could do it. That I wasn’t the same little girl anymore.

That my mother needed me more than I needed my fears.

I took the first step. Made my way down the cracked pavement and up the creaking steps to the front door, with Maggie somewhere behind me.

And I hesitated.

I didn’t know if I should knock, or just walk in. It wasn’t my home. Hadn’t been for a long time. The sounds were different… the way the wind blew through the porch, whistling like a distant train. The way the sprinklers weren’t spraying like they used to at that time every day.

But I had to face my past. Once and for all.

I knocked and took a step back. Chewed on my fingernails, and then played with the end of my shirt until Maggie smacked my hand away.

No one answered.

I looked back at Maggie.

Turned back to the door.

My hand wrapped around the cold handle. Turned clockwise as I sucked in a huge breath.

The smell hit me first, and it nearly buckled my knees. Cigarettes and stale air. The oil my mother used to fry his chicken in.

And the stench of sadness.

The smell took me back to her tears. Took me back to the moments I laid awake shaking, praying to whoever would listen that he’d stop hitting her.

That he wouldn’t come after me next.

You’re strong, Hannah. You can do this,
I chanted, sucking down the tears and burying them deep so I could use them as fuel to face whatever was about to happen.

I crossed the threshold, my pulse beating in my wrists and ears. My brain rapidly fired through all the memories. All the places she could be, or the things that could have already happened.

The floors groaned under my weight as I stopped in the foyer. Squares of bright yellow littered the walls of the hallway where my childhood pictures once hung. Decayed flowers hung from a vase on the table by the door.

If it weren’t for the sound of the TV coming from the den, I would have thought it was abandoned.

“Mother?” I called, peeking into the den off to the right of the door. The TV was on a sports station, replaying whatever my father had been watching. A trail of smoke slithered toward the roof from a lone cigarette left perched on his ashtray next to his worn-down recliner.

No one answered back.

Maggie came in behind me and shut the door, her hand on my shoulder, telling me she was with me, every step of the way.

I blinked through the colors of panic filling my eyes. Braced myself through her touch to keep from turning back, and then glanced into the dining room to the left. A plate sat on the table with the empty plastic shell from a frozen dinner.

“Mom?” I croaked out, passing through the dining room to the kitchen.

My feet froze when I saw his form hunched over the sink.

Every ounce of me wanted to turn and run, but I dug my heels into the ground, knowing there was no going back. I had to face him. Had to find out where my mother was.

“Your mother isn’t here.”

His voice. Still harsh and rough like sandpaper. Still devoid of emotion.

My stomach dropped a flight of stairs. “Where is she?” I kept my voice flat.

“Gone,” he said, and then he flicked the switch to the garbage disposal.

The awful scraping sound gurgled and scratched at my ears, rattling my bones as he turned around to face me. Still sinister. Still looking to get a rise out of me.

His white shirt was stained yellow around the armpits and neck… something my mother wouldn’t have let happen. His eyes were sunken in with large, purple bags hanging under them. He was a withered-up, wrinkly old man, who looked nothing like the monster I left behind so many years ago.

He just looked… human.

“What do you want?” Irritation stained his tone.

My heart clobbered within my chest like a rabid animal. I thought about leaving. Running. And then I thought about her. And about Ed. And about all the things I’d buried under my tongue for longer than I could remember, and a sort of bomb exploded inside me.

“You never deserved her,” I said, praying she was all right. That I wasn’t too late.

“No?” His voice raw.

“So many years… too many I wasted being scared of you,” I said, my voice thick and sore. “All I ever wanted was to be good enough. For you to look at me the same way you looked at Jack. For you to love me.”

“We all want things we can’t have, now don’t we?” He turned back to shut the disposal off.

A lightning strike of anger crackled against my spinal cord.

“Don’t you turn away from me!” I snapped, feeling like I was breaking clean in half. Like the shell I spent years forming around me was slowly beginning to fracture and crumble away.

He turned back to face me, the angry look in his eyes I memorized long ago returning. “Or what?”

If he looked closely enough, he’d see the tremor in my hands. The vein beating wildly in my neck.

But, then again, he never
looked
at me.

“Look… look at you!” I stuttered out, riding the high of my own hatred for him. “You’re weak. And you’re sad. A sad old man who wasted his life by trying to ruin everyone else’s. I hate you,” I said, not caring that my voice was trembling and my eyes were beginning to pour out all the pain he caused. “Do you know that? I hate you so much I can barely breathe.”

His hand gripped the sink, his eyes never leaving mine as he took in my words.

“Why couldn’t you be there? Love me the way a father should? Why was the only emotion you ever showed just your fists and your hatred? What did she ever do to you? What did I ever do?”

He stared at me with those dark eyes that never showed an ounce of emotion. “I told you before. You were a mistake. I never wanted children and she knew it.”

“And Jack? Was he a mistake?”

I felt ashamed of myself… like a beggar asking for food. Felt as ineffective as a squirrel trying to move a tree. He wasn’t going to hear me. Understand me.

Not ever.

He didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to. It was in his eyes. I was the only mistake in his eyes. I was the one who pulled my mother’s attention from him. Who
needed
from him.

Don’t fall apart.

“No.” I felt myself slowly piecing back together. Felt my heart pumping out the love I felt for Ed and for Maggie, the two who would always be there, filling me with strength.

One man’s opinion didn’t have to be my truth.

“What you did was take a perfectly good child and ruin her childhood. What you did was raise a daughter afraid to love and be loved in return. What you did,
Dad
, was take the only chance you had at love and squashed it deep into the ground, burying it in a hell you’ll soon enough find yourself in.

“And you know what?” I said, trying to collect myself. Realizing I held on to a human more broken than even I was. “I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

“Is that so?” No one threatened my father.

“Yes,” I said, more firmly that time. “I thought I wasn’t good enough because you told me so. You told me I didn’t deserve love, and I believed you. But that was then and this is now.

“I didn’t see it then and, how could I have? I was little. You were my father. But how can I take the word of a man who doesn’t even understand how to love? You don’t know the first thing about what I deserve.”

I stepped up to him, closing the distance between us. Smelling the cigarettes on his breath.

“The only mistake that happened was ever letting myself think I didn’t deserve love because you said so. I’ve given you too many years of my life. Given too many chances at a real life to the memories in this house. Memories are just that… the past. They can’t hurt me anymore.
You
can’t hurt me anymore.”

I saw his fist ball. Saw the same look he always got when he was close to snapping.

“You want to hit me?” I asked, stepping up to him. “Go right on ahead, because I’m not seventeen anymore,
Dad
, and I sure as hell won’t take it like Mom did. You will spend your last days rotting in jail.”

We stood like that for a split second, neither of us wavering, and I relished in the liberation that came with standing up to him. With calling his bluff. Felt the last pieces of my shell fall to ashes at my feet.

His hand relaxed, his eyes moving to the side. “You wouldn’t,” he said, his voice bumpy.

“You want to test that theory?”

He chuckled.

It was the first time I ever heard what his laughter sounded like.