* * *
Jesse had only been gone for three hours. But those three hours had been hell for Sean. He had compassion for Madison, but she’d made him so angry and hit him at his core. Saying that he wasn’t good for Jesse. That Jesse shouldn’t be with him at all.
Intellectually he knew it wasn’t true. He loved his son, he knew he could be a good influence on him. But he couldn’t shake that niggle of doubt, that insecurity that he didn’t deserve Jesse.
Why had he gone to the boys’ home? Sean knew he’d made a connection with a couple of the kids, and he wished he’d brought Jesse over sooner. He hadn’t even thought about it until the barbecue last weekend when Jason Lopez brought his two kids, and Ryan Quiroz his two young boys, and a few other kids were over, that he realized for the first few weeks it had been just him and Jesse—and Jesse was a kid. He needed time with other kids.
Jack was certain that Jesse had overheard Sean and Madison arguing, and Sean wanted to hit himself for not thinking about that when he reacted to Madison’s demands. But was he supposed to let her just take Jesse? Not fight for him? It wasn’t just that he wanted to be part of his son’s life, but that there was a threat to his safety.
Unless it was all a lie. All set up by Carson Spade to make Madison think there was a threat so she’d bring Jesse back to Sacramento and ban Sean from future contact.
Why did Jesse choose to go to the boys’ home? Lucy had tried to talk to him last night, but Sean honestly wasn’t paying much attention. Now he wished he had. She had been talking about what Jesse was feeling, and maybe Sean dismissed it as psychology. He’d been so scared after the accident, and all he could think about was protecting Jesse and finding the truth. He owed Lucy an apology, because one thing she did well was get to the heart of a situation. She loved Jesse, but she didn’t have the same fears that he did, so she could assess things with a clearer head.
But first things first.
“I’ll check the grounds,” Jack said when they arrived.
“Thanks, Jack. For everything.” He motioned for Bandit to follow Jack; the dog obeyed.
Sean took a deep breath. He wanted to yell at Jesse for disobeying the rules and scaring him, and he wanted to hug him and never let him go.
He knocked on the door. Mateo answered.
“My brother-in-law is looking around,” Sean said so Mateo wouldn’t be suspicious if he saw Jack through a window.
“Come to the kitchen,” Mateo said.
Sean wasn’t a religious man, though he liked Mateo and had always felt comfortable here. But he was surprised when he didn’t see Jesse. Sister Ruth and one of the boys, Brian, were prepping for dinner. They discreetly left when Mateo entered with Sean.
“Where is he?” Sean asked.
“I thought we should talk a minute.”
“Mateo, I need to see him.”
“He’s fine. He’s playing video games with Tito. He said you told him he could come over and visit anytime. I didn’t know he left without permission, otherwise I would have called you sooner.”
Sean rubbed his eyes. “He heard his mother and me fighting. She flew out here to take him home.” His voice cracked and he took a deep breath. “I’m sure she’s on her way here now, and I don’t have any rights. It’s killing me, Mateo. Just … just killing me that I can’t fix this.”
“What does Jesse want?”
“I thought he wanted to stay with me—for half the summer, like we planned.”
“When two people love someone like you and Madison love Jesse, it’s difficult to compromise. But you know I’m here to help. Just say the word.”
Sean knew, but Mateo didn’t know the whole story. “Did Jesse talk to you?”
“Not directly. I’m used to reading between the lines with teenagers. It’s clear he’s conflicted, and leaving as he did was something he felt was in his control. I sense he thinks nothing is in his control, and that can be difficult for a thirteen-year-old. Adults, making decisions, the child, having no say. He wants a voice, but I suspect he thinks no one will listen to him. That’s why counseling sometimes works. It’s a safe place where everyone has the opportunity to talk and everyone can listen.”
“If I thought that counseling would help, I’d go.” He certainly had changed over the years—he’d never have gone to a psychologist in the past. But he would do anything to fix this. “Madison never put me on Jesse’s birth certificate. She has all the parental rights, I have no legal rights. I made her sign a legal document that I am Jesse’s biological father, but that’s all I have—I don’t have custody, I don’t have any say. She let him come here this summer because Jesse asked. I was willing to fly out to Sacramento to see him, but he told his mom that he wanted the time with me because we missed so many years. I think he guilted her into it, but I didn’t stop him. I want her to feel guilty about what she did. She lied to me. She lied to Jesse. And I’ve had a real hard time forgiving her.”
“You haven’t.”
“No. I haven’t. Maybe you would, because you’re a better man than me, but I don’t know that I can ever forgive her.” Sean stood. “I appreciate your help, Mateo. Really. But I want to see him before Madison gets here. It might be the last time I see him in a long time.” His voice cracked as he realized this was it. He was losing his son.
Sean went down the hall to the family room. This was the place he spent most of his time with the boys—they had a pool table, a television, movies, video games, and a long, low table to play board games. When they needed to study, the landing upstairs had been converted into a library—several desks, a couple computers, a printer, books. And while there were three boys to a room, they all got along. They’d survived a nightmare, and were grateful and appreciative of everything they had.
Sean would have done anything to change the past so they never had to live through it. But living in the past was foolhardy. Just like he would do anything to turn back the clock and be a father to Jesse … except that choice had been stolen from him. The only option was to keep moving forward.
Jesse was playing Destiny with Tito, showing him some of the cool things about the game. Things that Sean had shown him, just weeks ago. He watched for a moment, then said, “Hey.”
They turned around.
“Sean!” Tito jumped up and hobbled over to him. Sean picked him up—for a ten-year-old, he was small. He’d been grossly malnourished for most of his life, but he’d gained thirty pounds in the last fifteen months and grown three inches. Sean could still pick him up far too easily.
“Ugh, Tito! You’re getting too big, kid! I’m going to need to start lifting weights to keep up with you.”
He hugged the kid and put him down.
“Jesse showed me how to infiltrate the base! I can get to the next level!”
“That’s great.”
“Can he come back tomorrow? Please?”
Sean caught Jesse’s eye. “Maybe,” he said. “Jesse’s mom is in town, so I have to talk to her first.”
“Oh. Okay. But you can come, right? It’s Sunday. You haven’t been to Sunday dinner in weeks.”
Sean had gotten into the habit of coming by the boys’ home on Sunday after church. He didn’t go to church, but the boys did—and in the afternoon, he would hang with them, play video games, and inevitably Sister Ruth would have him and Lucy for dinner. Sometimes Lucy was working, but Sean never said no. He enjoyed it.
But since Jesse had come to town, he had avoided the boys’ home, and he just now realized that he’d impacted them as well as himself. He’d made this commitment when he bought the house; more, he wanted this commitment.
“If I’m not working, I’ll be here.”
Tito grinned. “Great! Can Jesse stay longer? Dinner’s in an hour. You can all stay for dinner!”
“I don’t think we can. Right now, I need to talk to him, okay?”
“In private?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure.” Tito limped over to Jesse and gave him a hug.
“Thanks for playing with me. I had lots of fun.” Then he left, closing the double doors behind him.
Jesse stared at Sean. “You’re mad.”
Sean was so relieved that Jesse was okay and nothing bad had happened. Yes, he was mad. But not as mad as he thought he’d be.
He walked over and hugged him tight. “Never, never walk out like that again,” Sean said. “Whether it’s safe or not, never leave without telling someone where you’re going.”
“I didn’t know where I was going. Not until I saw the bus.”
Sean stepped back. “If it was safe out there, I’d be angry; but it’s not safe. So I’m angry and scared to death.”
“You think it was Carson. He’s not going to hurt me.”
“You are hurt. Car accidents are unpredictable. There could have been a fire, the car could have rolled, you could have been seriously injured. Just because I think Carson is behind it doesn’t mean that he has any control over what the people he hired are doing. When you deal with criminals, they can be unpredictable. If he’s behind it, because I don’t have proof. And I should never have said that to you—never blamed him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Sean sat and waited for Jesse to sit next to him. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be a dad. I want to. But I screwed this all up.”
Jesse shook his head. “No you didn’t. I did.”
“Nothing that has happened is your fault—except you walking out. And even then, I can’t completely blame you. I would have done the same thing if I heard my parents fighting about me.”
“Did your parents fight a lot?”
“No. Never, really. They argued sometimes, but they were never mean to each other. They lived in their own world. They were both smart, very focused on their work. Ironically, if I’d walked out they probably wouldn’t have noticed, not for a while at any rate.” Suddenly that made Sean sad. He had loved his mom and dad, but they’d been absentminded parents. They cared about their kids—but they raised them almost like free spirits. It was pretty surprising, he realized, that Kane was such a militant soldier and Duke had been an ultra-strict guardian. At the same time, Sean could see that he might be more like his parents—not when it came to safety and security, but when it came to just having fun. There had to be a balance. He just didn’t know what it was—or where to find it.
“My mom told me that she wanted to take me home, and she said you could visit. But then she told you she’d never let you see me again, and I knew she meant it. I don’t want to go back, and I didn’t know what to do. I’m really sorry.”
“Your mother’s worried, too. She’s had a lot on her plate with WITSEC and everything that’s happened this year. She didn’t mean we’d never see each other.”
Neither Sean nor Jesse believed that.
“It’s a lot of work,” Jesse said.
“What?”
“Going up against my mom and grandfather.”
“Your mother will change her mind. She’s upset.”
“Not on this—she didn’t want me to come here in the first place.”
Sean didn’t think she’d been happy about it, but she hadn’t tried to stop Sean from picking him up.
“I don’t understand,” Sean said. “I talked to her, we worked this out.”
“When we were in WITSEC, the second time you came to visit, you said that there might be a chance that we could get out.”
“I remember.” It had been in February, Sean had jumped through hoops with the marshals and finally had twenty-four hours with Jesse in a hotel in Cleveland—far from where Sean lived, and far from wherever the Spades were living. “A lot had changed with the Flores cartel, and the marshals promised to run another threat assessment.” It had taken nearly four months, but they determined there was no major threat. The family could stay in the program, but they chose to leave.
“My mom hated not talking to her friends, but especially Grandfather. And Carson felt trapped, and didn’t know what to do because he couldn’t do anything that he liked. They jumped at the chance, and I said I wanted to live with you now. My mom started to cry. And I hate that because it makes me sad and I don’t know what to do. So I told her just for the summer. And she agreed. She tried to back out, but I told her she had promised, and she said I could stay for six weeks. I thought … well, I don’t know what I thought. That she would move here and I could see you all the time. But now she wants to take me away and I know she’ll never let me come back. She has a reason now.”
Sean didn’t believe for one minute that Madison had orchestrated the attack on Lucy and Jesse. For all of Madison’s flaws, she loved her son and would never put him in danger.
Living with Carson Spade puts him in danger.
That was different, Sean told himself. She might look the other way. Such as with the evidence from Jesse’s phone that someone with access to her parental tracking app had sent the data to a third party. But after she absorbed the truth, she had to believe it, didn’t she?
“Jesse, I don’t know what you want me to say, so I’m going to tell you how I feel. I want you. I would be the happiest man on the planet if you could live with me all the time. But that can’t happen, and you would miss your mom.”
“Not after today. She—she said no court will let you have custody.”
“She says that, but she doesn’t know that. She was upset. You were hurt last night. When people we love are in dangerous situations, sometimes we react without thinking because we’re so worried about them. Like—last night. I’m sorry I walked away at the hospital. I was having a hard time processing what had happened, and I’d just talked to your mother and she was angry and upset. I should never have walked out on you and Lucy. But it’s true—if I thought Sacramento was the safest place for you, I’d send you home. If I thought going back into the witness protection program was the only thing that would keep you safe, I would make sure you were in it. It would tear me up to let you go again. But to make sure you were safe, that no one could hurt you, I would do it. Because I love you.”
“I love you, Dad.” Jesse hugged him and Sean didn’t want to let him go. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but he would fight for this kid with his last breath.
Sean just held him, taken aback at how powerful a hug from his child was.
“Jesse.”
Sean and Jesse turned to the doorway. Madison was there. She looked pale and scared.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” Jesse got up and hugged her.
She held on tight, and tears fell. “You really scared me.” She took a deep breath, stepped back. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, as much to Sean as to Jesse. “I’m so tired.”
“Stay for tonight,” Sean said. “Let the marshals do their job. And we’ll figure out exactly what happened. You can stay at my house.”
She looked at him oddly. “You’d be okay with that?”
He didn’t want Madison anywhere near him, but he would do anything for Jesse’s well-being. “I know you’d feel better if you were under the same roof as Jesse.”
“What about—your wife?”
“We have plenty of room, Madison.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t be okay with it.”
Did she want to start a conflict? “Lucy is fine,” Sean said.
“Please, Mom. Please. I don’t want to leave.”
“For tonight,” she said. “I really didn’t want to get back on a plane right now anyway.”
Sean couldn’t believe how relieved he was.
“No promises about tomorrow,” Madison continued. “I need to talk to the marshals myself. And I don’t trust your assessment of that phone app. I want someone else to look at it.”
Sean tried not to take it personally. “Of course.”
Madison looked around and frowned. “What is this place? It’s not a very good neighborhood.”
“The neighborhood is fine,” Sean said. “This is Saint Catherine’s Boys’ Home.”
<
br /> “A boys’ home? Boys’ homes are for juvenile criminals. You’re having our son hang around with criminals?”
“Not this house. They’re orphans.”
Madison didn’t believe him, and he wasn’t going to explain that the parents of many of these kids were in prison—that certainly wouldn’t go over well.
“Troubled kids. Problem kids.”
“Mom, it’s not like that,” Jesse said.
She wanted to argue; Sean could see she wanted an excuse to take Jesse away. But Jesse continued, “Dad built this place for them. They needed it, because they didn’t have any other place to go. I like coming here.”
She looked skeptical, and Sean could see that she wasn’t going to budge on her opinion. Simply, she said, “Can we leave? I’m really too tired to argue.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Madison hadn’t packed much in her overnight bag because she’d honestly planned on bringing Jesse back tonight. But she was exhausted and she didn’t know what else to do but stay here. In Sean’s house. With Sean’s wife.
She didn’t have the energy to argue with Sean or with her son.
“I love you, Dad.”
She would never get that image out of her head. Of Jesse telling Sean he loved him. Jesse calling him Dad.
Jesse wanted to be a Rogan.
Hadn’t she, too? Nearly fourteen years ago she and Sean had a fun and wild weekend in Las Vegas. Sean had been a month shy of eighteen, she had been nineteen, they both had fake IDs. She never intended on getting pregnant. But this was Sean … she loved him. He was smart and sexy and fun and her dad hated him, which was an added bonus.
Then he was expelled from Stanford and she never told him she was pregnant. She had been too much like her father, she supposed. The scandal of the expulsion, which everyone was talking about. And Sean was so angry … she wanted to believe Sean didn’t want anything to do with her and Jesse, but she knew that wasn’t true. Because even though Sean had been a wild young man, he was honorable. He would have stood by her. He would have stood up to her father. He would have done the right thing.
Too Far Gone Page 24
