Page 106 of Deacon

At the exact same moment, Jade asked, “Is my dad going to be there?”

Whatever argument I had been preparing lost most of its force. Blue must have seen the same thing in Jade’s face because she answered gently. “Probably. He lives there.”

Jade went quiet, but hope flickered across her face before she could hide it. She had known Jackson only days, yet every chance to see him already mattered. After sixteen years wondering who her father was, of course it did.

Of course she wanted to go. I looked at her holding Little Jax, trying so hard to act casual about the question, and gave up the argument before it could become one. “Alright,” I said. “We’ll come. Just tell me what time and where we’re supposed to go.” Jade’s face brightened before she could stop it.

Blue smiled, pleased for both of us. “I will.”

Evan turned toward me, keeping his voice just low enough to make the comment feel conspiratorial instead of private. “Very brave of you, agreeing to be in close proximity to your sexy biker on his own turf.”

I swatted at him without looking. “Shut it.” He grinned, entirely too pleased with himself, and I ignored him as best I could.

Jade shifted Jax a little higher against her shoulder. “Will Cage be there too?”

Blue’s smile changed just enough to tell me she had noticed the supposedly casual question too. “Probably. Ledger usually brings him when the club does family stuff.”

Jade nodded like the answer held no special importance. Across the room, Evan caught my eye with commentary already building behind his expression. One warning look kept it there, though his wounded response suggested he considered that censorship.

The conversation drifted back toward the wedding. Blue talked through more of Priest’s plans while Evan kept lobbying for a role nobody had offered him, and Jade smiled down at Jax whenever he made a sleepy sound. The easy warmth should have settled me. Instead, Sunday took shape in my head for a different reason: not family day, but Sunday family dinner.

The second Dad learned Jade and I were skipping his table for the Saints’ compound, he would hear rejection before anything else. Matty would reinforce every concern. Questions about Jackson, the club, Jade, and my judgment would follow, wrapped in the same family concern that could still make me feel twelve when they disapproved.

I was going to have to make that call, and it was going to be a shitshow.

29

Lila

I should have made the call earlier. Days earlier, if I was being honest. Instead, I had let it hang over me until Sunday morning, my coffee cooling on the kitchen counter while Jade finished getting ready down the hall. There was no version of this conversation where Dad took the news well, yet some childish part of me had hoped that if I waited long enough, reality might rearrange itself into something easier. It hadn’t, and I was out of time.

I finally picked up my phone and called. Dad answered on the third ring. “Morning, sweetheart.”

That almost made it worse. I stared out the kitchen window rather than at my reflection in the dark glass of the microwave. “Hey, Dad.” I tightened my grip on the phone before forcing out the rest. “I needed to let you know Jade and I aren’t going to make it to Sunday dinner today.”

His silence lasted just long enough for me to brace. “Why not?”

I gave him the vaguest answer possible. “We’ve got plans.”

The softness left his voice. “What plans?”

There it was. I had delayed the call because I knew exactly what would happen once Jackson’s name entered it. “We’re going to Jackson’s club today. They’re having a family day, and Jade wants to spend some time with her father.”

The silence on the other end changed. He wasn’t processing anymore. He was getting angry, and when his voice came back, it was louder than I had ever heard it. “Absolutely not.”

I pulled the phone slightly away from my ear. Dad could be stern enough to make me feel twelve with one look, but he rarely lost his temper. “Dad.”

“No.” Whatever restraint he usually carried disappeared. “You are going to regret letting that man into your lives, Lila. You hear me? This is not going to end well.”

The force of it stunned me for a beat. Then the old pressure started creeping in, the expectation that I should explain myself until he agreed with me. I knew that trap now. “Dad,” I said carefully, “I’m sorry you’re unhappy about it, but Jackson is Jade’s father. She has a right to know him.”

“That man abandoned you, he abandoned you, is a biker and a criminal!” The accusation landed hard, but what followed went straight for my daughter. “And now you’re taking my granddaughter to a biker compound like your teen daughter hanging in a biker compound with criminals is a normal activity?”

My jaw tightened. He had known Jackson as a boy and watched him grow up alongside Matty and me at our table. Now fear had rewritten him into something Dad could condemn without complication. “He is a good man.”

“You don’t know that!” The certainty in his voice stung because it left no room for the boy he had once known or the man Jackson had become.

“I do,” I snapped, then dragged in a breath that did nothing useful. “I do know it, you don’t know anything about him. What happened between him and me and him going away is between us and we need to work that out. He has his reasons but they don’t make him a bad person, they make him a person who made decisions that weren’t right for me when they were right for him. They may have been selfish, they may have not, I am still working that out. But that is for me to work out. And you need to leave it alone.”