Page 60 of Deacon

I looked away, but the word still cracked when I tried to force it out. “Mom passed a few years after you left.”

Jackson went completely still. Then he pushed himself higher despite the pain written across his face. “Shit, princess.” Shock and grief changed him so quickly that for a moment guilt seemed tangled through both. “Damn, I’m so sorry. What... what happened?”

My arms wrapped around myself as I turned away. The room felt too bright now, exposing too much, and when I finally looked at him again, his eyes had never left me.

“Cancer,” I said. “Ovarian cancer. She was sick for a while.” I swallowed and forced myself through the rest because stopping halfway would only make it worse. “Dad took it hard. Real hard. Put her in every trial and treatment he could find. Even when she didn’t want to do it anymore, she kept going for him. Because he couldn’t let her go.”

My mouth trembled once, and I hated that Jackson saw it. “Her death crushed him. Crushed all of us. It was hard on us.”

One tear escaped before I could catch it.

Jackson sucked in a breath that sounded painful for reasons having little to do with his injuries. “When did she get sick?”

“Matty and I found out a few months after you were gone.” I wiped impatiently at my cheek. “I don’t know how long she’d been sick before that. They tried hiding it from us. She may have been sick before you left.”

Something folded inward behind his eyes. For one raw moment, he looked less like Deacon, vice president of the Saints of Retribution, hardened by war and whatever else the last seventeen years had done to him, and more like the boy who had once belonged at our dinner table.

“I’m so damn sorry, princess,” he said quietly. “I wish I’d been here for you. I know how much Rose was the heart of your family. I know how much your momma meant to you.”

He struck the mattress once with the sides of his fists, frustration hardening his face. “God, I feel like an even bigger ass for not being here. You know I cared about her too.”

The words should have softened me.

Maybe they did.

Maybe that was why I lashed back.

“Yeah, well,” I said, sharper than I intended and still nowhere near as sharp as I felt, “not much you can do about it now, is there?”

I turned toward the door because staying meant risking tears or forgiveness for something I still didn’t understand. Neither was happening today.

“Lila.”

His voice stopped me.

I stood with one hand curled at my side and breathed through the ache in my throat before he continued.

“Listen,” he said, and something in his voice sounded dangerously close to what I had waited seventeen years to hear. “Let me just get out of this hospital. Let me wrap my head around some things, and then we can sit down. I’ll do what I can to tell you what I can about what happened and why I left.”

Slowly, I turned toward him.

Jackson watched me with an intensity that would have been unbearable even if I hadn’t spent years carrying pieces of him I never asked to keep.

“But, princess,” he said, his voice lowering, rougher and fiercer now, “what I can tell you right now, right this minute?” He held my gaze. “It had nothing to do with my love for you. Everything that happened that night was real. Everything I said, I meant.”

The room went still around us.

“Still do.”

My breath caught.

For one terrible second, I was eighteen again, barefoot beside the lake and young enough to believe love became permanent if somebody said it with enough conviction.

Then I remembered everything that followed. Silence. Years. A life built with Jackson’s absence running straight through its center.

“Words are hard to believe,” I said quietly, “when the man who says them ghosted you for seventeen years, Jacks.”

His face tightened, but he didn’t argue.