Gramps wet his lips, his cell phone in his hand. He covered the receiver upon seeing me. “Chicken or beef, son?”
“What?”
He frowned. “The governor’s wife… she wants to know chicken or beef for Saturday night?”
My lips closed, fucking frazzled. I started to say something before my grandpa went ahead and put the phone back to his ear.
“We’ll call you back with the decision,” he said, thanking whoever for their time before hanging up. He leaned over. “What’s happening? You look completely shaken, Knight.”
Did I? Needing to pound something, I took the frustrations out on my phone, the device digging so hard in my hand I thought I’d actually break it.
“Knight?”
I panned, facing him. “I just got a text from Royal. I asked him to get a copy of Mom’s medical records. I wanted to see them.”
“And why’s that?” His body shifted in my direction, his cane under his palms. “Why would you do that? Why the need for that?”
The reaction floored me, the quickness of it, and he immediately saw that all over my face, his eyes twitching wide before he panned away. The pair of us bumped in the car, running over uneven ground, and I couldn’t see anymore, not anything at all.
“Grandfather?” The word was a whisper in my voice, strained to fucking hell. I pulled my fingers through my hair, restless and at a loss for words. I forced some. “Do you know what he found out?”
Absolutely nothing on his end, fucking nothing, and I didn’t understand.
I decided to try again.
“I said do you know what he found out—”
“Of course I know.”
Shock ripped through me, immediately but not just by his candor. The lack of emotion, the lack of anything at all got me. This information should floor him as much as it did me. Piss him off. This was his son’s wife.
This was my mom.
He loved her, didn’t he? I didn’t see that as his hand lifted, rubbing his face with a sigh. His hand fell. “Son, before you say anything else. You don’t know all the facts.”
All the facts? All the damn facts were that my mom was in a coma when she didn’t need to be. A coma he told me to pull the plug on not days ago. My mouth moved. “What facts, Grandfather? Mom’s in a coma when she doesn’t have to be…”
“And that’s the hand she was dealt.”
“Hand? What hand? How? Grandfather, I don’t understand—”
“She tried to take you away from me!”
His voice raised when never in my whole life had I ever heard it. Even when disciplining me growing up, I’d never heard it. A sternness, yes, but never an octave above calm and cool. That was just my grandpa, Gerald Reed, nothing if not calm.
His hand warmed the top of his cane, the opposite now. I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”
“Just as I said.” He nodded as he faced me. “Your mom tried to take you away. Ran off with you into the night. Did you know you were in the car with her that night? She could have killed you both.”
I did know, but from what I remembered, my injuries had been minor. Honestly a lot of that was fuzzy, so long ago.
“She ran off with you,” he continued on. “She didn’t want you growing up privileged. Wanted you to be trash like her.”
“What are you talking about—”
“You mom was a whore,” he gritted, my eyes twitched wide. His jaw worked. “Your father’s whore. He hired an escort for an event, then had the nerve to fall in love with her.”
I hadn’t known that, none of it. They’d all gotten along, though. My parents and my grandpa, no arguments ever in my house between anyone growing up. My mouth parted. “You acted like you cared about her.”