The ride back to my apartment was silent. Joanna was trying to keep as much fucking space between the two of us as she could. And I didn’t blame her. I didn’t hold it against her. I had a questionable past at best, and she had been thrown into the middle of a debacle that was mine and mine alone to solve. I stared out the window, preparing myself for this conversation as best as I could.

But it was going to be a shitstorm.

I led her back up to the penthouse and promptly got her a drink. She settled into one of the white plush chairs in the living room, her eyes hooked onto the dead fireplace. I flipped a switch on the wall and the fire roared to life. Her legs curled up against her as she stared into the flame. She didn’t look as innocent as she once used to. She didn’t look as vibrant with life or filled with any sort of joy.

And it was because of me.

I sat down on the couch and waited for her to look at me. I wanted to give her the space she needed to digest everything around her. I wanted to wrap her in my arms. I wanted to pull her close to my chest and hug her until all her pieces fit back together. I wanted to be the glue that held those pieces in their places and I wanted to be the one thing she could rely on.

The one thing she could count on as we traveled this journey together.

“I met him, you know.”

I furrowed my brow as I turned my gaze to meet her body.

“This morning in the lobby.”

“Slate was in the lobby,” I said.

“Yep. Said him and his wife were fans of my voice,” Joanna said. “He wanted to take a picture together.”

“He has a picture of you. With him,” I said.

“He does.”

I clenched my fists at my side and tried to keep my cool. Good thing my security team was on the way to Chicago.

That asshole knew where the fuck I was staying.

“Who is he?” Joanna asked.

“Someone I used to consider a friend,” I said.

She scoffed and shook her head as her eyes turned towards mine.

“A friend.”

“Yes.”

“From what?” Joanna asked.

“My teenage days.”

“Am I going to have to drag this out of you? Or are you going to offer this up?” she asked.

“I don’t know where to start,” I said plainly.

“Then try from the beginning.”

I drew in a deep breath and nodded as I leaned back into the couch.

“When my family died in that house fire, I was put into an orphanage. And it was a terrible one on a good day. If we weren’t failing in school and we were in bed by a certain time, the caretakers of the place didn’t care about us. I met Slate in that orphanage and we bonded over our anger.”

“Bonded,” she said.

“Yes. We… hung out after school together and he introduced me to his friends. I fell in with the wrong crowd because I was lonely and felt abandoned. Part of me felt I should’ve burned with my own family and part of me felt I needed to get some sort of imaginary retribution for my family being taken from me.”

“Was your house set on fire or something?”

“No. We lived in a rough neighborhood to begin with. Faulty electrical wiring caused a spark in the walls and ravaged my home.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I was never going to be adopted. I knew that. I was aggressive and upset. I would cry myself to sleep at night and fight with my teachers during the day. Slate understood my anger. His parents were killed in a home invasion over some dumbass pearls and a few bucks. He introduced me to his friends as we grew closer and I started running with the wrong crowd. I was looking for a family to replace mine. People to take me in and love me since no one was there any longer to do that for me. To give that to me.”

I watched as Joanna turned her entire body towards me in her chair.

“I didn’t learn until I was around sixteen what I’d really gotten myself into. Slate was dealing drugs with his brother and I was sitting in the car with a gun making sure they were safe while they dealt. This ‘family’ I had was made up of nothing more than a bunch of thugs the neighborhood was scared of.”

“What happened?” Joanna asked. “Why does this guy think you killed his brother?”

“Because technically, I did.”

I watched Joanna bristle. She took a long pull of her water and turned back towards the fire. I raked my hand down my face and heaved a deep sigh as the memories from my past poured into my mind.

I just wanted to fucking forget about all of it.

“I had an altercation with ‘Pa’. He was the guy that sort of… ran all of us, I guess you could say. He literally preyed on children like me who were angry and had no chance of being adopted out of the system. He used us to do his dirty work and sat back on his mounds of cash his ‘children’ would rake in off the street. Drugs. Guns. Robbery. Carjacking. You name it, there was someone he owned that did it.”

“He thought he owned you guys?” Joanna asked.

“Yep. And in some ways, he did. He had this way of building people up before reminding them they wouldn’t be anymore than what they were. He tried to convince me of it. But I had this teacher in high school I owe everything to. She helped me shape up and get my grades in a place where I could’ve gone to college if I wanted to.”

“So where does this fight fit in?” she asked.

“The night I tried to leave. I had been applying to colleges when no one was looking. I wanted to get out and start a new life. A life my family could be proud of if they were still alive to see it. But Slate found out what I was doing and went to Pa with it.”

“Why was this any of their business?”

“In that kind of neighborhood, people like them rule by fear. Pa made examples of people and it kept the rest of the neighborhood in line. You don’t simply leave a place like that. Especially with all I knew about the inner workings of the group. So when Pa caught wind of the fact that I wanted to leave and go off to college, it sparked a fight.”

“Why didn’t they just let you leave?” she asked.

“All of us had nicknames in the group that designated our purpose. ‘Pa’ was named that because he was the head. The patriarch of the group. ‘Slate’ was nicknamed that because he was good at keeping the status quo in the neighborhood.”

“He said something to me about people going to him when they needed a blank slate or something like that?” she asked.

I turned my gaze to her, our eyes connecting as she shifted to turn back to me. Opening and closing herself off, like she wasn’t sure if she could trust me or not. Rely on me or not. Take my word for all this or not.

It killed me to watch her struggle like that.

“I asked him why people called him ‘Slate’ when he introduced himself,” Joanna said.

“That’s one way of putting it. He kept our neighborhood pumped full of false information on what we were actually doing. He didn’t mean ‘blank slate’ as in a clean start. He meant a ‘blank slate’ as in he beat and killed anyone who tried to out us for what we were doing,” I said. “He manipulated the information people knew about us to keep us from being arrested by the police.”

“What was your nickname?” she asked.

“Boulder.”

“Why?”

“Because I was the biggest guy they had. Stick a gun in my hand and people usually fell to their knees,” I said.

I watched tears line Joanna’s eyes as she took another sip of her water. She turned back towards the fire as my phone vibrated at my side. I slid my phone from my pocket and saw a message from Maynard.

In the air. See you in two hours.

“The fight,” Joanna said.

“It happened the night Pa cornered me about college. Slate and his brother were there, along with a few other guys. They were talking about how they had ‘heard rumors’ I was applying for college and ‘were wondering’ when I was going to tell them about such a venture. I told them I was going to go to college and make a new life for myself and things escalated pretty quickly. Pa didn’t like someone with the knowledge I had trying to run off and get educated. He saw it as a threat. Thought I would go to the police eventually and snitch on them or something,” I said.

“So you fought.”

“I did. Punches were thrown and guns were drawn. It was bad, Joanna. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I ducked behind a car and used the only weapon I had on me at the time and started shooting. They weren’t going to let me go. They would’ve rather let me die in the street than go off to college. To them, I was family. And when I pulled that gun and started shooting, I was shooting at family. I became the ungrateful son who wanted to leave everything behind because I thought I was better.”

“You are better,” she said.

I was shocked at how easy those words fell from her lips.

“You are better,” Joanna said. “Look at what you’ve built. What you’ve accomplished. You built your own company and you overcame the death of your entire family. You were better than them. You still are.”

I held her gaze as she finished off her bottle of water.

“Slate blames me for his brother’s death because it was my bullet from my gun that killed him. What Slate won’t tell anyone is that his brother had a semi-automatic weapon and had already pumped four bullets into my left leg.

“What?” she asked.

I bent down and rolled up my pant leg to show her the scars. They had faded over time, but they were still there. For mangled patches of scar tissue that ricocheted up the back of my calf.

Her eyes grew wide as I fell back into the couch.

“I did a lot of things in my youth I’m not proud of. It’s why I have the tattoos I do. They remind me of what I did and what I need to do whenever the darkness tries to pull me back.”

“Like the tattoo across your chest,” she said.

“That one was my first one. I got it when I was twenty. ‘Never Look Back’. It’s a reminder not only for my past, but for my business as well. If you dwell on mistakes you make, you never learn to push forward. You never learn how to grow.”

“What about the one on your bicep?” she asked. “It’s a roman numeral for something.”

“Eighteen,” I said as I rolled up my sleeve. “That’s the age I was when I got out and never looked back. And the date underneath it in roman numerals is the date of the brawl. I changed fundamentally as a man that night. It wasn’t just the start of a new life. It was the start of a new person. It was the night I made the decision that family wasn’t for me. If I could lose the only one that cared for me and shoot at the only other one I ever had, then I determined I wasn’t supposed to be a family man.”

“Then why are you doing this?” Joanna asked. “With me?”

I scooted all the way to the edge of the couch and leaned over the arm of the chair. I reached my hand out and tucked a strand of hair behind Joanna’s ear. Her eyes were wide and round. Full of curiosity and empathy and pain.

What a treasure she was to this world.

To me.

“You’re different,” I said.

She scoffed and shook her head, but I grasped her chin and turned her gaze slowly back towards mine.

“You are,” I said. “You captured my attention. From the first night I heard you sing. Joanna, I couldn't give a shit less about classical music. About the symphony or the opera or any of that stuff. But you changed that the night I heard you sing. I can’t explain it and I don’t expect you to believe me, but it’s true.”

I cupped her cheek and was surprised when she nuzzled into it.

“I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t think I can be the father this child needs. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to do this alone. We both agreed to something that night, just like I agreed to run with Slate the first night I protected him on a drug run. And the consequences of that night are both of ours to deal with.”

“I don’t want you to deal with us, Robert. That leads to resentment,” Joanna said.

“I could never resent you,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“Here’s what I do know. I do know I can always keep you safe. I do know I can give you whatever you and this child need. I do know I can provide for you and support you in whatever dream you decide to pursue, whether I agree with it or not.”

“I don’t feel very safe right now,” she said.

“That’s going to be fixed soon. I have part of my security team on their way to Chicago right now. They’ll be here within the next couple of hours and they’ll make sure you stay safe.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Will they make sure you stay safe?”

My hand fell from her cheek and wrapped around her hand. I felt her fingertips caressing my skin. Trying to comfort me even though she was the one that needed comforting. How had this woman dropped into my life? How in the hell did I deserve the compassion she was showing me?

How the fuck was I going to repay her for making me feel I was worth the sunlight on my face?

“Slate isn’t going away. Not until I resolve things with him.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, Robert.”

“I have to resolve my problem with him for you and our child to really be safe,” I said.

“But what about you? Who’s going to keep you safe?” Joanna asked.

“I always seem to find a way to come out on top. There’s no reason to doubt that now.”

“Robert, what are you going to do?”

But all I did was get up and head for the kitchen.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Robert, answer my question,” Joanna said.

“I need you to trust me.”

I turned around and took her in as she stood from her chair.

“If you trust me, I can promise you will be safe. You and our child. But if you don’t trust me-- if you can’t-- then the only way I can protect you is by not telling you. Because the less you know about all of this, the better off you’re going to be.”

“Robert, what are you talking about?” she asked breathlessly.

“You need to eat,” I said. “How does a bowl of soup sound?”