Page 204 of Cross Checked
I stayed silent.
“Knox has every cop in Michigan looking under every damn rock. Every contact. Every favor. Every department that owes him one.” Daniel’s voice roughened. “He doesn’t know it yet, but he ran out of places to hide the second my daughter told the truth.”
“Good. It’s still not enough, but he is scared now.”
Daniel dragged a hand down his face, and for a second, the anger cracked just enough for the grief underneath to show. “I should’ve seen it.”
The words came so quietly I almost missed them.
“I saw her disappearing back then.” I said nothing because Daniel wasn’t talking to me anymore. He was talking to ghosts. “I saw her stop eating. Saw her get quiet. Saw her pull away.” His throat worked hard. “I thought it was grief.”
Holy shit.
The pain in those four words almost hurt worse than the anger.
“I thought losing her mom had swallowed her whole.” His eyes closed briefly. “I kept thinking if I loved her hard enough, she’d find her way back.”
“She did.”
His gaze lifted to mine, and I held it so he knew it mattered what he saw now. Luke had taken enough.
“He didn’t ruin her,” I said quietly. “He didn’t break her.”
Daniel’s eyes glistened.
“She found her way back then, and she will find her way back now.”
The silence that followed felt thick enough to touch until he finally nodded.
“Yeah.”
Another nod.
“Yeah. We’ll all make sure of it.”
The hallway fell quiet around us as Daniel looked toward Bliss’s room again, then back at me.
“She asked for you.”
My chest tightened. “She did?”
A faint smile pulled at one corner of his mouth. “Girl was barely conscious and still managed to ask whether somebody had warned you not to do anything stupid.”
Despite everything, a rough laugh escaped me. “That sounds like her.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Daniel studied me for another moment. “She seems different when you’re around. She’s calmer, which is saying a lot for Bliss, who is a mile-a-minute talker.” He looked back toward the room. “I haven’t seen that in a long time and didn’t know it was missing until I saw it come back.”
Daniel’s eyes returned to mine, and whatever he saw there must’ve been enough because some of the tension left his shoulders.
“You’re good for her.”
The words landed harder than they should have, and for a second, I just stared at him.
Nobody had ever said something like that to me before. My entire life had been built around expectations, achievements, and whether I was living up to the Mercer name. People praised the player. The captain. The first-round draft pick. Nobody had ever looked me in the eye and told me I was good for someone they loved.
Daniel stepped forward before I could figure out what to do with that.
