Page 201 of Override

The tension in his shoulders eases so slightly that I almost miss it. "Then you stay here."

"With you?"

His gaze holds mine. "If that's what you want."

The answer makes warmth crawl beneath my skin, but before I can decide what to do with that, his expression becomes serious again.

"If you choose to stay with me, I need to tell your father where you are." My entire body stiffens. Keaton sees it. "I'm not telling him the location."

"Then what are you telling him?"

"That you're safe."

My throat tightens. "Why?"

"Because he'll be worried about you."

A laugh escapes me. It sounds wrong even to my own ears. Keaton's brow furrows. I look away from him. The sunlight coming through the window catches dust floating in the air, and I focus on that instead of the man beside me.

Instead of the ache beginning to form behind my ribs.

"You don't know my father."

"No."

I pick at a loose thread near the knee of my leggings. "He cares about the family. The alliances. His responsibilities."

Keaton doesn't say anything. I force a shrug I don't feel. "I don't think he'd really be that worried about me.”

Chapter 42

Keaton (Skee)

I stare at Maeve.

She keeps her eyes on the loose thread she's twisting around her finger, as if what she just said makes perfect sense.

It doesn't. Not even a little. I know her father.

Not personally, but I've spent months researching every person connected to Ronan Gallagher, and Cormac O'Donnell was one of the first files I built.

I know where he went to school. I know when he took control of his family's organization. I know the names of the men he trusts and the ones he only pretends to trust.

I know Maeve spent almost every summer of her childhood at the same house in Ireland. I know her father flew home in the middle of a business trip when she broke her arm falling out of a tree at eleven. I know there are hundreds of photographs of the two of them together over the years, and in every single one, Cormac O'Donnell is looking at his daughter like she hung the fucking moon.

Nothing in my research suggests an unhappy childhood. Nothing suggests neglect. If anything, it suggests the opposite.

Which means I don't understand how the woman sitting beside me came to believe her father wouldn't be worried that she'd disappeared.

I know what it looks like when parents love their child but don't know how to make that child understand it.

Mine love me. I've never doubted that. They just don't always understand me.

Growing up, my mother tried to hug every problem out of me while my father tried to fix them, and neither of them understood why sometimes I needed them to do nothing at all. They learned eventually.

So did I.

Rachel says my parents spent years trying to love me in ways that made sense to them, and now I spend too much time trying to love them in ways that make sense to them.