Fear Games

6. Who's Your Mommy?

EDEN

I was thinking about shit—you know, the way mothers do at times—and I couldn't seem to shake the feeling that there was something wrong with Jacob's son, Jax. I kept replaying the night that Jacob died over and over in my head, the way that I walked in and saw Jax holding the knife, and how quickly I believed whatever he told me about what happened to his father. But was I truly that gullible? I couldn't be. In the past, I'd always been much smarter than that. With Jax, for some reason I let him slip right under my radar. He was even still living with us, and I never said anything about what happened that night, but neither did he.

It was time for that to change.

It was early Sunday afternoon, the day after Freddy's funeral. The house was silent because Cinder was off at Emerald's, Kael was with Arya, and Echo was with her friends. That left Jax and me completely alone in the house. As I walked upstairs, I pondered what I was going to say to him when I confronted him about his dead father. I needed answers. I deserved answers. Even if Jax didn't kill Jacob, he knew something more about what happened that night that he wasn't telling me. Don't ask me how I knew; it was just a gut feeling, a wife's intuition.

When I approached the guest bedroom, I knocked lightly on the door. The response I got was, "Come on in!" so I obliged. Jax was lying on the bed, phone in hand, texting furiously to someone on his phone. It took him a few seconds to look over at me, and when he did, he plastered on a smile that reminded me so much of his father. "Oh, hi, Mrs—I mean, Miss—Walker."

"Hi, Jax," I said, stepping into the room and closing the door behind me. I took a seat on the bed next to him, clasping my hands together. "We need to talk about what happened again."

Jax's smile turned upside-down. "You mean with Dad."

I nodded. "Yes. I've been thinking about it a lot the last few days, and I just can't believe that you don't know anything about what happened to him. I'm not saying that you did anything, but I believe that you know more than you're letting on. If you could just find it in your heart to tell me—"

"Eden, if you don't mind," Jax said, interrupting me, "I'd just like to say one thing. I loved my father, and if there was any part of me that knew anything about who killed him, I would tell you. You have to remember that you're not the only person who lost someone. I lost him, too, and we'll never get him back." He put down his phone and looked me directly in the eyes. "Have you ever stopped to think about what I might be feeling in all of this?"

Suddenly I felt like the world's biggest bitch. Here I was, practically accusing Jax of knowing more than he was letting on about my husband's death, but it never even occurred to me that he lost someone too—his own father. I mean, it did cross my mind, but the reality of it didn't hit me until that moment. Gosh, I was such an idiot. He probably thought I was the bitchiest of bitches. Queen Bitch.

"God, I'm sorry," I said, using my hands to cover my face with embarrassment. "I feel awful for even bringing this up again. It's just that my gut and intuition have been telling me—"

"That I had something to do with it," Jax concluded as he sat up in bed. "Listen, I get it. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably be suspicious of me, too. You don't know anything about me and you literally walked in to me holding a bloody knife standing over my father. So there's no hard feelings here. I promise." He smiled gently at me again, and even though I think it was meant to give me comfort, there was something...else there. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Was he playing me right now?

No, he couldn't be. He was being honest, genuine, and fully authentic with me. Whatever weird vibes I was getting had to just be my own internal reservations about him as a person. I mean, we'd only known each other for a few weeks after all. It wasn't like I actually knew who he was as a person, or what he was capable of.