Chapter 121 The Distance Between Us

Chapter 121 The Distance Between Us
Penny POV

I don't sleep that night. Neither does Jake, judging by the texts we trade back and forth every hour, both of us too shaken by his dad's phone call to close our eyes for more than a few minutes at a time.
My mother found my real father three days before she died. The sentence keeps looping in my head like a song I can't shut off. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know if I'm supposed to feel grief for a man I've never met, or fear, or something else entirely I don't have a name for yet.
We end up at a diner the next morning before school, a neutral place, because neither of us can face sitting in either of our houses right now. Jake's dad meets us there, looking somehow worse than the last time I saw him, like the last twenty-four hours aged him five years.
"I need you both to understand something," he says, hands wrapped around a coffee he's not drinking. "The man on that birth certificate, his name is Daniel Ford. He worked with your mother years ago, Penny, before you were born. I don't know everything, I genuinely don't, but I know your mom kept you away from him on purpose, and I know my wife found out why right before she died."
"Then tell us what you do know," Jake presses, voice tight.
"I know your mother started asking questions about Daniel about a month before the accident," he says slowly, looking at me now. "I know she was scared. Scared enough that she asked me to help her make sure you'd be protected financially if anything ever happened to her. That's why your name ended up on that policy, Penny. She wasn't trying to hide something bad. She was trying to protect you from something she thought was coming."
My chest aches, thinking about a woman I never met who apparently spent her last weeks alive worried about keeping me safe. "But why would Daniel Ford be dangerous? What did she find out?"
"I don't know," Jake's dad admits, and for once I actually believe him. "That's the piece even I never got the full truth about. She died before she finished explaining it to me."
He goes quiet for a moment, staring down into his coffee, before dropping the next piece like it costs him everything to say it out loud.
"There's something else you both need to know. My hearing's in four days. If it doesn't go well, if the judge decides the missing funds warrant serious jail time instead of restitution, we're going to lose the house. The lawyer already warned me. I've put everything into paying for representation, and there's nothing left to protect what's left of our savings if the ruling goes against us."
Jake goes very still across from me. "The house. Lily's house. Our house."
"I'm so sorry, Jake." His dad's voice cracks. "I know I've already taken so much from you these last two years. I never wanted to take this too."
We drive to school in silence after that, and I watch Jake's hands grip the steering wheel too tight the whole way, his jaw locked, eyes fixed straight ahead like he's holding himself together through sheer physical force.
It gets worse that evening. I come over to help with dinner, and I watch Jake crouch down in front of Lily, forcing a smile onto his face so complete, so convincing, that if I didn't already know what was happening underneath it, I'd never guess anything was wrong at all.
"Hey, bug, guess what," he says, voice bright, nothing like the tight, exhausted voice he used with me an hour ago. "I found a new dinosaur documentary for us to watch tonight. The really long one you like."
Lily lights up immediately, completely fooled, chattering excitedly about which stuffed dinosaur gets to watch with them, and I watch Jake's smile hold steady the entire time, watch him laugh at exactly the right moments, watch him be everything Lily needs him to be while something behind his eyes looks like it's cracking apart piece by piece.
Later, after Lily's finally asleep, I find him in the kitchen, staring at nothing again, same as the other night on the porch. Except this time when I sit down next to him, he doesn't lean into me. He shifts slightly away instead, just a few inches, but I feel it like a door quietly closing.
"Jake."
"I'm fine," he says, too fast, too automatic.
"You're not fine. You just spent two hours pretending everything's fine for Lily, and I get why you did that, but you don't have to keep doing it for me too."
He rubs his face, and when he finally speaks, his voice sounds far away. "I don't want you carrying this with me, Penny. Not the house, not my dad, not whatever's actually happening with Daniel Ford. You've got enough of your own stuff crashing down right now. I don't want to be one more weight dragging you under."
"Jake, that's the exact opposite of what you told me two nights ago." My chest tightens with something between hurt and fear. "You said no more hiding things. You said we're a team. And now you're pulling away the second things get worse?"
"I'm not pulling away," he says, but he doesn't look at me when he says it, and that alone tells me he doesn't fully believe his own words either. "I just, I need to figure out how to protect what's left of this family without losing you in the process too."
"You're not going to lose me by letting me in," I say, my voice cracking slightly despite my best effort to stay steady. "You're going to lose me by shutting me out, Jake. That's the thing that actually breaks people. Not sharing the hard stuff."
He opens his mouth to respond, and that's when we both hear it, a car pulling into the driveway too fast, gravel crunching hard under tires, headlights sweeping bright across the kitchen window.
Jake's on his feet immediately, moving toward the front door, and I follow close behind, heart hammering, both of us braced for whatever new disaster is about to walk through that door.
It's Maren, and the second she steps inside, her face tells me this is bad before she even opens her mouth.
"Jake." She's out of breath, phone shaking in her hand. "I just got a call from a blocked number. It was him. It was Daniel Ford. And Jake, he says he's coming here. Tonight. He says it's time somebody finally told Penny the whole truth, and he's not waiting for your dad's permission to do it anymore."