Page 106 of Fight for You

"I think so. Tougher than he likes to admit." I bite my lip and glance up at her to find her watching me, her expression open. "He does it to punish himself for what happened to Titan and my mom."

"Maybe," she agrees and then cocks her head to the side. "Do you think it's possible he does it for another reason too?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, from what you've told me about him, he sounds like someone who cares a lot about what happens to people. He's been taking care of others his entire life. Do you think it's possible that his job isn't solely about punishing himself, but about protecting people too? He lost someone important to him. I just wonder if part of the reason he does what he does is to keep anyone else from going through the same thing."

"I've never thought about it that way," I admit, frowning. "I think you're right though. He says he isn't a hero, that he's a monster, but I think he became a cop to help people. After Titan and my mom…after they were murdered…" Saying that out loud still hurts. "He was so angry. The cops kept coming to ask him questions instead of looking for the guys who killed our family. He said they were too scared of life in the hood to spend any time in it."

"You said our family."

"Huh?"

"When you were talking about Titan and your mom, you said our family, not your family," she says like she's making an observation instead of asking a question.

"They're Cade's family, too," I answer anyway because it's true. Cade has always been part of our family. He was never just the boy next door to any of us. Titan was like a brother to him, and my mom adored him. He was as much one of us as me or Titan or my mom.

Dr. Jenner smiles at me and nods her head approvingly. "Do you think the police were too scared of the hood to do their jobs?"

I snort at the way she says hood like it's foreign to her. She doesn't like the connotations associated with the word, doesn't like the way it divides people. But that's exactly what life is like where I live.

We're seen as less than our neighbors in better communities. We're the people the rest of the world would like to forget—the ones treated more like a shameful secret than like people with hopes and dreams and feelings.

Most cops don’t know what to do about gangs or MCs. People like that scare the crap out of most cops. So when they move into neighborhoods like ours, those of us who live there pay the price.

We don’t matter. We never did. We’re what people call an acceptable loss to most of society.

"Yeah," I say softly. "I think they were afraid. Titan was a mixed kid from the wrong side of the city. No one really cared what happened to him. They didn't want to get their hands dirty looking."

"You resent that."

"Hell yes, I resent it. My brother was an amazing person. He was funny and kind and so protective. He got mixed up with Kaleo to help me, not because he was a bad person. I hate that all they saw when they looked at him was another drug dealer. That's not who he was."

Even after Cade left, that's all LAPD saw. When they came around to ask me questions, it was clear they didn't want to be there and didn't much care about my mom or Titan. As far as they were concerned, he was part of the problem in neighborhoods like ours, and that was that. How could they seek justice when they thought it'd already been served?

Eventually, I got fed up the same way Cade did and told them not to come back anymore unless they were coming to tell me they knew who killed my family. They stopped coming after that.

About a year later, Detective Whitten came by campus to tell me that he believed the men who killed Titan and my mom were dead, and that they were closing the case. I'd already put the pieces together long before that and figured out Cade had found the Diablos responsible and killed them before disappearing.

"Cops are human too," Dr. Jenner reminds me. "They make mistakes and have fears just like the rest of us. It's entirely possible they were afraid to look too hard into what happened. But isn't it also possible they were doing the best they could with what they had?"

"Maybe," I say with a shrug, not convinced. Maybe they were doing the best they could. Maybe they just didn't care. At the end of the day, the results were the same. Cade took care of the problem when they couldn't or wouldn't. He's been taking care of problems every day since.

In my eyes, he will always be a hero. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t put him on a pedestal when he murdered three people. I don’t know. But he will always be the one who cared enough about Titan to do something when no one else would. To me, that matters.

If killing them makes him a monster, then I guess I’m a monster too because I’m glad he did it. I just wish he’d taken Curtis Kaleo with them.

"It kills me that he blames himself for what happened when all he was trying to do was protect me, just like Titan was." I've thought about that a lot—about the fact that, had things gone differently, it might have been Cade who died that night.

I'm sure sometimes he wishes it had been him. That kills me too. I wish we could all go back and do it over. I'd be stronger, fight harder to defend myself. I'd have listened to Cade when he told me that he didn't want me being friends with Tony. Maybe changing that one decision would have put us all on a different path…one that didn't end with my mom and Titan dying in the street.

Maybe Cade would have made the same career choice. I don't know. What I do know is that I'm proud of him, and I'm so thankful he wasn't taken from me that night, too. He's still here. He's still alive. I wish like hell Titan and my mom were with us, too.

"I have homework for you this weekend," Dr. Jenner announces a few minutes later. "You told me about the necklace your brother gave you for your birthday before he died. I want you to take it out of the box in your closet. You don't have to open it. You don't have to wear it. Just take it out of the box."

"Why?"

"Because you need to face the things that scare you," she says frankly. "And seeing that necklace scares the shit out of you."