Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 138683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
At the wounds that were now permanently embedded in me.
I wouldn’t lie and say I’d come out of that day and night unscathed.
It had truly been horrifying.
Terrifying.
But Milo had come.
Well, Trent, Jud, and Logan had come, too, the idiots.
But I guessed I should have known this family didn’t turn their backs on those they loved, and maybe it’d taken until then for me to realize I was a part of it.
A true part of them.
That I wasn’t an outsider. The crazy friend who showed for drinks and a good time but was forgotten in the day to day.
Grief had a way of skewing it, didn’t it? Of making you believe you were unworthy.
Less.
Lost and without a home when it was sitting right in front of you, waiting for you to claim it.
I just wished Milo had figured that out for himself.
Could see he was worthy to be loved, no matter what he’d done.
I’d believed in him. Believed him when he’d promised forever.
Believed he’d fight for me, which he had, and the sad part was he would have gladly died that night to set me free, but he didn’t have the courage to stand for me in the light.
His shame too profound. Those demons catching up to him and bending his mind to their will.
The subdued tapping at the door jolted me out of my thoughts, and I pressed pause on the screen.
From where I was sitting propped against the headboard in the guest bedroom, I shifted around to find Eden leaning against the doorjamb.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Like I got shot…oh, and like someone ripped my heart out, too,” I tried my best to tease. It only caused a fresh pang of pain.
Sympathy coasted through her soft smile. “I’m sure that’s exactly what it feels like.”
My nod was erratic, emotion rising up quickly to erase any lightness.
“It feels like it’s missing, Eden.” I whispered the admission.
It’d been two weeks since Milo had walked out of my hospital room, and each day had compounded the vacancy that throbbed inside.
I fiddled with the locket I now wore around my neck.
Bobby had made it out alive that night all those years ago, only because Milo had chosen my brother, his humanity, over the depravity of the call.
Over his own well-being.
It cost him so much.
His wife.
His children for all those years.
Bobby had been wearing the locket on a large chain the day he’d been found, and I could only assume he’d stashed the flash drive and then had written the code on the pictures.
He’d likely been beaten and tossed over the ravine, making it look like an accident.
Left to die.
Except he hadn’t.
Grief clamped down on my chest, so heavy and intense I didn’t know how to see through it.
It was funny how I’d tried so hard to interact with Bobby, tried so hard to reach him in the recesses of his mind, praying so hard that he could hear and feel me and know I was there. So, I’d pressed the locket to his hand and asked him if he could remember the memories imprinted on those pictures, whispered a story about how he’d been wearing it that day.
He’d curled his hand around it, and I’d thought…thought he was giving me a message.
It was weird to find out he had been trying to give me a message, but an entirely different one.
I’d had no idea.
None until he was gone.
I sucked in a shattered breath, still unable to fully grasp it.
His funeral had been four days ago—three days after I’d been released from the hospital.
I’d been surrounded by my friends.
Wrapped in their support.
And I had to remind myself again and again that I wasn’t alone.
That I wasn’t abandoned.
That they loved me and would support me through anything.
They were my family.
Karl’d had the nerve to show there, giving me feigned sympathies, like he’d ever actually cared about Bobby. It was strange that I didn’t even really notice or acknowledge him when he’d once felt like such an obstacle.
He’d become no more than a blip. I hadn’t even given him a response, just turned my back on that part of my life.
But it’d been Milo who’d lurked in the distance, a giant silhouette on the boundary of my pain, cut off and alone and bleeding his.
His apology.
His remorse.
But he’d turned and left me there as I’d been swamped in my sorrow, and I thought that had probably wounded me more than anything.
Him turning his back.
On me.
On us.
A tear slipped free, and I swatted at it, whispering, “It all hurts so bad, Eden.”
Climbing onto the bed, she laid down beside me and threaded our fingers together. “Love is the most painful of all emotions. The most beautiful and most wonderful and the most painful.”
Through the blur of moisture clouding my eyes, I nodded. “Which was why Milo didn’t want to fall for me. He thought he would hurt me, but the only thing that hurts is that he turned his back on me. We were supposed to be a team.”