Page 20 of Written with Regret (The Regret Duet 1)
He looked me straight in the eye and said, “If you objectively look at life as a whole, it’s a daunting and impossible process. There are just far too many obstacles for one person alone to conquer. The world sucks. People are judged rather than accepted. Hate spreads far more easily than love. Power and money are valued more than morality. Insecurities are preyed upon rather than quelled.” His intense gaze never left mine when he asked, “Why would any of us want to live like that?”
I didn’t have an answer for him because I sure as hell didn’t.
And then he set his folder aside, leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and saved my life. “Because life isn’t lived as a whole. You aren’t given a hundred years all at once. Time is doled out one very manageable second at a time. Stop looking at the big picture and find happiness in the seconds.”
I’d always loved photography—before and especially after I’d lost my parents. It was my escape. But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized why.
A camera could capture a million different emotions.
But only one at a time.
One second.
One snap.
One memory forever frozen in time.
When I looked back on the picture of my parents taken exactly one second before my father was killed, they were genuinely happy.
There was no pain.
No terror.
As a family, it was our final second untouched by such brutal violence and staggering fear.
And it was beautiful.
My parents hadn’t lived their lives trembling because of what could have happened to them.
They’d lived their lives for moments like that picture.
And from that day forward, with my camera at my side, one second at a time, I started my uphill battle to do the same. To live my life the way my parents had. The way they would have wanted me to as well.
It had taken a while, far longer than I would have liked, but I could finally breathe again without pain. I was able to find warmth in the sun again and stare up at the night sky without wishing it would devour me.
For the first time since I had taken back control of my life, I wasn’t living in the gray anymore.
But I feared that was where Keira would always be.
I should have called. I should have turned myself in to the police. Caven would have been notified that I’d been arrested and he’d have had time to process my return. But that would have given him time to plan for it.
There was a good chance he was never going to let me see Keira. And rightly so. After everything that had happened, I couldn’t fault him for that.
But if I was about to wage war with the likes of Caven Hunt, I wanted to at least have a mental snapshot of what I was fighting for.
I had to see her.
Just once.
My palms were sweaty as I white-knuckled the steering wheel. I’d spent most of my drive over wondering what she’d look like. My mother? My father? My sister?
Me?
A tear rolled down my cheek and I quickly swiped it away. This was going to hurt. Seeing Keira walking, talking, laughing—knowing everything I’d missed out on was going to break me.
And seeing Caven again? Well, that was a different kind of sword through the heart.
After the shooting, I’d reached out to him no less than twenty-five times. Asking around Watersedge, I’d found his address and mailed him letters, begging him for help. I didn’t know what I’d thought a fifteen-year-old boy could do. I was just so lost in my own emotions, and he’d saved me once. I believed he could do it again.
He never answered.
On my tenth birthday, I rode my bike to his house, four hours each way. It was an old, dilapidated trailer without the first sign of life inside. I cried the whole way home. But that probably had less to do with the fact that he wasn’t there and more to do with the fact that, back then, all I ever did was cry.
Logic told me that he was gone and I should let him go.
But he was my hero.
As I woke up every morning feeling as though the sky had fallen down on top of me, I really needed a hero.
My last-ditch effort came when I was thirteen and at rock bottom. I’d managed to find out where he had moved and used the computers at the library to track down a phone number for his brother, Trent. Let’s just say that conversation had not gone as planned. Trent told me that Caven wanted nothing to do with me and he had moved on from the shooting. This was said just seconds before cussing me out and hanging up on me. His number was disconnected by the next day.
