Page 34 of Written with Regret (The Regret Duet 1)
I was losing him. If he left, there would be no getting him back. Frantic, I stood up with him. “Look, I don’t want your money. What I want is to make you understand. The only person responsible for that shooting is Malcom Lowe. I do not blame you in any way. I’m simply trying to make you see that we have way more in common than just a daughter.”
His chest was heaving and the smoldering anger rolling off him was suffocating. But he didn’t move.
That was a win in my book.
“Please,” I begged. “Just sit down and listen to me. I did some really terrible things in the past, but I am not an evil person. I swear I’m not here to hurt you. Or steal your money. Or steal your daughter. We didn’t meet in that bar by chance, Caven. There is a whole other dimension to our story that you have no idea about. All I’m asking is that you let me explain.”
He stared at me for a long second with a scrutinizing intensity. I had no idea what he was thinking. For all I knew, he was about to tell me to fuck off.
When he finally spoke, his voice was filled with gravel. “Were you there?”
The there he was referring to didn’t need to be elaborated on.
Neither did my answer. “Yes.”
His whole body sagged, and his lids fell shut. “Jesus Christ.”
“Sit down. Please.”
His chest expanded as he drew in a shaky breath. There were a lot of things I’d expected Caven Hunt to say to me that night. But never once had I considered his next statement.
His eyes opened, blazing with grief and filled with desolation. “I’m so sorry. God, I’m so fucking sorry.”CAVENAfter the mall shooting, Trent and I had done our best to escape the filthy wasteland that was my father’s shadow. For the most part, we’d been successful. Trent had been nineteen at the time, so he was able to gain custody of me, and after changing our last names, we ran as far away from Watersedge, New Jersey, as we could get. Which turned out to be two and a half hours away in Standal, Pennsylvania.
The guilt I carried with me was so devastating that it crippled me for years. Trent did his best to help me recover, but he wasn’t there the day of the shooting.
Nor was he the reason my father had gone to the mall with an arsenal of guns and what seemed like an endless supply of ammunition.
Those boulders of contrition were mine alone to bear.
Trent, Ian, and more therapists than I could count spent years trying to convince me that I was allowed to have a life.
But it wasn’t until Rosalee had come along that I’d finally believed I was allowed to be happy.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Hadley said, reaching for my forearm before deciding against it.
She was wrong. So fucking wrong.
I’d never spoken to a survivor of the shooting. I didn’t have the courage to face them, knowing what I’d done. As I blankly stared at Hadley’s face, regret and agony thrumming inside my chest, my body ached to flee.
But there would be no escaping this.
The tragedy of that shooting had now come full circle—my little girl, the one person I would die to protect, was surrounded by devastation on all sides of her lineage.
I felt like I was speaking through a barrel of rocks as I replied, “I… I’m not sure what else to say, then.”
“Then don’t talk. Just listen.”
I nodded, sinking back down to the booth, still in shock—but not nearly numb enough for this conversation.
Hadley flagged over the waitress, who brought an extra mug and a pot of coffee. While Hadley got busy with the cream and sugar routine, I just stirred the black liquid, waiting and hoping for it to become a vortex strong enough to devour me.
“I wanted Kaleidoscope,” she said, breaking the awkward silence.
My head snapped up. “What?”
“It was about the time Kaleidoscope was making national news after the false arrest.” She smiled and lifted her cup of coffee for a quick sip. “I’d read that your search engines could find every image of a person that existed on the internet. And I needed that. I was in a really dark place back then and I was hoping that, somewhere out there, I could find a photo or video or something I hadn’t seen of my parents before. I thought that maybe, if I could see them again, that it would make the hollowness go away—even temporarily. I was desperate.”
My chin jerked to the side, trying to dodge the blow of her confession. “Hadley…”
“Please don’t apologize again.”
Sighing, I cut my eyes over her shoulder. “How’d you find me?”
“You were a single man living in the city. I hired a PI to get your address. Then I picked the bar closest to your apartment and waited.” She tipped her head to the side. “It took about an hour for you to show up.”
