Page 62 of Written with Regret (The Regret Duet 1)
“Come here, Hadley.”
She swiped under her eyes, refusing to look at me by focusing on the mirror. “It doesn’t affect my ability to take care of her or anything. I would have been fine if—”
Shit. She thought I was questioning her ability to care for Rosalee. If that wasn’t a gut punch, I didn’t know what was.
“Come here, Hadley,” I repeated, this time taking a step toward her.
Emotion clogged her throat as she forced out, “I would have been fine.” A sob hit her and she supported herself with her hands on the vanity, her head hung low as she finished with, “Really.”
After everything we’d been through, Hadley and I did not have the best relationship.
But there was something about her that made me feel.
I told myself that it was only because we had a connection far deeper than the one we’d made the night we’d created Rosalee.
We were two people who had experienced the inside of Hell and lived to see the other side. Every once in a while, the flames would still devour me. The least I could do was try to extinguish hers.
“Come here, Hadley,” I whispered once more, pulling her into a hug.
She didn’t resist, not for a second.
I’d seen this woman cry far too many times over the last few months.
The tears that had filled her eyes the day I’d first seen her at Rosalee’s party.
The tears that had streamed down her face that night at the diner.
The tears that had dripped over her smile each and every time she left my house, still even three months later.
These tears were different though. They were formed in a place so dark that only a few people knew it existed. They were born in urgency and filled with fear, torn from your soul, leaving a gaping hole behind until it eventually felt like you were going to disappear altogether.
But you didn’t disappear, no matter how much you wished you could.
And that made them the most terrorizing emotion of all because there was no escaping those tears.
The only thing you could do was hope there were enough pieces of you left to pick up when it finally passed.
So yeah, we didn’t have the best relationship.
But I owed her. So, for Hadley, I’d stand there for the rest of the night, picking up the pieces while she was devoured by the task of losing them.
She cried into my chest, her arms circling around my waist and her hands fisting the back of my shirt.
“Caven,” she murmured.
“Shhhh, I’ve got you. It’s all right. Everything’s good. You’re good. Rosalee’s good. Everybody’s good,” I whispered into the top of her hair.
“I froze, Caven. I just stood there. She was bleeding and I did nothing.”
It made me an asshole, but relief washed over me like a warm summer wave. She wasn’t lost in that mall. She was very much in my arms, in that bathroom, and filled with regret for something she couldn’t control.
I slid a hand up her spine, pressing between her shoulders to bring her closer. “You didn’t do nothing. You called for me.”
“And then I stood there.”
“Yeah. You stood there fighting back demons after you knew I had her. Don’t twist this up in your head.”
She suddenly tilted her head back, beautiful surprise registering in her red-rimmed eyes as she searched my face. “What?”
I didn’t let her go purely because I wasn’t sure I was done picking up her pieces yet—not because I liked the way the curves of her body felt flush with mine.
No. This was Hadley.
None of that mattered at all.
Or so I pretended as I peered down at her, so close I felt her every exhale.
“When she was nine months old, Ian and I were watching the Jets game. She’d just started pulling up on everything. I’d paid a company to come in and baby-proof my place. They were thorough. Seriously, I couldn’t open the cabinets for a week.” I smiled at the memory, but it was the almost imperceptible hitch of her mouth—which I was definitely not staring at—that eased the ache in my chest. “I had this big coffee table that they told me to get rid of because she could hit her head on the corners. So, being a good dad, I replaced it with a giant leather ottoman and bought a wooden tray to hold the remotes and stuff. Anyway, Ian and I were watching the game, and she was crawling around, playing at our feet. The next thing I knew, she started screaming, and when I looked up, she had blood in her mouth and smeared all over her face.”
Hadley went solid in my arms, but I gave her gentle squeeze and kept talking.
“She’d somehow pulled up on the other side of the ottoman, and when her little legs gave out, she smacked her mouth on the tray.” I closed my eyes, feeling the bile crawl up my throat. “I lost it. Seeing her. My baby girl covered in blood, I couldn’t… I just shut down. I couldn’t form a rational thought about how to fix it, but I knew I had to do something. So I jumped up, scooped her off the floor, and did the only thing I could think of to make her better.” I cleared my throat to buy myself a second for the emotion to clear my voice. “I passed her to Ian.”
