Page 25 of Written with You (The Regret Duet 2)
“Sorry,” I whispered. “She was alone. I had you and she hated me for it. She talked about you all the time growing up. Any time she wanted to hurt me, she’d tell me that she’d found you or had run into you or…whatever lie she could think up at the time.” I shrugged, fighting back tears. “And I, uh…guess, one day, she got sick of threatening me and she followed through on it.”
“Why did you care?” he asked, the confusion so genuine that it made me sad.
“Because whether you like the word or not, when I needed a hero, you were there for me. And my eight-year-old heart fell in love with you before you ever said the word go.”
“Jesus Christ,” he cussed.
“Yeah. So. I did lie to you about some things, but the majority of it was the truth. She did steal your computer for Kaleidoscope. Just not to look up pictures of our parents.” I walked over to the couch and sat on the other end, tucking into the corner to give him as much space as I possibly could. His eyes tracked me every step of the way. “My father was the first person to die. And when it happened, Hadley was taking a picture of me with my parents. She was looking through the lens of a disposable camera, but she swore it was a woman who fired the gun. The picture even showed a blurry woman in the background, but there was no gun or anything to back up her claim. Honestly, it could have been anyone. The police wouldn’t listen to her, and in true Hadley fashion, she became obsessed with figuring out who it was.”
His brows drew together. “Malcom worked alone. There was no woman.”
“I know. Everyone knew. A therapist once said her brain was creating a story of the woman to block what she had really seen. You know…of my dad dying. I saw him fall, but she got a front-row seat. We were very different people before the shooting, but after that, it was like night and day. I struggled a lot for a long time. But Hadley, she was…gone. She had no interest in figuring out how to survive. By the time we hit high school, she’d gotten into drugs and started stealing things. I tried really hard to help her. She was the only family I had left. I would have given up everything to make her better. But there was no saving her. She died in a car accident in November.”
The guilt was written all over his face. I swear, blaming himself was Caven’s favorite pastime, but at the moment, he had bigger problems than booking his tattoo artist to add another feather of responsibility.
“Then why the hell does everyone think Willow died?” he asked.
And I guessed guilt was one thing Caven and I would always have in common. “Because we got into a big fight because I’d read her journals. She’d described everything about the last few years of her life. Including every excruciating detail of her night with you and then giving birth to Rosalee. I’d never been so hurt in my life, but we were going to fix it. We were going to be a family the way we were supposed to be. She was all I had left. But it was nothing but another one of her games. The second I turned my back, she stole my car and my purse and took off.”
I rolled the hem of my shirt between my thumb and my forefinger, desperate for a distraction from the gut-wrenching pain in my stomach. “It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I was done. Done trying to save her. Done letting her hurt me. Done trying to stop the inevitable. I took her purse, used her ID, and caught a flight back to Puerto Rico. She could keep my car and all the money she could get from my accounts. But I was done with her.” I swiped a stray tear away. “When the wreck happened, all signs pointed to it being me in the car. Beth didn’t even question it. Not surprisingly, nobody could get in touch with Hadley, so Beth buried me. Well…she buried Willow. Two weeks later, she found me when she came to clean out my house in Puerto Rico.”
With my every word spoken, his face filled with another emotion.
Most of them conflicting.
All of them heartbreaking.
“Why pretend to be her? Hadley came back and I was ready to wage war. But you… You’re Willow. Do you understand me? You. Were. My Willow. But the lies? What the fuck?”
My Willow.
I was his Willow.
Devastation shook me to the core and my lids fluttered closed as I imagined that alternate universe. “I didn’t know I was anything to you. When we left that mall, I never heard from you again. I tried to reach out over the years. I wrote letters every night when I’d wake up in a cold sweat. I rode my bike to your old trailer in Watersedge when I thought I was breaking. I even called once when I couldn’t breathe anymore.”
