Page 74 of Devoured

"Then go get her."

Dean went still.

"That's what you do." Her chin came up, eyes wet, voice not shaking, and God help him she sounded exactly like Lara. "When you love somebody and they go away, you go get them. You don't just let them be gone." A tear went down and she ignored it. "You told me that. When Mommy died. You said love doesn't stop just because somebody's not here. You told me, Daddy. So either you didn't love her, or you go get her. Those are the only two."

"Giana —"

"Did you love her?" Smaller now. The real question, under all of it. "Lara. Did you?"

"Yeah," Dean said, and his voice came apart on it. The word he couldn’t say to the woman herself falling out of him easy as breathing in front of his kid. "Yeah. I do. So much it scared me stupid, baby. That's the whole sorry truth of it."

"Then you were dumb."

A wet, broken laugh tore out of him. "Yeah. I was about as dumb as they come."

"So go get her." She climbed out of bed and crossed to him and leaned into his side, the rabbit squashed between them, and he got his arm around her and held on like a drowning man. "Go to Boston and bring her home. And tell her you're sorry you were dumb. And then don't be dumb again. Ever."

"Okay," Dean said into his daughter's hair, and this time he meant it all the way down. "Okay. I will."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Boston didn’t want him there.

Dean felt it the second he came up out of the airport, the cold coming off the harbor with teeth in it, the noise of a thousand people who'd never say good morning to a stranger, the buildings packed so close you couldn't see the sky or the edge of anything. He stood on a curb in his good boots and his good coat with a duffel over one shoulder, a man built for two hundred miles of open country folded into a city that had no use for the sky, and a kid in a beanie looked at the hat and smirked at him going past.

Dean didn't care. He'd have walked through worse than Boston. He had one thing to do and he'd known it with total clarity since his eight-year-old handed him back his own heart in the dark, and a smirking kid in a beanie wasn't even a thing that registered.

He had the address because it was on her job application, the one she'd sent John two months back — next of kin, a sister, a Boston street — and John had pulled the file off the office shelf without a word and set it on the kitchen table that morning, his thumb on the line, before he'd gone back to bed. Third floor, a brick walk-up in a part of the city that was all narrow houses leaning on each other. He stood outside it a while, in the cold, getting it right in his head, and then he gave up on getting it right, there was no getting a thing like this right, there was only doing it, and he went up and knocked.

The sister opened the door.

She had the chain on. She looked at him through the six-inch gap, Addi, in a sweatshirt with her hair up, no makeup, none of the show from the ranch, and her whole face went hard and flat and cold the second she saw who it was.

"No," Addi said, and started to shut it.

"Please." He got a hand on the frame, not pushing, just there. "Please. I came two thousand miles."

"I don't care if you swam." But she didn't shut it the rest of the way. She held it on the chain and looked at him through the gap with something in her eyes he hadn't expected, not just fury. Underneath the fury, fear. He didn't understand it yet. "You've got some nerve, Dean Royston. Showing up at my door looking like a kicked dog. You don't get to do that. You had your chance to look at her like she mattered and you blew it, so no, you can't come in, and you can —"

"Is she here?"

"— you can turn your truck around, except you don't have a truck, do you, you got on a plane, which means you finally figured out — " Addi's voice cracked, just slightly, and she steadied it with visible effort. "No. You don't get to just figure it out. Not after."

"You're right." He said it plainly, and it stopped her. "Everything you're about to say to me. You're right. So say it. I'll stand here and take all of it. I'm not going anywhere."

She studied him through the gap a long second. Then she took the chain off, and opened the door, and stepped out into the cold hallway in her socks, and shut it behind her so they were both out there, away from whoever was inside, and folded her arms.

"Okay," Addi said, low and shaking. "Okay. You want it? Here it is."

"Yeah."

"She loved you." Her voice was not theatrical now, not loud, none of the brightness, just bare and furious and frightened. "Do you understand what that took? My sister spent years shrinking herself to fit inside what a man could stand to give her, and she clawed her way out of that, and she flew to the literal end of the country so she'd never do it again, and then she met you and she did the bravest thing I've ever seen her do, she opened all the way up. To you. To your kids. She loved your kids, Dean. She came back to Boston and she cried about a little girl who braids hair and a little boy who's so strong, and she's never going to have them now, and that's your doing."

"I know."

"She'd have given you everything." Addi's eyes were wet and she didn't wipe them, didn't break, just kept them on him. "Everything. The whole rest of her life. And you handed her a list of reasons it couldn't work like that was love. Like being honest about why you wouldn't try made it hurt less. It doesn't. A man breaking your heart gently is still a man breaking your heart, and you did it so kindly she can't even hate you for it, and do you know what that's done to her? She can't get angry. There's nothing to push against. She's just… broken, quietly, over a good man who didn't want her enough, and that doesn't heal, Dean, that's not the kind you get over —"

Her voice went, finally, all the way, and there it was, the fear under the fury, out in the open.