My eyes closed, a sick unease swelling in my stomach. What in the world could have possibly made it worse?
“She wasn’t the same woman when she came home, Remi. And who could blame her? She’d survived hell. But where she’d once been so fiercely independent, she became terrified of everything. And when she wasn’t scared, she was obsessing about another woman who she swore had been kidnapped too and held in the same cold, dark room with her. She didn’t know anything about her or what she looked like, but her cries haunted Sally’s dreams. She spent entire days camped out at the police station, begging them to find her. But once again, without anything to go on, the police wrote her off. And they weren’t the only ones. She and her best friend had a falling out over her inability to let it go and focus on her own recovery. Her dad tried to convince her to start therapy, but he made the mistake of sending her to a facility that included an inpatient drug program, which promptly sent her over the edge.”
Unshed emotion sparkled in his eyes. “And there I was, stuck in the middle, desperately holding on to mere pieces of a woman I would have given anything to put back together, without the first clue how to help her.”
“Oh, God, Bowen.” I curled my hand around the side of his neck.
Sugar was having none of Bowen getting all the attention, so he army-crawled up, hitting me with a drive-by kiss to the nose on his way, and curled up like a cat on his dad’s shoulder.
An almost genuine smile tipped the side of Bowen’s mouth. And in that moment, I was more grateful than ever for the needy dog.
He gave the pup’s head a scratch. “Not too long after that, I gave her Sugar, naïvely hoping he would be a distraction. Sally was timid with Clyde at first too, but they became fast friends, and I thought having her own dog that could go back and forth between her place and mine would be good.”
Leaning his head to the side, he gave Sugar a snuggle. “She was so damn happy those first few weeks. Doting on him. Babying him. Buying him outfits. I honestly thought she was coming back to me. But it was all a ruse. She figured out the only thing I needed to be happy was for her to smile. And fuck me, she played the part like there was an Oscar up for grabs. None of it was real though. She was still scared. Broken. Shattered. Consumed by guilt and pain.” His gaze came back to me, his smile sinking into a sea of regret and shame. “She tried to kill herself three separate times.”
My whole body seized, and I bit my lower lip. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Who I was crying for, I couldn’t be certain. My heart ached for Bowen and everything he’d been through, but dear God, that poor woman.
“Hey,” Bowen whispered. “Please. Don’t cry.”
My shoulders shook with a sob. It was official. I was the world’s worst support system. I was supposed to be comforting him, yet my whole body trembled and my lungs burned for air that couldn’t quite make it past the boulder on my chest. “It’s a lot, Bowen. For both of you. I can’t even imagine…”
“And you’ll never have to.” In one swift movement, he plucked the dog from his shoulder, set him on the floor, and then rolled into me. His front became flush with mine, nose to nose, his minty breath whispering across my skin. “I would give up my entire life to make sure you never have to imagine a single second of that, Remi.” With soft, gentle kisses, he dried the tears from my cheeks, taking my pain as his own as if his wasn’t enough.
Gliding my fingers into the back of his hair, I murmured against his lips, “Did they ever find the man who took her?”
“No.”
“The other woman?”
He leaned away far enough to catch my eye. “No.”
A wave of grief crashed down over me, stealing my breath. Empathy had always been my strong suit, but this felt as though I’d been caught in the undertow. “Oh, God.”
His arms tightened around me. “Don’t do that. It broke her. Don’t put this on your conscience too.”
I sucked in a shaky breath, willing my racing mind to slow. There I was, lost in anguish over a story, when the man I was falling in love with had lived every horrific detail.
Jesus, Remi. Get it together. This isn’t about you.
But in a way, it was.
“I am so sorry about not letting you know where I was. You must have been terrified.”
His arms sagged the smallest fraction, and he blew out a breath. “I was. I thought it was happening again. And when I realized you were at the hospital, it hit me like a brick wall that, even if I found you physically, it still might not be you who came home with me.”
