“What else would you have wanted me to say, Ella? That she has a 10 percent chance of living until November? That’s only five months from now!” He had the nerve to look like I was the one who was nuts.
“I’m well aware!” My voice pitched breakingly high. “You don’t think I keep a mental countdown in my head? That I’m not excruciatingly aware of every day with her? How dare you tell her that she won’t die. You have no right to make that kind of promise to her.”
“To her, or to you?” he asked softly. “She’s a child who needs to be reassured, told how strong she is, that this fight is far from over, and yes, I realize how long this will take. I’m not about to tell her she’s a few months away from defeat.”
“You shouldn’t have made that promise,” I reiterated. “I don’t lie to my kids, and you can’t, either. This war she’s fighting is overwhelming. It’s David versus Goliath.”
“Right, and you’ve armed her with a slingshot and sent her against the giant. I’m telling you that I have a damn tank, and you won’t use it! Are you really going to watch her die because you won’t gamble that I’m a decent guy? What do you want? Character references? A lie detector? Put me through anything you want, just let me save her!”
He swore, and that alone pulled me out of my anger enough to listen to the rest of what he was saying.
“You swore. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear before.”
He walked past me, running his hands over his hair until they clasped behind his neck. Once half the porch was between us, he turned around. “You have my most sincere apology for that. I haven’t said a word like that aloud for over ten years. But the rest? I won’t apologize for that. You can think I’m crazy all you want. I get it. You’re scared of her dying and scared of what kind of guy she’s chained to as a dad if she lives, even if it’s only on paper.”
“Yes and no.”
“Which one?”
“I’m not scared of her being chained to you,” I admitted softly. “I know you’d do anything for them. I see it in the way you take care of them, the way they trust you.”
“But you won’t trust me to stay.”
How long could Ryan’s letter possibly keep him here? Was he so honor-driven by that letter that he would sacrifice himself with a marriage? Could I trust that honor to keep him around long enough to save Maisie? This was all such a screwed-up tangle of a mess.
“I don’t trust anyone to stay, and you’ve already warned me that I shouldn’t. That you’ll eventually walk out.”
“Oh no. You don’t get to use my words against me unless you get them right. I said you wouldn’t let me stay—that you’d push me out. But it looks like you don’t even need me to mess things up before you start shoving. Do you do that to everyone who gets close to you? Or am I just lucky?”
I ignored the truth of his jab, refusing to look in the metaphorical mirror he’d held up to my face.
“You know what? None of this matters. Not when it’s a giant lie. We’d be committing fraud, Beckett. A fake piece of paper about a nonexistent relationship, and if we were caught… I’m not putting the kids through that.”
His jaw set in a tense line, and he gave me a singular nod before turning and walking down the steps.
Havoc immediately abandoned me to follow him, tiny traitor that she was.
He turned at the bottom of the steps. “Are you really saying that you’re not willing to bend your morals in order to save your daughter’s life? To give me some of that precious trust that you keep locked up tighter than Fort Knox?”
I felt the verbal blow all the way to my toes. Was that really what I was doing? Choosing my own morals, my own trust issues over Maisie’s life? Was I so jaded that I couldn’t believe? Couldn’t hope when my own brother had vouched for him?
Ryan.
“You want me to trust you?” My voice softened.
“I do.”
“Okay. Tell me how Ryan died.”
The color drained from his face. “That’s not fair.”
A piece of that warm, fuzzy hope burned up in my chest.
“Don’t make me lie to you,” he begged…or threatened. I couldn’t tell.
I stood silently, waiting for him to say something different—to give me some of the trust he was asking for. To put himself in a position of vulnerability. But the longer we stared at each other, the more rigid his posture became, until he was once again the hardened soldier I met on his first day at Solitude.
I felt a sorrowful sense of loss, as if something rare and precious had disappeared before its value could even be realized.
“Have a nice night, Ella. I’ll pick up Colt tomorrow for practice at ten.”
“What? Soccer practice?” Like the fight we’d had was something normal and could be glossed over. Like we hadn’t just shoved a stick of dynamite between us and lit the fuse.
“Yep. Soccer. Because I show up. That’s what I do. When I make someone a promise I follow through, and that goes double for your kids. And, since you apparently won’t take my word for it, I’m just going to have to show you over and over again.”
He opened the door, and Havoc jumped into the truck. Then he climbed in and left me standing on the front porch with my mouth hanging open, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
…
“Well?” I asked Ada as I crammed another peanut butter cookie in my mouth. Colt and Maisie were asleep in our cabin, and Hailey was keeping watch while I reverted back to my childhood and spilled my guts to Ada.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked, taking another tray out of the commercial oven and setting it to cool.
“Your thoughts? Opinions, anything.” Because I needed someone else to tell me that I wasn’t psycho.
“I think an extremely handsome man offered you a way to save your daughter.” She leaned back against the opposite counter, wiping her hands clean on her apron.
“What? So I’m the one who’s wrong here? He asked me to marry him, Ada. That gives a veritable stranger rights over my kids for the sake of insurance. Insurance that he can revoke anytime he feels like filing for divorce. Hell, rights over Solitude.”
“Only if you let it. You’re telling me you couldn’t draft a prenup or something that limits his rights? The same as you’d do with Jeff if he walked back through those doors?”
“Jeff isn’t coming back.”
“Exactly.”
“What if he’s a serial killer?” I asked, reaching for another cookie.
“He was Ryan’s best friend.”
“So he says,” I muttered with my mouth full. Well, so the letter said. Ryan had never shared personal details about the guys he served with. He barely told me anything about Chaos when he asked me to be his pen pal, just that a guy in his unit needed mail. I missed my brother. I wanted my brother. I needed to hear his opinion, why he’d never talked about Beckett if they’d been best friends.
I missed Chaos, too.
Chaos. If he’d shown up at my door in January, everything would be different. I knew it in my soul. Maybe I was the psycho one. After all, I’d fallen for two different men in the span of what? Eight months? Pregnancy lasted longer than that.
But Chaos was dead. Ryan was dead. Mom and Dad were dead. Grandma? Dead, too.
Was I really going to add my daughter to that list?
“Didn’t he have Ryan’s letter?”
“Yeah,” I begrudgingly admitted. “Maybe if there was a picture of them, or something. Anything.”
“Did you ask?” She tilted her head and stared at me like I was ten all over again.
“Well. No.”
“Huh. Seems like you already believed him, then, doesn’t it?”
“Ugh.” I let my head roll back and sighed my exasperation to whoever wanted to take my side. “You’re on his side.”
“I’m on Maisie’s side. And that side looks a lot better when she’s living.”
Well, when you put it like that…
“I don’t know what to do. I can’t marry him, Ada. It’s only a matter of time before he gets bored. Guys like Beckett don’t play house.”
“He’s not your father. He’s not Ryan. He’s not Jeff. You have got to stop convicting him of their crimes.”