A door at the front of the house slammed, the sound dying away, leaving them alone once more in the silence of noises they could ignore.
Max’s confession wasn’t over. “Making you beg in the car was wrong. Running to Angela without telling you was even worse.” She folded the money carefully, then pushed it into the little box. “This will remind me to throw away the price tag. To squash my ulterior motives. To trust you,” she finished on a whisper.
Tucking the box safely in her pocket, she took another stair. His gaze frightened her, dark, steady, and ice cold. Then she said it, the thing she’d never asked for because she was afraid no one could ever give it to her. “Can you forgive me?”
After a few interminable seconds, he laughed without humor. “What a fucking pair we are. Will I forgive you?” He laughed again, then leaned forward and grabbed her chin, holding without hurting her. “Don’t you get it? I wanted your mouth on me. I still want it. I’d let you do it on my mother’s goddamn front porch. And dragging you into that alley? Anger was an excuse to put my hands on you.” He swallowed, then dragged in a breath. “I’d kill ten Angelas for you. Without cause. Without provocation.”
He let her go and sat back to stare at her, waiting for something. “Do you even get what that means?” he asked one more time.
She could have told him she’d killed when she was thirteen. She could have put aside the fear and the shame for him and admitted the truth. She would have if she believed her truth was what he needed. She didn’t think it was. She said the only thing she had left to give him. “I forgive you.”
He laughed once more, a cracked harsh sound. “You think I need your forgiveness?”
With a deep breath, she steadied herself against the sarcasm in his tone. “No.” She licked dry lips. “But it’s what you think you need.”
He looked at her with an incomprehensible gaze.
“It’s what you needed me to say when you told me about the young girl you helped.” She’d failed him then and given him a meek apology later that hadn’t been worth the breath it was said with. The words had come from her head and her mouth, not her heart and her gut, as Cameron said they must.
Witt knew the reference, but he asked anyway in the most restrained of voices. “What girl did I help?”
He would force her to repeat his sins out loud. “You were a beat cop then, and she was a kid you saw on the streets where you worked. She was thirteen.” That terrible age. He couldn’t know how much it cost Max to tell his story. But she did, for him. “You gave her money for an abortion. You took her to a clinic and saw her through the whole thing. Because she’d told you her father raped her and got her pregnant.”
“She lied. It was her boyfriend.” Finally, the ache broke through his control, permeated his voice, and bled into the lines of his face. Max knew it would be stark in his eyes if she could have seen them beneath his hooded gaze.
I don’t blame you versus I forgive you. Such a fine distinction. Witt wouldn’t blame Max for her crime at thirteen. But could he forgive the choice she’d made? He hadn’t forgiven the young girl who lied to him. He hadn’t forgiven Debbie Doodoo. Max didn’t want to think the next thought.
Witt was close enough to touch. She’d climbed another step without realizing. Knowingly, she made the next move, putting a hand to his cheek. “I forgive you for helping her and being terribly wrong.”
He sagged, leaned his forehead against hers, and rested his eyes, lids closed. “You should have told me that before.”
He meant the girl, she knew. He was right. She should have told him two weeks ago when he’d first made his confession to her. Forgiveness. True, only God could grant it, but sometimes a man needed a human voice to utter the words.
“Forgive me for letting you think I believed you could be a monster.” She’d thrown him out the night he told her, not because of what he’d done, but because of her own terror. Good people make bad mistakes. Witt was one of the best. Hidden behind a badge and an attitude, his very nobility had eaten him alive with guilt. She should never have let it fester, not even for those few days.
She stroked his face, ran a thumb across his lower lip. “I forgive you for being forced to take Angela’s life.”
Killing Angela would forever change him. She couldn’t reverse that. She’d stolen his innocence in much the same way her own had been stolen. There were no platitudes to offer. Angela had murdered, she might have done so again to hide her crime, but Witt would be forever tainted by her death.
“And forgive me for leading you to do it.” The last was a whisper, with her eyes closed, too. His breath fanned her cheek as he let it out.
His hands moved up her arms. “Didn’t I tell you I’d always forgive you?”
She went down on her knees, her arms around his neck. “I believe you indicated you sort of hated me for that.”