When I didn’t answer, he sighed. “Look, you’ve both kept parts of your past from each other. And for good reason. No one wants to relive that shit. I get it’s screwing with your head, but I think you need to ask yourself if it really changes how you feel about her.”
“Does it even matter? I can’t compete with the memory of a dead fucking fiancé.”
“It’s not a competition. You can be pissed at her for not telling you, but it comes down to whether or not you’re willing to walk away over it. And personally, I don’t think you are.”
“Thanks for the unsolicited opinion.”
“I thought that was why you called me. If we’re having an honesty session, I’m here because I don’t want to deal with your sorry emo ass if you make a stupid decision.”
Chris had a point. The lie and the betrayal were only a part of the problem. I wasn’t just angry about it; I was hurt. I wanted her to trust me enough to share those parts of herself and her past with me. I might not like the truth, but it was better to know than remain in the dark. Beyond that, I wanted to do for her what she’d done for me; fill the holes in my life I hadn’t realized were there. I wanted to be able to replace the memory of the person she’d lost, and I feared I never would. What an assload of revelation.
Chris’s phone vibrated on the counter. “It’s Sarah.”
I motioned for him to answer it. “Hey—” His greeting was cut off. “What? I can’t—Slow down. Are you—?”
Sarah’s voice filtered through the phone, high-pitched, frantic.
“She did what? We’re coming.” Chris ended the call. “We gotta go to Tee’s.”
It didn’t occur to me to argue. Not with the look on Chris’s face. “What’s going on?”
“She just left with her brother-in-law.”
“It’s after midnight. Where the hell would they go?”
I pushed away from the counter, grabbed my phone, and dialed Tenley, but it went to voice mail. I tried again as we left the condo and bolted down the stairs. We rushed across the street to her apartment. The anger over the belated disclosure evaporated as Sarah came into view, standing in Tenley’s doorway. Her eyes were red, she was sniffling, and TK was curled up in her arms. The kitten let out a forlorn meow and struggled out of Sarah’s hold, bounding toward me. As I picked her up, the heavy feeling in my chest expanded.
“Where is she?” I looked into Tenley’s apartment.
“She went home.”
“What?” I moved past Sarah, inside. My brain refused to process the words. This was her home. The bathroom door was open, the light still on. Her shoes were gone, and so was her jacket.
“She’s going back to Arden Hills. She left with Trey just before I called,” Sarah replied shakily. “I tried to get her to stay, but she wouldn’t listen to me. She wasn’t making much sense. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Her car’s still out back.”
“He drove. She had a suitcase with her. She asked me to look after TK until she came back,” Sarah said. Her pity felt like sandpaper on my already raw emotions.
Unwilling to accept she was gone, I strode through her apartment. Her living room was the same mess it had been before she told me to leave. When I reached the bathroom, I stopped short. Her medicine cabinet was wide open, the entire collection of pill bottles missing. In her bedroom the closet door was open, hangers missing from the middle. One of the dresser drawers was lying on the floor, half the contents strewn all over the place.
“She left me?” That choked feeling got worse, making it hard to breathe.
“She said she needed to take care of things,” Sarah said from the doorway.
“She’s running again.” I put the drawer back in the dresser and gathered up the discarded clothes, trying to create order for the chaos in my head.
“She has to deal with her estate.”
“So she left with that dickface? Couldn’t she have done that here?”
I wished I knew more. It made sense that Tenley had an estate; she was the sole survivor in her family. There must have been things left to her; a house maybe, money. And somehow that dick Trey played a role in things.
“Why didn’t she just tell me the truth in the first place?” I picked up the tank top lying on her bed. She’d worn it last night; I’d folded it and left it there this morning.
“Maybe she wanted to protect herself.”
“From what? Me?”
“She’s petrified of losing you, Hayden. Don’t you get it? All the important people in her life are gone. You gave her a reason to feel something good again. She wasn’t going to risk that.”
“So she left?”
Sarah looked at me with such empathy that it made me want to scream. “She’s in love with you. If she hadn’t lost all of those people, she never would have met you. I think it’s reasonable for her to be a little fucked up over it.”