Relief slammed me, and I bent in two, all the strain I’d been holding coming out of me in a whoosh. I gathered it and forced myself to look at her. “Thank you for letting me know.”
Another tear streamed down her cheek. “I’m so angry with you, Ryder. Angry that my daughter and grandson got stuck in your mess. But I also know you, and I know you would never purposefully or carelessly put them in danger. I know you had your fears. Your losses. Your mistakes. But I also know you were brave enough to set Dakota free of it, so for that, I thank you.”
Without saying anything else, she turned and hurried back into the emergency room.
Leaving me standing there alone.
FORTY-NINE
DAKOTA
In the bare light glowing from the oven vent, night covering the house in a shroud, I stood in my mother’s kitchen slowly whisking the mixture in a metal bowl.
Sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla.
Butter, brown sugar, baking powder.
I added the chunks of the candy bars I’d already cut up, blending them into the gooey mix. I heaped the balls onto the cookie sheet, put them into the oven, and waited while the timer counted down until they were done, then transferred them onto the cooling rack.
I always thought of baking as therapeutic.
The way you could get absorbed in the motions. Your thoughts and fears still alive and plaguing you, but it was like you could churn through them as you churned through the ingredients. Process each one until they were diluted and reshaped, meshing to become a part of something greater.
Because the pain would always be a part of me, but it became a piece of the bigger picture. A piece of the whole. Every experience we had shaped us into who we were, we just had to make sure the bitter parts came out sweeter on the other side.
Once the cookies had cooled, I used a spatula to transfer them into a tin, my chest heavy and achy when I covered it with a lid.
The house creaked in the silence as I tiptoed across the floor. My mom and Kayden had both been long asleep. I’d asked her if I could move Kayden’s portable crib into her room tonight because I had something I needed to do.
We’d been staying here while we convalesced.
While we rested.
There weren’t really any physical wounds to recover from other than a bruise on the side of my face.
It was the discovery of Ryder’s past that required some healing.
What he’d been involved in, who Trey was, the trauma Kayden and I had both been through, and the million other things that I’d had to meld into that mixture to fully see everything as a whole.
What it meant.
I held my breath as I opened the door and stepped out into the cover of night. I’d done it so many times before, slinked around the edge of the house and quietly raced down the path to the edge of the woods to the tree beneath the star-speckled skies.
Drawn because I’d always been able to feel when he was there.
Intrinsically pulled his direction in his time of need.
Meet me in the place of the forgotten.
It was overgrown now, unused, but I could never forget the path.
One that had always led me to the man who’d be waiting on our branch.
Tonight, his black hair rustled with the breeze, his energy so thick that I always felt it as the rumbling of the ground.
It trembled then, this foundation that hadn’t had the time to set.
Held, I stayed there for a long moment. My pulse thundered so wildly that it echoed through the cool air, and my breaths were shallow and hard.
Finally, he shifted to look at me from over his shoulder.
Darkness rained around him.
Midnight.
His pain was so stark and intense that it was difficult to walk through the surge of it.
But I did because I finally could see what that mixture had become on the other side.
And it was so much sweeter than I ever could have imagined.
I approached, moving through the night until I was climbing onto the branch so I could sit at his side. In the same place where we’d fallen in love, even though it had taken so long to truly understand what that really meant.
Our obstacles had been so great, they should have been insurmountable.
But this love was greater than that.
We both faced forward, staring into the darkness that weaved through the woods.
The connection hummed between us.
Wrapped and soothed.
It’d been a week since everything had happened, but I’d felt him out here, every night.
I had known he was waiting. Waiting on me to make the choice.
“The number of times I’ve sat on this branch,” he finally mumbled in that low, deep voice.
It covered me in chills.
“For all those years after I’d ruined my chance with you.”
Self-deprecating laughter rolled from him, and he rubbed his hands together like he could squash the tension that strained between us. “You weren’t even living here at your mom’s any longer, and I’d still come, just because I ached to be close to you. So I could get lost in the memories of you.”
Pain lancinated through my chest. “And I couldn’t come because it hurt too bad to sit here in the amount of love I felt for you and know you didn’t love me back.”
Regret left him on a slow sigh. “I don’t know how I even forced out that lie, but hurting you that way? Seeing the evidence of what I inflicted on your face? It was the moment that fully broke me. The moment I marked on myself as a reminder of what I had lost. Standing at my door, having to break both of our hearts.”
He fisted a hand over the spot where the broken clock sat on his chest.
Its fractured hands unable to move.
I’d never asked him what the broken clock on his chest had meant, sure I’d already known its meaning.
Now, my spirit toiled with its truth.
Those hands were an affliction.
They were his chains.
They were his lost hopes.
They were me.
Grief clouded his voice. “He killed Amelia, Dakota. Killed her as a warning of what would happen to those I loved if I tried to break away from him. And I knew I couldn’t have you a part of that life. So I tried to stay away from you. Tried to put as much distance between us as I could.”
I’d known about Amelia. Ezra had told me when he’d come to check on me the next day after I’d been released from the hospital. He’d given me the barest insight, more ingredients to process into the convoluted mix.
It was sickening, knowing what that monster had done to her. What he had done to Ryder. What he had done to us.
His chuckle was hollow. “Seems I’m not so good about staying away from you, though, am I? And when I’d heard you’d had a son, I came crawling back, thinking if I could just have that small part of you, I would be satisfied. Thought it wouldn’t hurt so fucking bad if I at least had you as a small part of my life. But it was never enough, was it? I wanted more and more of you when I never should have asked for it.”
His hand shook as he roughed it over the top of his head. “I’m fucking sorry, Dakota. I’m sorry for hurting you. I’m sorry for lying to you. I’m sorry for betraying your trust. For giving you that money without you knowing where it came from. For dragging you into something that wasn’t yours.”
Incredulity seeped into his laugh. “I thought I was doing something right—for the both of us, but Dare played me a fool again and again, always a step ahead of me, destroying every chance of joy that anyone around me could get.”
“Except he couldn’t destroy it, could he?”
His harsh brow pinched when he looked at me. “Did he, Dakota? Did he destroy it? Did I destroy it? I kept telling you I wasn’t a good man, and now you see the fullness of that. What I put you and Kayden through…”
A broken sound clawed from his throat, and he looked away as he scrubbed a hand over his face. “It kills me, Dakota. It kills me to know what you both went through. It will forever be the greatest regret of my life.”
He inhaled a shaky breath. “But I don’t want to live my life regretting my choices any longer. When I look at you? When I look at Kayden? I see the man I want to be. The one I should have been all along. The one I’m going to strive to be every day of my life.”