It had been three days since we flew back to New York and we had yet to talk about what happened in Columbia. To be completely honest, we barely talked at all. I was still pissed about the situation and how everything went down. The fact that she never fucking told me that Martinez was her uncle. Not that I ever asked, but who the hell would ask something like that. It never even crossed my mind to find out anything about him.
He was irrelevant.
The signs were all there. I just didn’t pick up on them. That pissed me off more than anything.
I was too caught up trying to find out her real name.
As luck would have it Martinez was in Colombia because Hector had personally asked for Briggs to take the meeting. Which had never happened before. Martinez had a feeling and that was why he set it up in his warehouse. If shit went down, he would know about it. Briggs was never in danger.
I wanted to ask her all sorts of damn questions, but she seemed so fucking lost in her own head. As if she didn’t know what to do with her life now. Like her uncle had taken everything away from her. I finally realized that this wasn’t just a job for her.
This was her life.
It was all she’d ever known.
She barely talked to me other than small banter about what I wanted to eat for dinner and meaningless conversations, never addressing the elephant in the room. She hadn’t smiled or laughed once since we arrived back in New York.
It was killing me not seeing her face light up. The only time I felt close to her in the last few days was when we were in bed. She still let me hold her every night.
I woke up from a bad dream about my family. I never dreamt about them. It was the worst feeling, the worst fucking anxiety and I didn’t know why. I summed it up to being worried about Briggs and overwhelmed with everything that had gone down recently.
When Briggs left the apartment that morning to go grab the mail from the mailroom, I found myself grabbing her computer. Every once in a while I would check the online Oak Island newspaper and something told me that I needed to.
I clicked it.
After three years of being gone, there before my very own eyes was the headline news.
Savannah Ryder, beloved wife of Dr. Robert Ryder, esteemed member of the community dies at age forty-nine, losing her four-year long battle to breast cancer.
My heart dropped.
I couldn’t fucking breathe.
The ground beneath me swallowed my body whole.
She will be laid to rest at noon today at the…
I immediately shut the laptop unable to keep staring at the truth that was blatantly in front of my eyes. I don’t know how long I stood there with my emotions bleeding out of me. Trying to come to terms with the fact that I didn’t get to say goodbye to a woman who had raised me like her own.
A woman I was proud to call a second mom.
I wished I had kept in touch with her. I hadn’t felt homesick up to that point, but the news hit me hard. It was a reality slap that made me doubt some of my choices.
I couldn’t stop the tears that formed in my eyes. The pain in my heart was ripping at my soul and eating me alive.
I faintly heard Briggs open the door and walk in with the mail, it was like I was there but I wasn’t. The emotions crippling me in ways I had never experienced before, not even after the accident. The guilt was too much to bear.
“Hey, I'm going to make some food. Did you want—“ She stopped dead in her tracks, taking in my appearance. “Austin…” she coaxed, walking toward me. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Our eyes locked.
I didn’t have a chance to register her face. I just pushed off the island and walked past her to grab my suitcase. Throwing it on the bed, grabbing random shit from my closet.
“Austin, are you leaving me?”
Her worried tone snapped me out the chaos surrounding me that was taking me under.
“Never,” I simply stated. “Baby, grab some shit. We got to go.”
“Go? Go where? What are you talking about? You’re scaring me, Austin.”
I didn’t falter. “Home. I got to go home.”
Her head jerked back, stunned by my revelation. I told her I had no one to go home to, and I knew that was one of the reasons she agreed to let me come with her in the first place.
We never talked about my past.
Not my parents.
Not the boys.
Not even Alex.
They didn't exist in my new life. Out of sight, out of mind for the most part. Which was about to come back and bite me in the fucking ass.
There I was about to take her home to my truths, the ones I had been running away from for the last three years. At that moment, in that second, I didn’t care about the repercussions that would follow from her learning my reality.
I needed her.
More now than I ever had before. She was my rock, my reason. The one thing that was constant in my life.
There was no way in hell I could do this without her.
She was all that mattered to me.