Chapter 12 #2
Then Hannah’s there, a gasp, followed by her quiet sob.
She wraps herself around my left side, arms tightening around my ribs.
Wilder slides in on the right, arms wrapping around all three of us, a silent but solid presence.
They don’t try to fix it, they just hold me, not knowing they’re the only thing holding me together.
“Let us know if we need to move, Collin,” Abby whispers over her shoulder.
“Did you move anything?” Collin, Abby’s brother, who happens to be a homicide detective, asks.
I lift my eyes, letting them land on her once more. Still cold and unmoving. I try to speak, but it catches in my throat, coming out as a rough cough. “I flipped her over. She was face down when I got here. I’m sorry.”
Collin squats down beside Abby, blocking my view of my mom.
I’m grateful for it, I can’t look at her anymore.
“Don’t apologize for trying to save her,” he says.
“But there’s nothing you can do from here.
I think it’d be best if you headed home.
You can come by the station tomorrow, you’re welcome to stay, but…
” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
I give him a weak nod. “Yeah, sure. Okay.”
Hannah leans into me, offering her gentle strength as her husband helps me stand.
My knees buckle, but he’s ready. He always is.
Wilder drives me to the ranch while the girls drive back in my Jeep.
“Do you need anything?” he asks as he walks us through my front door.
Scarlett. I think. But I know I need to try to make it through this on my own.
Leaning on her may just be setting me up for further destruction.
I flop back on the couch, eyes focused on the wood beams in the ceiling, counting them as if I don’t already know there’s eight. “Someone put the flowers in my car on Lettie’s doorstep,” I say, not making eye contact. His hand lands on my shoulder, squeezing before he heads for the door.
He pulls it open. “Call if you need us. You know we’ll be here.” I nod, movement stiff, practiced while I hold my breath, waiting for the door to close behind him.
The soft click of the door echoes like a bullet out of a chamber through the empty house. Walking to the kitchen, I pull out the bottle of tequila sitting in the freezer. Unscrewing the top, I flick it off, sending it flying across the room, clanking a few times when it hits the floor.
“To never knowing how it feels to be loved,” I whisper.
The words scrape their way out of me, the kind of truth that burns worse than any drink ever could.
I tip the bottle back, welcoming the bitter taste, the brief warmth against my taste buds, and the numbness that eases the ache clawing at my chest.
Back on the couch, I take gulp after gulp until my hands start to tremble from how hard I’m strangling the neck of the bottle. The bottle of Don Julio drops to the floor with a dull thud, one that ricochets through me. The finality of the day sinking in as the room starts to spin.
I let my head fall back, eyelids heavy, and a strange peace settles over me.
Not the good kind, but the quiet kind. The kind of quiet I’ve been chasing for longer than I want to admit.
The kind of quiet that doesn’t hurt when I think about visiting her.
The kind of quiet that says it’s time for me to live for myself.
The thought settles in the part of my heart I’d caged off for my mom. It aches, but it’s oddly comforting as I let the darkness take me.
Maybe she’ll love me in heaven.
The pounding on my door shakes through my body like Tom when Jerry would hit him in the head with a rubber mallet.
My entire body goes rigid as I will the ringing to stop.
“Get up and let me in, Monroe!” Abby’s forceful yell slices through the door, making me sit up fast enough that my vision swims.
“I will give you all the money in my bank account if you’ll stop knocking,” I croak, dragging my feet toward the incessant knocking.
I barely get the lock flipped before the door is pushed open.
Abby stands at the front of an army of my best friends, all of them. Their arms are loaded with grocery bags, takeout containers, and enough bottled water to float a canoe. My hand finds the back of my neck, realizing they showed up for me. They showed up, and I didn’t even have to ask.
“I don’t want your money,” Abby says, pushing past me. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”
I groan as my head falls forward. Slap after slap against my shoulder, my teammates push past me, yet I can’t bring myself to look a single one of them in the eye. I don’t even know what time it is. Is it still today or is it tomorrow? Has it been a week?
“I thought I told you I was good,” I say as I walk up behind Wilder, who’s helping Reed load food into my fridge.
He snorts, looking at me over his shoulder. “You did, but try telling them that,” he says, jutting his chin at Hannah and Abby, who are scooping copious amounts of food on a plate. “I dropped the flowers off, but didn’t see her. Do you want me to go get her?”
The thought sounds enticing, but I shake my head. I don’t want her to feel guilty, like she has to talk to me because I lost my mom. I want her to be here for me because she wants to be, and if the armada shows up at her door, she’d show up because they told her to.
And wanting her to want me right now feels pathetic enough without involving a search party of professional athletes.
I shake my head, extending my arm to take the plate Hannah’s holding out to me. “No, I’m okay. Thanks for doing that.” He pauses, looking me over. He notices too much, but I can only hope he stays here. The man is a sucker for love, and I know, given the chance, he’ll try to play matchmaker.
“Thanks, Han,” I say as I wrap my arm around his wife’s shoulders. She looks up at me, eyes filled with tears, no doubt reliving losing her own asshole of a parent. I should be crying with her, but I don’t have it in me. Not to mention, I’m still tipsy and jonesing for another drink.
I set my plate on the island and walk back over to where I’d crashed out on the couch earlier. “Nope!” Abby says, putting extra emphasis on the P. “Water, flat or sparkling. But I will bench you so quick if you pick up that bottle.”
She snaps her fingers before flattening her hand, asking me to hand it over.
I narrow my eyes like she’s taking all the wind from my sails.
She isn’t, that's the problem. She cares, they all do.
And the warmth that brings to my chest, I hate that I love it.
I hate that it makes the edge of wanting to drink myself to sleep a little duller.
I hand her the bottle, falling onto the couch where they immediately close in, settling around me like a human shield. No one talks, no one asks for anything, we just eat in the thick, heavy silence. But their presence says everything.
I can feel them watching, waiting for me to break, to scream, something.
But all I feel is this heavy, slow-burning resentment sitting in my chest like soggy ash.
It’s not grief, not yet. Grief would require closeness, and she shut that door long ago.
Twenty years of nothing. Twenty years of pretending I didn’t exist. And now, I’ll never get another chance.
But it’s not even that, it’s the fact that I’ve wasted so much time begging for scraps when I should have been walking in the strength of what her silence made me.
I’m so much more than what I let her silence tell me I am.
My gaze drifts to the bottle Abby confiscated.
The light looks as if it’s highlighting the curve of it, like it knows exactly the power it holds over me right now.
Just one sip and everything would go quiet again.
The resentment, the guilt, the memories I don’t want to remember but can’t stop replaying.
One sip and I wouldn’t have to deal with this today.
My fingers twitch. I could get up, no one would be fast enough to stop me before I swipe it and run to my room. They’d try, no doubt. One reach, one twist, and the cap would be off, and I could stop feeling agai–
A hand lands on my knee, soft and steady. I look over to see Hannah, her soft hazel eyes are the closest to my own out of us all. Her hand is a grounding presence that tells me she knows exactly where my head's at, even if I haven’t said a word.
“You’re allowed to not miss her, you know,” she murmurs, voice barely above a whisper.
My shoulders drop, tension draining from me in a slow, painful wave. Those words, words I didn’t know I needed to hear, they’re permission, and no one else thought to say it. Probably because no one else here, other than Wilson, has shitty parents. It's a thought that would never cross their minds.
I stare down at my hands as they tremble against my plate. “You’re grieving what you didn’t get, Lucas,” she says. “Not what you lost.” Her hand squeezes my thigh.
I hate how right that is. My eyes drift to the bottle again, not out of want, but out of reflex. It’s there, and it’s an out. One I don’t usually take, one that’s all too tempting to get lost in, though.
“You don’t need that,” Wilder says quietly, nodding toward it without judgment.
I swallow hard. “Yeah,” I mumble. “I know.”
The thing is, I really do. I know it won’t fix twenty years of silence. It won’t erase the voicemails I never got. It won’t rewrite the birthdays that I lit and blew candles out all by myself. It won’t give me the mother she chose not to be. It’ll only make the resentment louder once it wears off.
I lean back against the couch, the weight of the day pressing into my spine, and for the first time all day, I let myself breathe. Slow, deep, without running from it. “Thanks,” I say as I meet each of their eyes. “It means a lot that you’re here.”
Reed stands, walking across the room before he sits on the coffee table in front of me. “We don’t fight alone, Monroe.”
Sammy stands and moves to his side, reaching out and placing his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got you, man.”
I smile up at them, tears springing to my eyes for the first time, not out of heartbreak, but of gratitude. Thankful that they knew better than to leave me alone, grateful for the group of misfits that have turned into family these past few years.
“Thanks,” I say again.
Wilson chuckles from his spot on the couch. “Stop thanking us for doing exactly what you’d do if any of us were in this situation.” I flinch, he’s right. So why do I feel like I don’t fully deserve it?