Chapter 3 #2
“I won’t stay long. I just—I need to explain something.” He shakes his head. “At the fair, when I saw you…”
I press deeper into my chair, the tiny, weighted glass balls molding around me. “When you looked through me like I was nobody?”
His jaw tightens. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Didn’t mean to what?” Holy crap. I just growled at him. “Not recognize me? Forget about me? Leave me in the trauma so you could pretend I never existed?” Sweat forms on my lip, and my throat scratches as though it’s already raw.
“I didn’t…forget you.”
“You literally said, ‘Are you okay, lady?’ Not, ‘Oh my God, Clover. It’s you!’ That’s the very definition of forgetting.”
“No.” He runs a hand through his dark hair, an unconscious habit he hasn’t lost in all these years. “I didn’t forget you. I can’t forget something that doesn’t exist in my mind.”
The words hang heavy in the air like gas. Like poison.
“W-what?”
“It’s not that I don’t remember you specifically, Clover. I don’t remember anything. But I read your file. I know we were at Roots of Salvation, ROS, at the same time. I know I told my family about you. I know you left or escaped the same night I lost…”
I flinch. No one is supposed to have access to my history. The judge promised that all my records were sealed when the Danforths adopted me.
His gaze cuts to mine, then to the overhead lights, the lamps on every table—all burning brightly.
“Did you turn on every single light so you could open your front door?”
I shake my head, still trying to process how he could have access to information about me but not remember me. “I—I sleep with them on.” I lower my gaze as my cheeks heat. “Or try to.”
Roman leaves the couch to lean against my bookcase and study my home. I know what he sees. The curtains are all drawn tight, while every corner of my home is lit by LEDs like it’s a Christmas Spectacular.
“The night you lost what?” My words are no more than a puff of smoke.
I didn’t think it was possible for Valen to physically tense any more than he already is, but he stiffens like the teeth of a zipper, inch by inch, locking himself away.
“The night I lost my childhood. I don’t have any memories before waking up in the hospital when I was seventeen.”
My thumb taps against each finger with slow, deliberate movements.
“I—I don’t understand.”
Roman’s soft footsteps pad down my hall. I don’t even care where he’s going.
“I don’t have any memories, Clover. My very first memory is of a hospital room.
” He’s watching me carefully, like I’m a grenade that might explode.
It’s a fair assessment. “I woke up with no memory of how I got there or who I was, even after months of surgeries and therapy. They told me I’d been beaten.
But they never caught the responsible parties—” He swallows hard.
“My aunt pulled onto the grounds of Roots of Salvation and found me in the center of a mob. They scattered as she and her driver ran toward me. I had a note stapled to my shirt that said ‘Deliverance.’”
The room tilts as I try to make sense of his words.
That’s not true.
“You—you were beaten?”
He studies me like someone searching for a lie, a threat.
“I nearly died. When I woke up…” He spreads his arms wide. “Nothing. The first seventeen years of my life, gone.”
“How?” I whisper through my shaky breaths.
He didn’t leave me. He didn’t choose his mother. He didn’t abandon me.
Valen takes a step toward me, then hesitates.
“They don’t know.” His voice roughens, as though the militant mask he wears is crumbling but he won’t go down without a fight.
“Trauma. Brain injury. The doctors called it dissociative amnesia. The memories might come back, they might not.” He studies me with all the distrust I glared at him with earlier.
“It’s been fourteen years, and they haven’t. ”
Fourteen years.
He was hurt while I was waiting for him at his Aunt Miriam’s house.
“When?” I ask, the tapping of my fingertips keeping me grounded. “When exactly did this happen to you?”
“Vivi found me on August fifteenth, fourteen years ago.”
The day I escaped.
The day he was supposed to meet me.
He wasn’t abandoning me.
He was dying.
I can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t—
“Clover?” He’s closer now. Not touching, but close enough that I can feel his body heat. “Are you okay?”
“Am I—” A laugh bursts out of me, bitter and broken. “Am I okay?”
“That was a stupid question. I’m sorry.”
“You were…beaten.” I’m staring at him, but it’s not this version I see. No, I see a young man. A teenager who helped a girl escape and paid for it with his memories. With his life. “You were nearly killed.”
“According to hospital records, yes.”
“And you don’t remember…anything.”
“When I woke up, Aunt Vivi was beside me. She told me who I was, Valen Stone. The son of her brother, Edward Harrington and Terra Stone.” His mouth twists.
“I don’t remember either of them but know that my father died when I was young, and my mother died a couple of years after I woke up in the hospital. I never met her.”
“Terra.” The name sends ice down my spine. “Your mother,” I whisper.
His whole body goes rigid. For a moment, the professional mask slips, and I see something raw underneath—a boy who never got to grieve a mother he can’t remember. A man who doesn’t know if he should mourn or hate her.
“You knew her.”
It’s not a question, but I answer anyway. “I knew her.”
And she knew things—secrets that died with her. Or should have. But someone’s been digging. The packages. The notes. Someone wants to make sure those secrets stay buried, even if it means burying me too.
“From Roots of Salvation.” He’s cautious, careful with his words and his actions.
I nod. “Do—do you know about that place?” Does he know that his mother was a sadistic, narcissistic bitch with really fucked-up ideologies?
His eyes narrow, and I realize my fingers have turned white where I’m squeezing them together. “Some. Just what my family has told me.” He’s watching me too closely now. “We were both there. As kids. You and me.”
“Yes.”
“Were we…” He stops. Frowns. Then starts again. “We were close? Before?”
How do I answer that?
Do I tell him we were everything to each other? That he saved me a hundred times over? That I’ve loved him since I was six years old and saw him smiling at me?
Do I tell him he promised to meet me? That I’ve been waiting ever since? That he’s the hero in every book I’ve ever written?
“Yes,” I finally say. “We knew each other.”
“Were we friends?”
Friends. Such a small word for something that encompasses my entire world.
“Yes.” I’m detaching. My voice doesn’t sound like my own. “We were friends.”
Something flickers across his face. Relief? Disappointment? I can’t tell.
“When I saw you earlier, something just—” He touches his chest, and I feel it in mine.
The pressure, right over our hearts. His fingers press there, like he’s holding something in—or trying to understand what’s fighting to get out.
“I didn’t know why. But your name, that nickname, it just came out.
Like my body remembered even though my brain didn’t. ”
Tears burn the edges of my eyes. I will not cry. I will not cry.
In. Hold. Out. Hold. In—he needs to stop staring at me—out.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “If we were friends, and I forgot, I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t forget me.” The words taste like grief. “I was stolen from you. Exactly how she always planned for it to go.”
He sucks in a gasp of air. The silence it leaves behind is thick and choking.
“Who?” The word rumbles around in his chest—a bowling ball hitting pins.
“T-Terra. Your mother.”
I study him as the truth settles between us. He’s fighting something behind his beautiful blue eyes, in the muscle of his jaw that ticks like a heartbeat.
He lost almost everything, and I’ve blamed him.
All those years of anger. All that wasted grief. And now, I don’t know what to do with any of it, except maybe, finally, let it go.
The guilt crashes into me, suffocating in its weight.
“Clover?” He reaches for my hand but drops his to his side almost as fast. “What’s wrong?”
“Valen.” Roman’s careful gaze cuts between us. “Maybe we should finish this tomorrow. It’s…a lot. For you both.”
He’s right. Absolutely right. Yes. I’m nodding faster than a bobblehead on a rollercoaster.
“I have to…” Jumping to my feet, I ease along the outside of the room, keeping eyes on both men until I reach the doorway. “I need to… I need a minute.”
“Of course. I’ll just…We’ll wait.”
“No.” The word crashes through the space between us. Too sharp, too loud. “I mean, you don’t have to stay. I’m fine. Totally fine.”
His face is the poster child for an eye roll. “You’re not fine.”
“I’m always fine,” I fire back, my words soft but firm.
I am always fine.
“Clover.” Worry lines crease Roman’s face, but they blur through my unshed tears, and I focus on the door locks.
All. Three. Of. Them.
“Please.” I place one foot on my stairs. Safety. Escape. They’re only twelve steps away. “Please, just— I need to be alone.”
Valen wants to argue, I can see it on the tip of his tongue, but whatever’s happening with my face right now must convince him to stay away because he nods.
“We’ll go, but—” He pulls a card from his pocket and places it on my coffee table instead of handing it to me. I appreciate the no contact more than he could know. “This is my cell number. We. I hope that… We should talk, Clover.”
He moves toward the door, closer to me, but pauses as Roman unlocks it and then walks through.
“For what it’s worth,” Valen says without turning around. It’s another small kindness. The emptiness in his eyes hurts me. “I wish I remembered. Whatever we were. Whoever you were to me—I can see that it’s caused you a great deal of pain. I wish I remembered so I could ease that for you.”
The door closes with a soft click, and I’m quick to engage the deadbolts, then sink to the floor, but I don’t count—not this time.
Some things are too big for five seconds. Some things are meant to sweep you away in the swell of grief, and that’s where I allow my mind to go—the overwhelming grief of losing myself a little more with each breath I exhale.
My entire life has been one lie after another, and he’s been the biggest of them all.