Chapter 24 #2
Clover takes the phone from my hand. She’s trying to bite back more tears. “I won’t, I swear. In fact, I might need a genre switch in my near future. Real-life thrillers are not nearly as much fun.”
Madi chuckles. “Maybe now you’ll write that why-choose romance with three heroes I’ve been begging for.”
The heads of six men all turn at the same time, faces wearing matching WTF expressions while Clover’s cheeks finally flood with some color.
“She’s joking,” Clover stammers. “Sort of. It’s fiction. I don’t— I wouldn’t— How does it—”
Madi’s laughter stops Clover’s word vomit.
“Love you, Clove.”
The call ends, and Clover hands the phone back to Grant as though it weighs a thousand pounds.
“She was in Happiness,” Clover says flatly. “I knew she must have been, but knowing that she was that close to Madi? Watching them. Watching me…”
“But she didn’t hurt them,” Sterling points out. “She could have. She chose not to, which means—”
“She’s not interested in taking unnecessary risks,” I say. “She’s only interested in Clover. Her friends are just pieces in the cog. Backstory, information.”
“They’re safe as long as Terra thinks she can still get to Clover,” Roman adds. “The second she feels cornered, that could change.”
“Then we don’t corner her,” Grant says. “We trap her. Carefully. Strategically.”
“How?” Clover’s voice is gaining some fire, but it’s still small, a wounded animal backed into a corner. “She knows everything about me. How do we fight that when we don’t even know where she is or who’s helping her?”
“By being unpredictable,” Chase says, flashing her a wink, and suddenly, I’d be okay if my cousin came down with a nasty case of pink eye.
“She thinks she knows you, but what she knows are only snippets of your life. Things she’s learned by being on the outside looking in—it’s not all of you.
And hell, I’d bet you’re not even the same woman who was writing those letters six months ago.
Look at you now. You’re on a road trip with six handsome-as-fuck devils. Would the old Clover have done that?”
“No.” She sighs. “Never.”
“Exactly.” Chase’s voice is like an excitable puppy. “She’s created a formula of you that she thinks you follow because that’s what Clover Styx would’ve done. But you’re not Clover Styx anymore. You’re bigger, braver, stronger, and have an army behind you.”
“And we’re very good at war,” Sterling adds with a grim smile.
Clover scans the room, staring at each of us in turn. Grant, Sterling, Chase, Chief, Roman, me—and her expression shifts.
Not hope, exactly, but maybe the beginning of it.
“Okay,” she says with a solid nod of her head. “If it’s a war she wants, it’s a war she’ll get.”
That’s my fucking girl.
We eat as the sun begins to set. Not because anyone’s hungry, but because Chief insists and none of us have the energy to argue with him. Not after listening to a two-hour debate between him and Chase arguing over whether water is wet or not.
Chief insists that water is wet.
Chase says that water makes you wet, water just…is.
I’ve never heard such a stupid fucking debate where neither side will hear reason, and now my head is pounding because of their idiocy.
Clover picks at her food, managing three bites before giving up. But she drinks the tea that Sterling makes her, and she doesn’t flinch when Grant squeezes her shoulder. She even almost smiles when Chase tells a deliberately terrible joke about a dog and a duck.
It’s progress.
A less jumpy Clover is a more relaxed Clover. Maybe tonight, she’ll actually get some restful sleep.
Eventually, people start drifting off. Chief claims the couch so he can “man the front door.” Roman heads out to do another perimeter check. Grant, Sterling, and Chase disappear into the other bedrooms, arguing about who gets which bed, while Clover and I sit side by side at the table.
Roman’s back in under three minutes, his face tight. “Motion sensors tripped on the east side. It’s most likely a deer, but Sterling and I will check it out.”
Clover’s body locks up beside me, so I pull her close. The minutes stretch like hours until Roman’s voice crackles through the radio beside me. “Clear. Just a doe and her fawn. But I’m doubling the sensor range.”
Clover exhales shakily.
I don’t. This time it was a deer. Who’s to say the next time won’t be her?
The radio falls silent, and then it’s just Clover and me. Despite everything that’s coming for us, this—here, with her—feels right.
“You should sleep,” I say.
“So should you.” Her gaze lands on the letters spread across the table, and her expression shutters. “You’re reading them.”
“Yeah,” I say, hating how quickly she can still retreat into herself.
“They were private.” Her voice is sharper than I’ve ever heard it. “I wrote them thinking no one would ever—that you would be the only one to read them. Not. Not—” She’s breathing hard. “It’s like someone is stealing my childhood all over again.”
“Oh, Honeybee.” The weight of all that she carries is crushing.
Her shoulders slump. “I wanted you to read them. I just…I never expected to feel so exposed by someone else reading my past as though they had a right to it. The invasion. The…pillaging of all my secrets. It’s—it’s too much.
It’s our story, and it feels like she’s plagiarizing it and benefiting from our pain at every turn. ”
She taps her fingers against the grain of the table, but it’s not a measured rhythm. This beat is new, uneven, frustrated. “What did you think of them? The letters.”
I draw her focus to me by covering her dancing fingers with my own. “I think you survived hell and came out on the other side still believing in love. I think every word I read makes me fall even more in love with you.”
Her light fills my heart when she registers what I’ve said.
“L-love?”
“Yes, Clover. Love.”
She smiles through a new wave of tears. “You’re only halfway through the letters though. You haven’t hit my angry era yet.”
“Your anger won’t scare me away. It’ll give me insight into our past that I wouldn’t otherwise have, and for that—as painful as it will be to read—I’m grateful.”
I’m also grateful when she falls into my chest and allows me to hold her.
“Come on,” I say, brushing her hair away from her face. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“Will you stay?” she asks. “Even if I can’t—even if my foot stays on the floor?”
“Always. I’m not going anywhere.”
She nods against my chest, and then I guide her to our room with a stack of letters under my arm.
Wrecks is already on the bed, having claimed his spot. He lifts his head, assesses the situation, and apparently decides I’m acceptable because he shifts to the bottom of the bed as if that’ll give us enough room.
I wait until Clover climbs into bed, then I pull her back to my front and wait for her breathing to even out.
It takes longer than I expect. She keeps startling awake, gasping, reaching for me to ensure I’m still here.
It’s heartbreaking.
But every time, I hold her tightly. Every time, I promise I won’t leave.
Eventually, she drifts to sleep, and I pull the stack of letters from my side table and continue reading. Since Clover sleeps with the lights on, I doubt I’ll disturb her.
I have fourteen years’ worth of words to get through that will tell me so much about who Clover Danforth is.
And why I’ll do anything—destroy anyone—to keep her safe.
Dear Valen,
It’s been four years to the day since I last saw you. Four years since Miriam dropped me off with the Danforths and never looked back.
Four years since you promised you’d protect me for the final time.
I’m not angry that you broke that promise. I have to believe it wasn’t your fault. If I don’t, I’ll go insane. Maybe I already have. I’m still writing to you, right?
But sometimes, late at night, I pretend you’re reading these letters. That you know what’s happening in my life. That we’re still connected even though we’re apart.
Because I still feel it. I feel you. It’s not a connection that severs so easily for me.
I turned nineteen this week—two years older than you were when I lost you.
My adoptive mom threw me a party. It was small.
Just her, me, and Barney because I didn’t tell my college friends it was my birthday.
My “mom” said her husband would have been proud of how far I’ve come.
And it was the first birthday party I’ve ever had where I didn’t look over my shoulder, waiting for Terra to punish me for not conforming to one belief or another.
Mary, the woman who adopted me, told me that Terra passed away a while ago. I don’t know the details or how she got them, and I don’t want to. Did you know? Were you there? Did you go to her funeral? Spit on her grave?
I think that’s what I would’ve done. The spitting, I mean, not going to her funeral. Does that make me a bad person?
When I blew out my candles this year, I wished you were here.
It’s the same wish I make on every falling star, every candle, every lost eyelash.
I wish you were here for everything.
But since you’re not, I’ll keep telling you about it. Honestly, I don’t know how not to tell you things now. Maybe this is all we’ll ever be.
Or maybe someday I’ll wake up and this will have been one really messed-up nightmare.
Is it strange that I pray for the nightmare, and not that you’re willingly choosing to move on without me?
I Google you every time I go to the library, you know? It’s like you never even existed. Is this why you said it was safer for me if I didn’t know Vivi’s last name? It made it easier for you to disappear.
I love you.
I hate you.
But I always come back to you.
Clover
I read her words until the sun comes up, memorizing them, feeling them, experiencing them.
Every hope. Every fear. Every moment of her life she was thoughtful enough to share.
Because now I know her.
And Terra Stone will never touch her again…even if I have to burn the whole world down to do it.