Chapter Eighteen #2
“No, you’re not. It’s just that I wouldn’t think your dad would want you to cling to this guilt, would he?
” Audrey ran her hands through his hair before peeling his palms away from his face.
“I’m not saying not to honor him, but it sounded like he loved you a lot.
I don’t think he’d want you hurting this much.
Look at me, Theo.” When he still wouldn’t meet her gaze, she put her hand under his chin and tilted his face up to make him.
“He angled the car away to keep the truck from hitting your side head-on even while he was having a heart attack, didn’t he?
He tried to take the hit so that you wouldn’t.
He protected you. You know that’s true, don’t you? ”
Theo closed his eyes sharply, but it wasn’t enough to keep the tears from spilling out. They lingered on his eyelashes for a split second, shining golden in the firelight before finally falling, leaving shimmering streaks in their wake. He sniffed and nodded once—then again, more firmly this time.
The hardest words to say waited on her tongue, and her own heart broke when she finally released them.
“He wanted you to live. Your father made a choice, and he chose you—he chose you over himself, over anything else.” Her own cheeks were wet, the tears streaming down them in earnest now.
“And you know what? In a lot of ways, that’s more than my mother ever did for me.
That’s what a parent’s supposed to do. He loved you so much. You have to know that.”
A sob wracked his chest at those words.
Audrey wiped his tears away and buried her hands in his hair again, pulling his head down to the curve of her neck. Theo’s arms shook as they wrapped around her—strong, but still tentative, still broken as they always had been.
“You said he knew who he was, and that he accepted himself, and your mother, even with their complicated past,” she said, her voice quivering as she pressed her lips to the side of his head.
“Why can’t you have the same thing? Why don’t you think you deserve that kind of peace?
Your dad thought you did. Don’t you think that’s what he would have wanted for you?
For you to forgive yourself, and to let your wounds heal, to stitch them up and let the scars finally settle?
” She shook her head. “This isn’t living.
It’s a half-life at best. He can’t have wanted you to keep cutting yourself open, slicing over your scars with a knife and bleeding them dry, again and again and again. And I don’t want that for you either.”
Her hands shook as she held him close, the ache in her heart for him growing with every tear he shed.
“Your dad loved you, and if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that love never dies.
It persists. It’s what we leave behind—it’s what your father left behind for you.
It’s not his death that keeps his memory alive, it’s his love.
That’s his legacy. It lives on through you.
” She buried her face in his hair. “And now I love you, and I don’t want this for you.
I don’t want you to keep hurting yourself, torturing yourself over this.
I can’t bear you living with such pain. Seeing it hurt you?
It hurts me.” Another sob tore through her chest. “Please let it go,” she begged.
“At least a little. For me, if not for you. I love you too much for you to keep carrying it like this.”
Theo’s shoulders shook.
His arms tightened around her, and his fingers gripped so hard as he clung to her, she wondered if he might have left bruises petaled along her ribs and back.
But that was fine.
It was nothing compared to the hurt he felt.
She knew it, by the sound he made.
When he finally set it loose—
And let it go.
She felt where it came from when Theo finally set his grief free. It rose from deep inside him, boiling up from some unknown place, somewhere he’d buried it, refused to fully look at it, refused to let it do more than only simmer constantly beneath his skin.
It wasn’t small.
It wasn’t just a pool of grief.
It was an entire ocean.
And he’d been lost in it, adrift at sea.
He was spent from treading water, trying not to drown.
He needed a safe place to breathe.
To rest.
So she would be his island.
Audrey closed her eyes and let it wash over her too, clinging to him and pressing her heart to his while he wailed, the sound of it unearthly and uncanny. It vibrated through her, sent shivers down her spine, shook her to her core.
But what it didn’t shake was her resolve.
She sat with him, cried with him, kept silent, stayed strong and upright against him, held him tight and stroked his hair while he screamed everything he couldn’t voice, everything he’d been keeping wound tight inside for six long months, longer maybe, perhaps hadn’t ever truly dared unleash.
Eventually, Theo calmed.
He grew quiet.
He closed his eyes, his tears finally run dry, finally spent.
And when he buried his right hand in her hair to draw her forehead to his lips for an exhausted kiss, she didn’t feel it move at the back of her head.
His hand didn’t shake at all.
Instead, it stayed perfectly still.
For the very first time.