31. Chapter 31
Her tears break my heart all over again.
Failure is the only thing running through my body. I should be ecstatic that Tennison is finally gone from this world, but all I can think of is how I failed Lennox. How I failed to protect the family of the woman I love.
It makes me feel less than, and wholly not worthy of her tears.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Nope. We’re not doing that. And if you apologize, I think I’m going to poke your damn incision.” She laughs through the tears, and I relax a little.
“That would hurt really bad, I think,” I grumble.
“Yep.”
“How’s Lennox?”
“He’s…” She completely breaks down again, and the guilt is overwhelming.
She can ask me for the rest of my life to not apologize, but it’s my fault. This whole fucked-up situation is my fault, and I’ll never be able to atone for that.
“He’s physically going to be okay, but how does someone recover mentally from what was done to him?” she whispers.
I can’t answer because I don’t have an answer. Every victim we’ve ever talked to struggled every single day. Some succumbed to depression, to the inability to escape the memories. Over the course that I worked on Tennison’s case, we lost six people to suicide. It’s something I’ll never be able to forget, never be able to reconcile.
And if Lennox falls into the same path, I’ll never recover. Not for the damage it would do to Willow.
“We’ll help him,” I barely get out. I don’t necessarily feel it’s true, not for me. I wholeheartedly believe Willow and her family will help Lennox recover to the best of their ability, but I just don’t know where I fit into it all.
Am I even any good for her?
This entire situation is making me second-guess everything. Not how much I love this woman because I think she’s the only one I’ll ever love like this. But if Lennox never heals, if something far worse happens, in what world would she ever forgive me? Sure, she seems like she doesn’t blame me, but will that still be the case in a couple of weeks? In a year?
She puts her forehead on our hands and just cries. My other hand reaches over, putting it on her head in some lame attempt at comfort. Her shoulders shake with her sobs, and my eyes well with tears. I don’t feel the pain in my arm or my stomach.
It’s ripping my heart into a million pieces that she’s in pain and I can’t do anything to help. Hell, it hurts more that I know I’m the reason for her heartache.
“Fuck, Will,” I barely get out through my own tears. I attempt to scoot over, and it draws her head up.
“Don’t move,” she scolds.
I ignore her, adjusting myself enough to make room. A little pain from a stab wound won’t stop me right now.
Pulling her hand that’s still in mine, I lead her up onto the hospital bed with me.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispers.
“It hurts to not hold you. Just give me this, Will. Please, let me hold you,” I beg. She’s on my good side anyway, so it’s not like she’ll hurt my wound. And my forearm is wrapped up in a cushioned bandage.
She leans into my side, gripping the hospital gown as she cries.
“I thought I lost you. When I—” She gasps. “When I walked into the cabin, I just saw you on the ground and I thought you were gone. And then Lennox… Fuck.”
I can barely make out her words, but I understand her fear more than anything. I rub her shoulder, and she lets out all of her emotion. I have a strong suspicion she was—or still is—in shock and everything is hitting her all at once.
I don’t know how long she cries for, but eventually her tears dry up. She lifts her head up to look at me and wipes away tears I didn’t even realize were still falling.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” I tell her.
“Did I kill him?” She whispers it like she’s scared of my answer. I know somewhere deep in her brain, she knows logically that she didn’t, but wading through her shock proves to be impossible.
“No, Will, you didn’t. That was a not-so-unfortunate reaction to him falling. That is one hundred percent not on you.”
She nods, but I know she doesn’t fully hear me yet.
A nurse comes in, concern in her eyes as she looks at Willow.
“The doctor asked me to come in and check on you,” she says softly, her eyes on Willow, not me.
My eyes tear up again with the fact that she’s in so much shock the doctors want to intervene.
“I’m good. Totally good.” Willow’s voice cracks as she continues attempts to sit up.
“I tell you what, if you come with me for maybe half an hour max, we’ll check you out and see if we can get you feeling a little bit better. After that, you are welcome to come back. We’ll set up a recliner for you to sleep in if you’d like, too.”
Willow’s gaze shifts from the nurses to mine. I give her a small nod.
“O-Okay.” She slowly gets off my bed with help from the nurse before she leads her out of my room.
The nurse meets my eyes over Willow’s head, nodding in a subtle way to let me know she’ll probably be a lot longer than thirty minutes.
I lean back on the bed, wiping my face one more time. I’ve seen a lot in my life, but seeing Willow like that is by far the worst. There’s nothing I can do to help either. This feeling of helplessness isn’t unknown to me, but this feeling of wanting to escape it is new.
A knock at the door makes me lift my head as Woodcroft walks in.
I refuse to hide my glare. Their response was abysmal, and I don’t know that anything he says will make me forgive that.
“I’m sorry, Oak,” he says quietly.
“What the fuck happened?” I growl.
He sighs as he sits in the chair Willow vacated not all that long ago.
“He sent us on a wild goose chase,” he says plainly.
I stare at him, waiting for a better explanation because that tells me nothing.
He lets out a sigh. “He called in an anonymous tip to the line, saying Tennison was on the opposite end of town in some abandoned barn. We followed through because, well, we had to. That’s the job. When Arlo called us, we immediately knew what had happened, but it put us just far enough away for shit to go down with no backup.”
“You should have known.” I don’t relent. I can’t. I just had Willow sobbing on my chest for God knows how long, and any explanation he gives me is not good enough.
How do I even look at her and tell her this? How do I tell her I got stabbed and she had to save the day because a team of fucking experts got tricked?
How can she even look at me?
Lord knows I’ll have trouble looking in the mirror.
“Oak, man, I know this whole thing was fucked up, but it’s over.”
“Sure, it’s over. I just got stabbed, and Lennox is sitting in the ICU. Things will magically be fine because you get to fly back home in a couple of days.”
“I’m going to ignore all the shit you just said because you’ve been through a lot. You’re emotional and probably a little high on the good drugs, but believe me, we will be having this conversation again in a few days. I feel shitty enough that we got duped by that fucker and weren’t there for you guys.” His anger shouldn’t shock me, but it does. Subconsciously, I know I’m being a dick, but Willow’s breakdown has me so on edge that I don’t know how to even express how I’m feeling. Woodcroft is probably feeling the same guilt I am, and it’s not fair to put more on him.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I’m doing a lot of apologizing today, and somehow none of it feels like enough. My eyes burn, trying to keep the tears in, but they fall in defiance.
“Oh, Oak,” Woodcroft murmurs before I feel him lean over and hug me.
My shoulders shake with the outpour of emotion.
“I’m no good here,” I say through the tears. “I hurt everyone. Willow deserves better than this.”
“Shhh. We can talk about it later, but you deserve everything you’ve built here, okay? Just remember that.”
I don’t bother disagreeing, I’m too busy letting the events of the day—hell, of the past few years—settle in.
Tennison is dead.
I haven’t let myself think that yet, and it feels less relieving than I thought it would.
Years of work. Years of him mentally taking his toll. Years of being on high alert.
And it’s just over.
It’s strange how, in a matter of hours, everything you’ve worked for is over. How does a person just move on from something that’s held such a large part of their life? Do you forget things ever happened? I know I attempted to do just that by moving here, but it wasn’t like I actually forgot everything.
Impossible, if I want to keep Willow in my life, but what else is there? Therapy, sure. I assume I’ll be needing it for years to come just to cope, but can you truly move on and be happy? Live a fulfilled life?
They’re all questions I have no answers for. I suspect no one does because, as humans, we’re all different. We all cope and heal differently. But fuck, it would be nice to have a solid answer for once.
The only thing I can do is question if my place is really here in Bluebell Falls. Can I continue to do more good than harm during this phase of healing? Is love enough to conquer this giant chasm of my own creation?