Chapter 43 Having All the Answers Hits Different—Worse, Actually
AMANDA
The gun barrel pressed against Kade’s throat grounds me in a way that nothing else has for the last hour.
Or maybe the last eight years. His pulse beats against the metal, steady and strong, and for a wild second, I wonder what would happen if I just pulled the trigger.
If I ended this here, ended him, ended the possibility of him walking away from me again.
Because that’s what he’s done to me, right? Made me think about abandonment and ways to stop the pain before it starts. Made me consider the worst possible outcomes because at least then I’d be prepared when they happened.
But then he speaks, and his voice is exactly the same as it was eight years ago when he used to whisper against my skin in the dark.
“Go ahead, baby doll,” he murmurs, his tone almost peaceful. “I’d happily die at your hands.”
The casual way he says it, like dying would be a gift if I were the one giving it to him, makes the dam inside me snap.
“You bastard.” The words tear out of my throat. “Eight years ago, you made me fall in love with you, and then you show up and make me fall in love with you all over again. How dare you?”
The tears are falling freely now, hot and angry and years overdue.
I can taste salt and dust and the metallic tang of adrenaline, and I hate that he’s seeing me like this.
Hate that after everything, he still has the power to reduce me to this crying, furious mess.
He doesn’t flinch away from the gun or try to step back.
Just takes my rage, like he’s been expecting it.
“I know,” he says quietly. “I know I fucked up.”
“Fucked up?” I laugh, but it comes out broken. “You think you just fucked up? Kade, you didn’t forget our anniversary or leave the toilet seat up. You vanished. You made me think I meant nothing to you. You made me feel worthless in every sense of the word.”
“That was never—”
“Why?” The word explodes out of me. “Why did you do it?”
“You know about Bergen,” he says, his voice urgent now. “What he did. The hit squad he hired. The threats he sent me for eight years. Photos of you in crosshairs. Messages threatening your life. It was all I could do to stay away from you to keep you safe. Don’t you understand that?”
“You shouldn’t have left,” I whisper.
“How could I stay knowing that they would kill you? I could never live with myself if you died because of me.”
I press the gun harder against his throat. “You shouldn’t get to make that decision for me. But you did. You decided—all by yourself—that I was better off without you. That I was safer alone. That your love wasn’t worth the risk.”
“Amanda, they were going to kill you!”
“Maybe! Maybe they would have. Maybe loving you would have gotten me killed. But that was my choice to make. My risk to take. My life to live or lose.”
His jaw works, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“You didn’t respect me enough to let me choose.
” My voice is shaking now. “You thought you knew better. Thought you could just decide what I could handle and what I couldn’t.
What I was strong enough to face. You treated me like I was some fragile thing that needed to be protected instead of a partner who deserved to know the truth. ”
“I was trying to keep you alive.”
“By making me wish I was dead?”
He swallows hard.
“Because that’s what you did to me. You kept me physically safe, but you destroyed everything else about me.
Maybe the love would have been enough,” I say, my voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
“Maybe I would have looked at the danger and chosen you anyway. Maybe I would have said fuck the threats, fuck the risks, I want to be with you regardless. Maybe I’m strong enough to live with a target on my back if it meant not living without you. But you never let me make that choice.”
The anger surges back inside me. “You decided for me. Took away my agency, my voice, my right to choose my own life. You left. Abandoned me without explanation. Without goodbye. Without giving me any say in what happened to my own fucking marriage.”
The tears stream down my face, and I can barely breathe through the sobs building in my chest.
“Do you know what that did to me?” My voice cracks.
“Do you know what it’s like to wake up every morning for eight years wondering if you’re fundamentally unlovable?
To second-guess every interaction, every relationship, every moment of happiness, because maybe it’s just another lie that’s going to disappear? ”
I’m shaking now, the gun trembling in my hand as eight years of carefully controlled emotion explodes out of me.
“You made me feel worthless. You made me feel like I wasn’t worth fighting for.”
“That wasn’t— I never thought—”
“You did, though.” I cut him off. “You thought you knew what was best for me. You thought your decision to leave was more important than my decision to stay. You chose to protect me from danger, but you never considered protecting me from the pain of losing you.”
His expression breaks, and raw pain flashes across his face.
“Friends, relationships—I swore off men entirely because of what you did to me. Because if the man I married, the man who promised to love me forever, could just disappear without a word, then what hope did I have with anyone else? I became this hollow, bitter shell of a person who couldn’t trust anyone, couldn’t open up to anyone, couldn’t even let myself want anything real, because you taught me that real things don’t last.”
The words are coming out in gasps now, broken by sobs I can’t control anymore. Tears are streaming down his face now, too.
“I’ve spent eight years building walls so high that I forgot what it felt like to actually connect with someone. I wrapped myself up in pink armor and a tornado of a personality as a defense mechanism, because no one can actually get close to that sort of storm.
“And just when I thought maybe, maybe I could try again with Chad, it turns out he was you all along. You’ve been playing with my heart this entire time, making me fall for you twice, all while knowing exactly how much you destroyed me the first time.”
“I know,” he whispers.
“Do you? Do you really?” The tears are coming harder now. “Do you know that I blamed myself for years? That I wondered what I did wrong, what I wasn’t enough of, why I couldn’t make you stay?”
“I know.”
“I thought maybe I wasn’t pretty enough, or smart enough, or interesting enough to keep you. I thought maybe the whole thing was just a Vegas mistake and you finally came to your senses and realized you’d made a terrible error marrying some random girl.”
“Baby doll—”
“Don’t.” I shove the gun harder against his chin, using the contact to ground myself before I completely fall apart. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare call me that right now. You have no right. You have no right.”
The pet name on his lips, in his voice, hurts worse than anything else, because it’s so familiar, so intimate, so much like the man I fell in love with, that it makes me want to collapse into his arms and pretend the last eight years never happened.
But they did happen. And I’m not the same woman who would have been satisfied with pretty words and gentle touches.
I’m not some twenty-one-year-old girl who believed she’d found her person while high on ecstasy and electronic dance music.
I’m a woman who’s tired of fighting, tired of pretending, tired of carrying the weight of someone else’s choices on her shoulders for eight fucking years.
I’m a woman who’s tired of trying to pick up the broken pieces of herself, just for another one to break off as soon as one is in her hands.
“Amanda.” He tries again. “Please—”
“No.” I step back, finally lowering the gun but keeping it at the ready. “You had eight years to think about your choices. Now it’s my turn.”
The fight goes out of me all at once, leaving me feeling hollow and exhausted. I can feel the adrenaline crash starting, making my hands shake and my legs feel unsteady.
“I need time,” I say, hating how small my voice sounds. I take another step back from him. “I need to figure out if I can forgive you for choosing for me. For deciding my life without me. For taking away the one thing I deserved: the truth and the choice that came with it.”
Kade’s face crumples slightly, like he’s finally understanding the magnitude of what we’re facing.
“Go home,” I tell him.
“I can’t leave you here.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I won’t.”
“You will, because I’m asking you to. Because after eight years of not having a choice in anything that happened to me, I’m finally getting to make one. And I choose to ask you to leave.”
We stare at each other across the warehouse floor, and even though he’s only a few feet away, it feels like there are miles between us. Like the distance is stretching out with every second that passes.
I can see him wrestling with the decision. But maybe he’s finally starting to understand that keeping me safe was never the problem. The problem was thinking he got to make that choice for me.
“Amanda—”
“Kade, please. Just… go.”
Before he can argue further, the sound of footsteps echoes through the warehouse, and Cal appears in the doorway. He takes in the scene—me with tear tracks down my face, Kade looking like he’s been gutted, the gun still in my hand.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he says diplomatically.
I immediately wipe my face with the back of my hand, trying to pull myself together. I can feel the familiar mask sliding into place, the one I’ve perfected over years of pretending I’m fine when I’m falling apart.
“Oh, good, Cal,” I say with forced brightness, my voice getting steadier as I fall back into the rhythm of pretending everything is normal. “You can take me home.”
The two men share a look over my head, some kind of silent communication that I’m not privy to. I hate it.
“Come on,” Cal says gently, extending his arm like he’s escorting me to dinner instead of away from the wreckage of my marriage. “Izzy’s back at your place.”
Of course she is. Izzy is probably pacing around my apartment and stress-cleaning and waiting to wrap me up in concerned best friend energy. The thought of it makes me want to cry all over again, but I push it down.
I start walking toward Cal, but at the last second, I glance back at Kade.
He’s still so devastatingly handsome. Dark hair slightly mussed, sharp jawline shadowed with stubble, those intense brown eyes that used to make me forget my own name now rimmed with tears.
He’s standing exactly where I left him, watching me with an expression that’s equal parts desperation and heartbreak. The look on his face almost breaks my resolve. Almost makes me run back to him and demand that he take me home and hold me until all of this makes sense.
But I don’t.
Because the woman who would have done that died eight years ago when her husband decided she couldn’t handle the truth. The woman standing here now knows her own strength. Knows her own worth. Knows that she deserved a choice.
And she knows that some things can’t be fixed with love alone.
I turn away from him and walk out of the warehouse.
Cal falls into step beside me, not saying anything, just a steady presence as we make our way to Izzy’s car.
He opens the passenger door for me, and I slide in gratefully, suddenly exhausted down to my bones.
As Cal starts the engine, I catch a glimpse of movement in the rearview mirror.
Kade, standing in the warehouse doorway, watching us drive away.
He looks smaller from this distance. More human. Less like the mysterious, untouchable figure he’s been for the past two weeks and more like the man I married in a Vegas chapel, drunk on love and possibility.
I close my eyes and lean back against the headrest, trying to sort through the chaos in my head.
“You okay?” Cal asks quietly as we pull onto the main road.
No. No, I am decidedly not okay. But I nod anyway, because that’s what you do.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
Because right now, sitting in this car as we drive through the city toward whatever comes next, all I know is that for the first time in eight years, I have all the answers I thought I wanted.
And somehow it’s worse than not knowing at all.