63. Willow
WILLOW
NOVEMBER PRESENT DAY
Ifeel the once soft fur, now matted and tangled from washing it over and over, just to get it back to a shade close to white.
His bow is more of a dark mottled blue now as opposed to the bright blue I’ve always remembered in my dreams. One marble eye has a crack running through it, but you can see the layer of glue sealing it back together.
I run my fingers up his ears and can feel the stitching on the left one. Noah still has me on his lap pulled against his chest as we sit here in silence. He’s letting me process everything, but my mind doesn’t even know what to do.
Should I be mad at him for hiding this from me?
Should I be grateful that he did because he thought it would only cause me harm if he forced the memories to come back?
My entire body sighs against his. I’m both mentally and physically exhausted. It’s been days since I had a good night’s sleep. Sleeping upright in a hospital chair or curled into a hospital bed with him hasn’t been the worst, but my body doesn’t agree.
“Talk to me,” he finally says, breaking the silence.
“I don’t know what to say, Noah,” I answer honestly, because I truly don’t.
It all makes sense now, and yet my mind couldn’t be more confused.
“That’s okay. I just need to know that you’re okay.”
He kisses the top of my head, and I let myself relax against him as I inhale the comforting scent of his cologne.
“I think so. This is just…a lot.”
“I know. When I saw you that day, I swear my heart stopped beating. I knew there was someone named Willow coming to do the interview. I saw your resume and looked you up online. I saw the photos, and even though your last name was different, something inside me felt it was you. The one I’d been searching for all this time.
But when I finally saw you in person, I thought I was dreaming. ”
He wraps his arms tighter around me, and I can feel something warm fall on my cheek. Is he crying?
“I went to your house that night after all of the cops and ambulances left. I felt like part of me died that night. Maybe it was part of my soul that always belonged to you. All I know is seeing all that blood…” He sharply inhales as if the memory alone is causing him pain.
“I begged the universe not to let it have been your blood, but when I saw Mr. Snuggles, I lost it. I became depressed and withdrawn from everyone. The only thing that helped was the fact that the news said that they believed your dad took you and ran, but I still searched for you. Jeremy and my mom were the only things that kept me going, but then my mom died. I felt like the universe was punishing me for failing to protect you.”
“Noah,” I gasp.
I lift my head and gently cup his cheek. Tears fill his eyes, and some spill over to run down his cheeks. Knowing how much pain he’s been in all these years because he was searching for me hurts.
“We were just kids. There was nothing we could do. I…I don’t remember much of my childhood, obviously,” I force a small laugh, and I see the corner of his lips tilt in a small smile. “But I do remember how much I feared my father. You didn’t fail at protecting me, Noah. The rest of the world did.”
I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him closer pressing our foreheads together. His eyes close as his fingers trail up and down my back.
“The others who saw the marks on my mom and me and chose to ignore them are the ones who failed to protect me. You went there that night. You got my favorite stuffed animal. You fixed him and kept him all these years. And you were the one who never stopped searching for me.”
“I’d do it all again if I had to, Willow. You mean everything to me,” he says with such reverence.
“I’m sorry I didn’t remember. I’m sorry that you’ve been in so much pain all these years.”
“It was worth it. I knew I’d find you one day…Even though you were actually the one who found me,” he laughs, and I can’t help but laugh as well.
“I guess it was just meant to be,” I say quietly.
I rest my head back against his chest and listen as his heart rate finally begins to level out.
“It was fate,” he whispers.
He kisses the top of my head as he holds me.
I’ve never felt the level of peacefulness and protection that I do when I’m in his arms. Now that I know it isn’t just something random, my mind finally accepts it for what it is.
A connection we built when we were young, and he kept feeling it even after all these years.
I just wish my mind had let me remember him sooner.
My muscles tense at the irritation of it all, and I know he feels it. He tilts my chin up so he can look into my eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“I hate that my mind blocked everything out. I hate that it made me forget you.”
“Hey, you didn’t forget me. I’ve always been right here.
” He places his hand over my heart, and I can feel the heat of his palm even through the layers of clothes.
“When you didn’t recognize me that day and refused to talk about your childhood before you moved to Texas, I started looking more into PTSD. ”
My head slightly tilts as I look at him. He looked into what I was suffering from to make sure he didn’t push me or hurt me more.
“Sometimes your mind chooses to protect the memories that mean the most to you, along with protecting you from the bad ones. Basically, your mind puts all the good into one box and the bad into another. Unfortunately, those boxes were still near each other. As we’ve been hanging out more, your mind recognized the connection we always had and began to allow your body to remember, but with the good comes the bad.
I think that’s why you had such a bad panic attack from seeing the crime scene photos.
It pushed the bad right to the forefront of your mind, and you were overwhelmed. ”
“How could you keep this to yourself for so long?” I ask.
“Oh, Jeremy knows.”
“He knows who I am?”
“Who you are, what you mean to me…He knows everything, Willow.”
“Can I ask you a question?” I ask.
“Of course. Anything.”
There’s been something bothering me since he said he’s been searching for me since that night.
“Veronica said you seem to date women who only look similar to me.”
I watch his face slightly shift in the moonlight. There's a look of embarrassment and shame, but I don’t want him to feel like that.
“Yes. No one could ever be you, but I did date women who had similar features to what I thought you would look like, but trust me, none of them compared to you. No one could ever have your deep forest green eyes or your soft strawberry blonde hair. No one else could make me feel the way I do when I’m with you.
They were poor substitutions that I needed to try and get through all these years.
I never dated them for long, and Jeremy always teased me because of it. ”
“Why did he tease you?”
“I never told him your name, but I told him I had a childhood crush who I was searching for. He always knew I had a type. Whenever it got brought up that I was seeing someone new, he would tease me saying he could guess exactly what they looked like. He’s known I was obsessed with you, but it was more than that.
I’ve been lost without you, Willow. As much as I wanted to move on, I couldn’t.
My heart wouldn’t let me because it’s always belonged to you. ”
He leans away slightly and pulls off his jacket, dropping it to the floor behind him. His hand grips the fabric of his shirt, ready to pull it off, but he stops.
“There's something I want to show you,” he says softly.
“What is it?”
“Something I had done when I was seventeen years old. I'm surprised you didn't see it that morning on the couch.”
He smirks, and I can feel my cheeks blushing at the memory of that perfect morning.
“Okay. Show me,” I tell him before he hesitantly starts to lift off his shirt.
Beneath the fabric is the ink I remember seeing that morning. All the different images that didn't seem to have a pattern or reason. Just chaos. Beautiful fucking chaos.
My eyes drift over the different inks once again, then finally land on one on his chest. It's just above his heart. It looks like a flower. A very horribly drawn one, but a flower nonetheless.
He takes my hand and brings it closer until my fingers touch the inked skin on his chest. I can feel the sparks from our connection and it makes my breath catch.
I take my time studying the tattoo. He watches me, staring at my eyes as I trace each line in it.
Something about it seems familiar, but like everything else from my childhood, the memory is just out of reach.
“You drew this for me for my ninth birthday,” he says as I place my palm flat over the tattoo.
“I did?” I ask, slightly stunned.
He chuckles as he pulls his wallet out of his back pocket. He opens it and pulls out a faded piece of paper folded into a small square and unfolds it.
“We had a tradition for my birthday that we would go pick as many flowers as we could while we walked down our road, then we would go to Adler's farm to get freshly picked apples, and then on the way back we would stop by Beatrice's house on my family's property, and she'd have cookies made for us.
Unfortunately, on my ninth birthday I was really sick with the flu.
I could hardly leave my bed. But because I couldn't do our tradition, you drew me this flower.”
He hands me the faded paper with fold lines so deep from being folded up in his wallet all these years I don't think they could ever flatten back out. The drawing looks identical to the tattoo on his chest, and I'm stunned at how accurately they managed to tattoo it.
“You kept it?” I ask, emotion filling my voice.
“Of course I did. That was one of the last things you ever gave me. I'd never get rid of it. I loved that drawing so much that when I turned seventeen I got it tattooed on my chest…So that a piece of you would always be with me. Because no matter what, you were always meant to be mine.”
I can’t seem to stop the tears. All my life I’ve never known a love like this.
Sure, my adopted grandparents loved and cared for me, but they took me in when I was young.
They felt like it was their duty because their daughter was taken from them by her abusive boyfriend.
They wanted to try to prevent that for others.
They were actually the people that we were supposed to go live with the night my mom was murdered.
I knew from an early age I was adopted and I was not allowed to talk about anything that I remembered from my past, even though I couldn’t remember hardly anything except through my nightmares.
They finally told me the full story when I was sixteen and they felt like I was old enough to handle everything.
I felt it from the first time I saw those dark eyes in that elevator. It was like my soul lit up and recognized something familiar. Someone I should have been with all along.
“Are you ready to burn this place to the ground, Little Rabbit?”
I laugh at how completely absurd my plan was. What? Come out here in the middle of the night to burn a house down, yet expect somehow not to get caught? I keep laughing even as he looks down at me, confused.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“I was ready to burn this place to the fucking ground. You were ready to light the match. We were going to break so many laws tonight, all because of my panic attack.”
“So?” He says it as if I’m not crazy for wanting to do this.
“So? I can’t just burn someone’s property to the ground, no matter how much this place haunts my dreams. This house isn’t mine.”
“No, Willow. It’s mine.”
“What?” I’m looking at this man like he’s the crazy one now.
“When I finally had you back in my life, I knew that I wanted to give you the option to destroy the place that brought you so much pain. I tracked down the owner of the property the moment I walked away from you and my father, and then the night we were on our double date, I finalized the details. I own the barn, the house, and the small amount of land it sits on. The original owner still owns all the farming land. So you better believe you’re going to burn this fucking shit-hole to the ground and I’m going to be right by your side when you do it. ”
I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him, almost painfully rough.
He groans as I bite onto his lip and pull him closer.
This man has done so much for me, even without knowing if I’d ever get my memories back.
He searched for me for fifteen years and never gave up hope that one day we’d be back together.
There’s nothing more he could do that could make me love him more than I do right now.
“I love you, Noah,” I manage to breathlessly say between each frantic kiss.
He cups my face with both hands and pulls me slightly away so he can look into my eyes.
“Say it again,” he begs.
“I love you, Noah Anderson.”
“Fuck,” he gasps.
He pulls me into his arms and practically crushes me in a hug.
“I’ve waited so long to hear those words. I love you too, Little Rabbit.”