Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cara woke up at three in the morning. She looked at the clock and saw the red numbers glaring bright. She felt a rumble, and it was damp. She had been crying so much that she could feel that her eyes, her whole face, were swollen.
She grabbed her phone off the nightstand and checked to see if she had any texts. She had one from Marlowe, letting her know that the car was still in the parking lot because Cody had come to pick her up, and she had left her keys in it in case Cara needed them.
Cara smiled.
There was Marlowe, thinking of her, even though she flat-out didn’t deserve it.
She sat up in bed, wrapped the bathrobe more tightly around her shoulders. She was such a mess.
And there, in all that silence, something bled through for the first time.
You can just love somebody, and then the next day they can be gone.
She started to cry. Deep, wrenching sobs.
Because loving people had never kept her safe, and it had never kept them safe.
She was such a small, tragic coward because Zane had lost so much, so, so much, and he had been brave enough to say that he loved her, brave enough to ask for more, and she was… Just not.
She was afraid.
She wasn’t afraid of her life being small, she wasn’t afraid of the heaviness of loving him, she was afraid of grief. So much of her life was a patchwork of grief, and she didn’t know what on earth she would do if she had Zane, only to lose him.
And loving him, the possibility of that, of the life that he might expect them to build, that opened her up to even more grief.
To children that they would have, that they could lose.
She felt like the world was pressing in on the hotel, that the ceiling was pressing down on her head, that she was being crushed beneath the weight of her own cowardice.
She did love him.
Of course, she did.
She had loved him when he had pulled her out of the rubble, she had loved him when he had held her in the dark and whispered the tragic secret of his past, she had loved him when his lips had first touched hers in the rain.
The rain falls on the just and the unjust…
Which meant that random blessings could happen just as easily as random tragedy, and she wanted to internalize that. She wanted to believe it. She wanted to feel it.
But it was just so difficult.
Everything was just so difficult.
And she was only twenty-four, and she really felt that right now.
She didn’t feel like she was as mature as he was, she didn’t feel like she was as brave.
As this man who had lost his whole family and gone on to fight in wars.
To ride bucking Broncos, this man who was just…
Perfect. Everything she could’ve ever hoped to find, everything she could’ve ever dreamed of.
But the dream felt so terrifying, like something beautiful dangling there in front of her, like rolling fields and open roads, and a church made of sweet grass, and a cathedral ceiling made from the sky, and everything beautiful in her life that had been taken back.
But if he could have faith enough to say yes to this, to loving her, how could she do any less?
She was getting out of bed before she could think better of it, robe wrapped tightly around her body, and the keys to the room in her hand.
She crept down the hallway, took the elevator down to the empty lobby.
Everything was dark and still at the hotel.
She pulled the doors open and walked out into the parking lot, which was mostly full, but she spotted Marlowe’s car quickly.
She opened up the door and retrieved the keys.
And before she could let herself second-guess it, she was on her way, driving to Zane.
She remembered Marlowe saying that she liked Cody to ambush her in the hotel room.
Well, she was going to break into Zane’s house.
To see if it was too late. To see if she could still fix it.
To see if they could try and find their way home, together.