Chapter 46
FORTY SIX
A FRAGILE PEACE has descended. Nestled in Matthew’s arms, I listen to his breathing, deep and even. The violent storm of his memories has given way to this shared calm.
My voice, when I find it, is a soft murmur. “Tell me about her. What was she like, your mother?”
I feel his chest expand with a deep breath beneath my ear, then a long exhale. For a moment, he’s silent, sifting through the years.
When he finally speaks, his voice is a husky murmur laced with the enduring ache of love.
“She was…” He pauses, his gaze distant, looking at a ghost only he can see.
“She was like sunshine. Even when everything was dark.” A faint, heartbreakingly sad smile touches his lips.
“Yeah. She was my sunshine.” He nestles me a fraction closer, as though the memory itself makes him seek comfort.
“She had this laugh. Not loud. More like… the sound of wind chimes. Delicate. It could make you forget for a minute how bad things were.”
“She sounds lovely,” I murmur, my head resting against his chest as his thumb begins a slow, absentminded caress on my arm.
“She was. I remember how she would always have music playing. When he wasn’t home, of course. She loved music. Always humming to herself while working around that place.” A touch of bitterness enters his tone. “That house. Always trying to make it a home. But it never really was.”
He takes another deep breath, this one shakier. “Did you know my mother could coax these little flower miracles out of the worst soil?”
A soft, bittersweet smile touches my lips. “She loved gardening?”
“It was just a miserable little patch of dirt by the back steps,” he clarifies, a quiet venom in his voice. “He never liked her spending time on useless things like flowers. But she grew them anyway. Said it was her rebellion.”
“Did she ever think of leaving your—him?” I ask carefully.
“And go where? She’d always repeat to me: Better a familiar hell.
” He sighs, the sound carrying years of resignation.
“At least that was her excuse. But I overheard her once on the phone. She didn’t know I was listening.
” His voice drops. “She said she would have left years ago, but she’d rather die than give him full custody of me. She knew he’d win that battle.”
He turns his head slightly, his breath stirring my hair. “She deserved an entire field of flowers. She deserved so much more.”
His final words.
Her sacrifice.
They are a testament to a love so profound it aches.
I see that familiar clench in his jaw. The way his gaze drifts again to that distant, haunted place where his ghosts live.
I can’t let him stay there.
I sit straighter, my hands finding his face, gently but insistently turning his gaze to meet mine. His eyes are shadowed with remembered agony.
“Your mother adored you, Matt,” I whisper, pouring every ounce of certainty I possess into the words.
He tries to look away, an ingrained unworthiness flickering in his eyes, but I hold his face steady. “Please,” I plead softly. “You have to see it. What she did, staying, enduring all of it for you. That is the devastating, unconditional gift of her heart.”
A harsh sound tears from him. Half pained scoff, half fractured sigh. “A gift, Amy?” His voice is laced with the agony of a boy who felt the weight of her life on his small shoulders. “She stayed in that hell because of me.” The self-blame is an open wound.
“And that,” I insist, my voice soft but unyielding.
My hand slides to cradle the back of his neck, urging him closer.
“That absolute devotion is undeniable proof of her love for you. Don’t let his horrors or your guilt tarnish it.
That love is yours. All yours. Untouchable.
Even by your father.” I pause, searching his tortured eyes.
“I know this is going to sound harsh and so very wrong.” My voice drops, imbued with a lifetime of my own quiet sorrow.
“But you have no idea how lucky you are.”
His brows draw together. Confusion and a flicker of hurt war in his grief-stricken eyes. “Lucky?” The word is a breath of incredulous pain.
I don’t flinch. “Yes,” I affirm, my voice trembling as I unearth my own long-buried grief.
“You’re lucky because you know. For the rest of your life, you will carry the unshakeable certainty that your mother loved you more than life itself.
” My vision blurs, but I hold his gaze fiercely.
“That kind of certainty… it’s a bedrock, Matt.
A truth to hold on to when everything else crumbles.
” I take a shaky breath, the words I’ve never spoken to another soul pressing against my lips. “It’s a gift I will never have.”
His brow furrows, his gaze questioning, laced with his own sorrow, but now dawning with attentiveness to mine.
“My father,” I begin, the words devoid of the fire they once held, now just a dull, chronic ache. “He made it clear he wanted a son. It was a fact that lay like a suffocating weight over our home. Over my mother. Over me.”
I can almost see the disappointment and disregard that used to cloud my father’s features whenever he looked at me.
“They tried, but weren’t able to have any more children.
I was it for them. For him. He tolerated me for thirteen years, but it was like living with a ghost. He didn’t see me.
Rarely interacted with me unless he absolutely had to.
He was just biding his time.” I swallow hard.
“Until one day, he found another woman. She already had a son. The son he’d always craved. So, he just… replaced us.”
The silence in the backyard feels immense.
“And my mother,” I clear my throat. My voice is raw with a desolation that has lived in my gut for years.
“She blamed me for him leaving. For her life falling apart. For not being the son who might have made him stay.” I look down at my hands.
“She wasn’t protective of me like your mother.
Every sigh, every barbed remark… they were reminders that I was the curse that broke her marriage.
The reason her life was a misery.” My voice finally cracks, the carefully constructed dam of my composure crumbling.
“She couldn’t wait for me to be old enough to leave.
So, the day came when I gave her what she wanted.
I left. And ever since, I just… kept leaving. ” My voice fades on a shuddering sigh.
For the first time in my life, my story is out. I feel stripped bare. My old wound is ripped open, the poison bleeding out, leaving me hollowed and terrifyingly exposed.
Every old shame, every childhood hurt, laid bare for his judgement.
I keep my gaze fixed on my hands, twisted together in my lap. Afraid to look up.
Matthew’s fingers find my hair, gently caressing the strands from my temple.
A silent encouragement to meet his gaze.
When I hesitantly lift my eyes, the muscles in his jaw are pulsing.
A hard, rhythmic beat. A quiet, chilling fury that settles over his features.
But those emerald depths burn with a fiercely protective light that makes the wounded core of me feel profoundly…
Seen.
His voice is a low, dangerous rumble, scraped raw. “They broke you.” It’s a grim acknowledgment from someone who understands the brutal language of damage. “Robbed you of your right to feel safe. Loved.”
My breath shudders out of me. “My father ultimately got the son he always wanted. My mother got the house to herself…”
“And you walked away carrying all their shit,” he finishes for me, his contempt for my parents a palpable force.
His thumb catches a tear on my cheek, his touch impossibly tender against the storm brewing in his eyes.
“They made you believe you were the reason for their own pathetic failures.” His eyes, which had been blazing with that protective fire, soften infinitesimally as they hold mine.
“So damn sorry, love,” he breathes, the fury draining away, replaced by a deep, aching sorrow.
“So incredibly sorry they did that to you.” He pulls me closer, his forehead coming to rest against mine.
His sincerity is a balm, mending pieces of my soul I didn’t know were still broken.
Here in his arms, my pain is validated.
I am not the curse my mother painted.
I am not the disappointment my father fled from.
I am just me.
And for the first time, that feels like enough.
The staggering force of that acceptance cracks open something deep inside me. A sob, thick with years of unshed grief and a dawning, incredulous relief, escapes me.
I need to be closer. To feel the entirety of his strength. His solidity. His acceptance surrounding me.
With a choked sound, part sob, part plea, I rise to settle astride his lap.
My legs find their place around his lean hips, my body flush against his.
I wind my arms tight around his neck and bury my face in the warm, safe haven of his shoulder, finally letting go of a breath I’ve held for a lifetime.
He makes a soft sound deep in his chest as his arms wrap around my waist. His hands spread warm and firm against my back, pulling me closer until no space is left between us.
An embrace that feels like it could piece us back together. Two souls stripped bare, finding a profound solace. A shield against the ghosts of the past.
After a long moment where the only sound is the soft whisper of our mingled breaths, and the hushed sounds of a world still lost in sleep, I feel his lips press a lingering kiss to my temple. The gentle pressure, the intimacy of his breath, is a perfect echo of another moment in the chaos of Hydra.
This is my part to play, nobody else’s.
Matthew’s words resonate with startling clarity. He stepped in. A protective shield. Ready to play a role in a degrading charade, all to spare me. Even after that morning in his kitchen when I said I wouldn’t mind using some random stranger.
“I wasn’t going to go through with it,” I confess in a hushed whisper into the warm curve of his neck. “The make-out session with a stranger.” I lift my head just as he pulls back to search my eyes.
A faint frown creases his brow. “You were standing there all alone…”
I nod, looking down for a second before meeting his gaze. “That’s because I was there to confront him.”
“Confront him?” he repeats slowly. “And Maddy’s Place? You were so sure…”
“A risk I was willing to take.”
Matthew shakes his head. A slow smile of admiration curves his lips, a fierce pride lighting his eyes. “So even when you were telling me there was no other choice, a part of you was fighting back.”
A sheepish smile is my only answer.
He lets out a breathy chuckle that holds a weary irony.
He covers his face with his hands before combing them back through his hair.
“All day, it was eating at me. I couldn’t fucking think.
” He closes his eyes for a brief, agonized second.
When he reopens them, they bore into mine with a fierce, haunted honesty.
“All I could see was another man’s hands on you.
” His hands cup my neck, his thumbs caressing my jaw.
“His lips on yours—” His voice cracks. His gaze drops to my mouth as one of his thumbs glides over my lower lip.
“Only to appease that fucker.” An inferno of possessive fire blazes in his eyes when they rise back to mine. “Unbearable.”
My lungs stall.
To be wanted like this…
It’s a brand of devotion so potent it chases away the last lingering shadows of my own unworthiness.
It makes me feel irrevocably, utterly…
His.
I lean that last fraction of an inch, my lips pressing to his in a silent, answering vow.
An acceptance.
A seal.
I feel him sigh into the kiss, a shuddering release of all that coiled tension.
His hands slide from my neck to my back, pulling me even tighter, molding me to the hard lines of his body as if he wants to absorb me into himself.
The kiss deepens. A mutual pouring out of all the overwhelming emotions of this night.
Of the magnificent hope that now burns between us.
When we finally break apart, our foreheads pressed together, the world around us seems to hold its breath.
The only sounds are our ragged breathing and the frantic, synchronized beating of our hearts.
He adjusts his hold, one arm sweeping securely under my knees, the other a steadfast support against my back.
He stands, lifting me effortlessly, my legs still wrapped around his waist, my body held flush against his.
I bury my face against the warm column of his neck, a sigh of pure contentment escaping me.
He carries me back inside, through the quiet house. Each step sure and steady toward the sanctuary of his bedroom. Toward the promise of a shared rest. And a new, fragile, but fiercely hopeful dawn.