A Dom is Forever (Masters and Mercenaries #3)(84)

A well of despair fed her voice, threatening to cut through him. He wished he’d never asked, but he couldn’t make her stop talking now that she was open. He reached out for her. Maybe she could tell the story more easily if he held her.

She stared for a moment, longing plain on her face, but she shook him off. “If you still want to hold me after I tell you the whole story, I’ll gladly take it, but you have to listen first.”

“What did you do that you needed forgiveness for?” He couldn’t imagine Avery doing anything to hurt someone. Did her in-laws blame her because she’d been driving the car? According to the reports he’d read, she’d been blindsided. She’d had the right of way.

“I told you I was in an accident.” She’d told him in only the vaguest of terms. “I was driving. Brandon was in the passenger seat, and Maddie was in her car seat behind him. It was late. We’d been at a party but neither of us had been drinking. I was still breastfeeding, and Brandon had never had a drink in his life. We were both pretty straight kids. Besides getting pregnant, I think the wildest thing the two of us did was go to the mall when we were supposed to be at the library.”

And Liam had been getting in trouble for as long as he could remember. He’d been in the SAS by the time he was just a tiny bit older than Avery had been when she had the accident. He’d killed more than once by then. His innocent had ended long before his teen years. “Go on.”

She took a long breath. “We were hit by a teenaged girl. I told you that much. I remember seeing the light coming at us and trying to move out of the way and then nothing. I went into a coma, and by the time I woke up, they had already been buried. Brandon and Maddie had been buried together, and I didn’t even get to go to the funeral. Lydia had to take care of it herself. Later that year, she had to go to the other driver’s trial alone because Frank had shut down. That trial was so hard on her, but he wouldn’t go. He’s never gotten past losing his only son. She was the one who came every week and sat with me. Lydia came to the first couple of surgeries.”

“Sweetheart, I am not seeing any need for anyone to forgive you,” he said gently.

“A few years passed and that was when she came to see me.”

“She?”

“Her name was Stephanie Gibson. By all accounts, she was a good kid. She was only two years younger than me, but I felt so much older at the time.”

The room was so quiet, only their voices filling it and even then Avery spoke in hushed, almost reverent tones. Liam found himself nearly whispering his questions. “Is this the woman who hit you?”

She nodded. “The girl, yes. Like I said, she was sixteen at the time of the accident. She was an honor student, graduating early. She admitted to having two beers at the party when the police first interviewed her. In New York, if you’re under twenty-one your blood alcohol level doesn’t really matter as long as they can prove alcohol is in your system. It could have been a tiny amount, and they still would consider her drunk. But there was a huge mistake at the hospital and her toxicology labs got mixed up with someone else’s, and even the cheap lawyer her parents had hired managed to get the whole case thrown out because of it. But I believe her about the beers. I really do. No one at the party saw her have more than two, and she was drinking water when she left according to all accounts. I honestly believe it was the phone distraction that caused the accident.”

“That’s not an excuse, Avery. She killed two people.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, a defensive move. “You’re going to be like the rest of them, I can see. Just let me finish. Stephanie came to see me. My mother-in-law was furious because the case had been thrown out.”

“Why weren’t you angry?”

“I was. I was so mad I could have killed her, but you have to understand years had gone by.”

“Years where you couldn’t walk.” Years where she’d been alone in a string of hospital beds.

“Are you going to let me finish or do you want to judge me now?” She stared at him, her body closed down. What the hell was she going to tell him? Had she somehow killed this girl? She continued when he was silent. “So she came to see me, and she was so utterly different than the girl I’d read about. You have to understand. I was a little obsessed with her for a while. I read all the papers and looked her up on the Internet. She’d been vibrant and pretty. She’d been that girl who volunteered for everything according to the news accounts. She had so many people willing to speak up for her. You know usually when something bad like this happens, people go away, but they stood up for her. They loved her. She’d been very lovable and kind. From her teachers to the volunteer coordinator at the hospital where she worked, no one had a bad thing to say about her. She wanted to be a doctor, you see. But the girl who stood before me that day was so dark. Thin. Like she’d been starving herself. Her mom had sent me a letter begging me to meet with her because she just knew that Stephanie was going to kill herself. The guilt was eating her alive, and her mom thought I might be able to forgive her.”

Shit. Had this girl killed herself and Avery couldn’t handle the guilt? It wasn’t her fault. The girl had killed Avery’s husband and child. She didn’t deserve forgiveness.

Avery’s arms got tighter, like she was attempting to turn in on herself, to hide away. “I agreed because I was going to tell her to go to hell. I was going to tell her that she should do it. She should kill herself and do it so it hurt. I was going to suggest several ways to make it happen. I even saved up my pain meds in case she was a baby and needed to go out easy.”