Preston's Honor(64)

“What else? What did you think about when you were gone?” Did you think about me? Did you hate me, Lia?

She was quiet for a moment, and it looked like she was picturing the place where she’d been. “I thought about Cole.” Her eyes shot to mine, and I gave her a small smile to let her know it was okay. “I thought about why I was such a bad mother.”

I frowned, taken aback. “You thought you were a bad mother?”

She stared at me for a moment before looking away. “Yes.”

I moved closer, turning her toward me in one quick movement, and she startled slightly. “You’re not a bad mother, Lia. You never were.”

“How would you know?”

I took her words like a punch to the gut, clenching my eyes shut for a second. How would I know? I hadn’t been around enough to see if she’d struggled or not. And the few times I’d seen pain in her eyes, I’d turned away because I’d felt ill-equipped to deal with my own pain, let alone hers. Was that my own innate selfishness, or just the way of grief? I didn’t know but either way, I would take responsibility. Either way, I’d hurt her.

I blew out a gust of breath, raking my fingers through my hair. “I was checked out. You’re right. But I saw enough to know you’re a good mother.”

She bit at her lip for a second and then her shoulders sagged a little. “I can’t blame you for being checked out, Preston.” She shook her head. “It was just . . . it was just what happened and you did what you had to do to get through that time.” She turned her head, looking away from me. And there it was. In typical Lia style, she had offered me the olive branch, an offer of empathy and forgiveness, and then she’d retreated inside herself.

I frowned slightly. Yes, what she’d said held some truth, but why did it feel like she was still absent, even though she was standing right next to me? Even though I could feel the heat of her body and smell the sweetness of her skin, it felt like she was a thousand miles away—closed off, untouchable. A part of me wanted to shake her. Stop being so understanding. Yell at me—something.

Cole would have known how to draw her out. He would have either made her laugh or made her mad. But not so mad that it did lasting harm. Just mad enough to get her temper to flare and loosen her tongue. I didn’t know how to elicit emotion from her without doing some sort of permanent damage. God, maybe we’d been doomed from the start, even if Cole hadn’t died. Maybe Lia and I were just doomed in general—always managing to just miss each other. Like two people searching for one another in the dark.

I looked up at the big old tree next to us, the one she used to sit under sometimes. “Cole and I came up with this secret handshake under this tree,” I murmured. “We used to do it all the time. Hell if I can remember it. In the beginning, right after he died, I used to go over and over it in my head—just trying to recall it—each time I passed this tree and I couldn’t figure out why other than to keep my mind busy, or maybe just to torture myself. I can barely remember his funeral. It’s like I was cocooned inside myself, just going through the motions. So I don’t know. I thought . . . if I could just remember that handshake, I’d have a piece of him back however small.”

Lia turned her gaze back to me and the sadness in her eyes had turned to surprise. I’d only mentioned Cole one other time since he’d passed away. I remembered because that time had hurt, too. “We fought that day. He hit me, and I hit him back. I never told you that, but we did.”

Lia was staring at me in startled silence, and I forced myself to go on, to say the words that had been lodged inside me for so long. “One eye was swollen shut when he left and . . . I wonder if that was why he didn’t see—”

“Oh, Preston,” she breathed. “No. No, you can’t do that to yourself. He was on the highway on a motorcycle barely fit for back roads, and he wasn’t wearing a helmet. You’d warned him about that bike. I heard you. It was not your fault.”

I let out a huge gust of air, clenching my eyes shut briefly. She stared at me for a moment, the look on her face so full of stunned heartbreak. “The fight, was it . . . was it about me?” She flinched slightly.

I didn’t want to hurt her, but I also knew this conversation had been long overdue. “Yeah.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, as I’d just done, and let out a long, slow breath. “You told him what we’d done and he didn’t like it.”

“No, he didn’t. But . . .” I let myself go back to that day. “It was because he cared about you. And the truth is, Lia, he didn’t know that I cared about you more because I’d never told him. And I should have.”

She turned her whole body toward me and nodded slowly, biting at her lip. She opened her mouth as if to say something and then closed it. I couldn’t blame her for not quite knowing what to think—it’d been so long and I still hadn’t settled on anything that felt right. I’d gone through grief, and self-blame, anger, and denial, but I was still searching. Maybe I always would, I wasn’t sure. Maybe if we kept talking, maybe we could help each other come to some conclusions that brought a measure of peace.

She shifted and the soft swells of her breasts rose very slightly in her sundress, drawing my gaze. I remembered how they’d looked when she’d been nursing, swollen with milk, her nipples dark and enlarged. I hardened so quickly, I let out a quick hiss of breath at the wonderfully painful sensation. Lia glanced at me and I attempted to adjust myself subtly. Between my legs I felt hot and heavy and I wanted to lay her down and connect my body with hers. If it was going to take us some time to find our way to each other in other ways, at least we could have that. But then I remembered how she’d left after the last time we’d made love, and my body cooled with the fear and regret that trickled through me.