Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1)(18)

But if I was about to wage war with the likes of Caven Hunt, I wanted to at least have a mental snapshot of what I was fighting for.

I had to see her.

Just once.

My palms were sweaty as I white-knuckled the steering wheel. I’d spent most of my drive over wondering what she’d look like. My mother? My father? My sister?

Me?

A tear rolled down my cheek and I quickly swiped it away. This was going to hurt. Seeing Keira walking, talking, laughing—knowing everything I’d missed out on was going to break me.

And seeing Caven again? Well, that was a different kind of sword through the heart.

After the shooting, I’d reached out to him no less than twenty-five times. Asking around Watersedge, I’d found his address and mailed him letters, begging him for help. I didn’t know what I’d thought a fifteen-year-old boy could do. I was just so lost in my own emotions, and he’d saved me once. I believed he could do it again.

He never answered.

On my tenth birthday, I rode my bike to his house, four hours each way. It was an old, dilapidated trailer without the first sign of life inside. I cried the whole way home. But that probably had less to do with the fact that he wasn’t there and more to do with the fact that, back then, all I ever did was cry.

Logic told me that he was gone and I should let him go.

But he was my hero.

As I woke up every morning feeling as though the sky had fallen down on top of me, I really needed a hero.

My last-ditch effort came when I was thirteen and at rock bottom. I’d managed to find out where he had moved and used the computers at the library to track down a phone number for his brother, Trent. Let’s just say that conversation had not gone as planned. Trent told me that Caven wanted nothing to do with me and he had moved on from the shooting. This was said just seconds before cussing me out and hanging up on me. His number was disconnected by the next day.

My heart was broken, but Trent had a point. I relived that day of terror every time I closed my eyes. If Caven had managed to move past it, who was I to drag him back?

Yet there I was, eighteen years after the first shot was fired, preparing to do just that.

My leg bobbed nervously as I pulled into the last spot of the horseshoe driveway. There was another area for parking off to the side, but this would be the quickest way to leave when he inevitably had me escorted out—that is if I even made it inside at all.

Pushing my sunglasses up to the top of my head, I stared up at the front door decorated in uneven pink streamers, jagged unicorn cut-outs, and a crayon-scribbled Happy Birthday sign placed completely off-center. It was homemade chic at its finest. However, that was where homemade ended. Pink and purple flower garlands were draped from the tall trees, and little paper lanterns of all shapes and sizes hung from the branches. A large wooden arrow with intricate purple swirls etched in the wood pointed around the side of the house to a path created by what had to be thousands of dollars’ worth of pink rose petals.

As I sat in my car, nerves violently buzzing inside me, a few guests passed by, holding gifts and laughing. My chest ached with hollowness as I thought about how each and every one of them knew Keira in some way, yet I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a lineup.

It was four years overdue, and I would have to live with that for the rest of my life, but it was time to right the wrongs.

Starting with her.

For that reason alone, I grabbed the gift bag off the passenger seat, pushed my car door open, forced one foot in front of the other, and followed the pink-petal path.

My heart pounded harder with each step as my heels sank into the grass. I’d tried on everything from cocktail attire to jeans before landing somewhere in the middle with a simple emerald-green shift dress and brown heeled booties. I knew that it didn’t matter what I wore, but somehow, it still seemed important. First impressions and all.

My breath caught in my throat when I made it around the corner. The decorations in the front were a sham job compared to the back. With two large, open tents, a dozen or more tables, and roses upon roses everywhere, it looked more like a wedding than it did a child’s birthday. Had it not been for the line of children and two brown ponies making laps around the yard, I would have been positive I was in the wrong place.

Adults were scattered, chatting in small groups, and the few children who weren’t waiting at the pony ride were dancing through a continuous stream of bubbles.

And that’s when I saw her.

My heart stopped and my lungs seized, refusing oxygen in or out.

I’d been wrong about not being able to pick her out of a lineup. I would have recognized that little girl even if the entire world was standing in one room.

She looked like every single person I’d ever loved.

Tears pricked at the backs of my eyes as I stood frozen, watching her jump to pop a particularly big bubble. Her hot-pink dress, complete with a tutu and the number four outlined in sequins on her chest, bounced with her, revealing the top of her jeans, which she’d paired with cowboy boots. It was ridiculous but so freaking cute that I couldn’t help but smile and allow a tear to escape the corner of my eye. But it was her laugh when she caught a bubble in her mouth that hit me like a freight train. I stumbled back, bumping into someone before righting myself.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“It’s okay,” a man with a deep, masculine voice replied.