Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1)(55)

These tears were different though. They were formed in a place so dark that only a few people knew it existed. They were born in urgency and filled with fear, torn from your soul, leaving a gaping hole behind until it eventually felt like you were going to disappear altogether.

But you didn’t disappear, no matter how much you wished you could.

And that made them the most terrorizing emotion of all because there was no escaping those tears.

The only thing you could do was hope there were enough pieces of you left to pick up when it finally passed.

So yeah, we didn’t have the best relationship.

But I owed her. So, for Hadley, I’d stand there for the rest of the night, picking up the pieces while she was devoured by the task of losing them.

She cried into my chest, her arms circling around my waist and her hands fisting the back of my shirt.

“Caven,” she murmured.

“Shhhh, I’ve got you. It’s all right. Everything’s good. You’re good. Rosalee’s good. Everybody’s good,” I whispered into the top of her hair.

“I froze, Caven. I just stood there. She was bleeding and I did nothing.”

It made me an asshole, but relief washed over me like a warm summer wave. She wasn’t lost in that mall. She was very much in my arms, in that bathroom, and filled with regret for something she couldn’t control.

I slid a hand up her spine, pressing between her shoulders to bring her closer. “You didn’t do nothing. You called for me.”

“And then I stood there.”

“Yeah. You stood there fighting back demons after you knew I had her. Don’t twist this up in your head.”

She suddenly tilted her head back, beautiful surprise registering in her red-rimmed eyes as she searched my face. “What?”

I didn’t let her go purely because I wasn’t sure I was done picking up her pieces yet—not because I liked the way the curves of her body felt flush with mine.

No. This was Hadley.

None of that mattered at all.

Or so I pretended as I peered down at her, so close I felt her every exhale.

“When she was nine months old, Ian and I were watching the Jets game. She’d just started pulling up on everything. I’d paid a company to come in and baby-proof my place. They were thorough. Seriously, I couldn’t open the cabinets for a week.” I smiled at the memory, but it was the almost imperceptible hitch of her mouth—which I was definitely not staring at—that eased the ache in my chest. “I had this big coffee table that they told me to get rid of because she could hit her head on the corners. So, being a good dad, I replaced it with a giant leather ottoman and bought a wooden tray to hold the remotes and stuff. Anyway, Ian and I were watching the game, and she was crawling around, playing at our feet. The next thing I knew, she started screaming, and when I looked up, she had blood in her mouth and smeared all over her face.”

Hadley went solid in my arms, but I gave her gentle squeeze and kept talking.

“She’d somehow pulled up on the other side of the ottoman, and when her little legs gave out, she smacked her mouth on the tray.” I closed my eyes, feeling the bile crawl up my throat. “I lost it. Seeing her. My baby girl covered in blood, I couldn’t… I just shut down. I couldn’t form a rational thought about how to fix it, but I knew I had to do something. So I jumped up, scooped her off the floor, and did the only thing I could think of to make her better.” I cleared my throat to buy myself a second for the emotion to clear my voice. “I passed her to Ian.”

Her face got soft. “Oh, Caven.”

“Yeah. It was bad. I mean…it wasn’t bad. She was fine two seconds later, eating little puffs out of his hand. But I was not okay in any way, shape, or form. And most of that was because I felt like I’d failed her.”

She stared up at me with nearly hypnotizing understanding. So much so that I didn’t move a muscle when her hand slid over my chest, the smooth pads of her fingers curling around the back of my neck, where she used her thumb to trace the underside of my jaw. “Oh, Caven.”

Why did she keep saying my name?

Why did I fucking love hearing her, of all people, say my goddamn name like the vowels and consonants had been strung together for the sole purpose of rolling off her tongue?

I needed space.

I drew her impossibly closer.

“We’re not normal people, Hadley. We won’t ever have normal reactions to things like her busting her lip or cutting her finger. But we love her, and I’ve found that a very basic part of me will always ensure she’s safe. Even if that means not being the one to fix things for her.”

“What if I don’t have that part?”

“You do. Because four years ago, you handed her to me.”

She sucked in a deep breath, and just like that, the spell was broken. She blanched, and her arms fell away. It was the right thing to do—absolutely, one hundred percent, for both of us. We needed the distance to remember who the hell we were and, better yet, who the hell we weren’t. And that was two people standing in a bathroom, minutes away from doing something seriously stupid—and, more than likely, seriously incredible.

Hadley had always been gorgeous, and I knew I’d always feel a certain draw to her, knowing what we’d shared in the past.

But that wasn’t who Hadley and Caven would ever be in the future.