Written with You (The Regret Duet #2)(22)

Most of all, not from me.

And for that reason alone, with tears welling in my eyes, I finally gave up on having a family. “I didn’t save your life, Caven.” I lifted the hem of my shirt, revealing the spider web of puckered flesh caused by Malcom Lowe’s bullet. “You saved mine.”

The paper fell from his hand like a feather caught in the wind. But his knees went straight to the floor.

I slapped a hand over my mouth and fought the overwhelming need to go to him.

But that was no longer my right.

And if I was being honest, it had never been my right.

“Who are you?” he rasped, the words sounding as if they had been filtered through broken glass. “I need you to say it.”

I’d often imagined the moment when I finally told him the truth. Though, in those daydreams, it had never felt like a knife through the heart. “I’m Willow.”

He peered up at me with the most beautiful and soul-crushing awe. “And who is Rosalee’s mother?”

My chin quivered. If there was one thing I could change about the entire situation, that would be it. I would never want to go back in time and erase the incredible little girl who now existed only because my sister had had an ingrained need to break me. But I wished like hell I could answer this question differently. “Her mother was Hadley. My deeply, deeply troubled sister.”

His eyes scanned my face. Looking for something he’d missed. Some way he should have known I wasn’t her.

Or worse—at least for my aching heart—searching for some way he should have recognized that I was the girl he’d once met.

“You couldn’t have known,” I whispered. “My own grandfather couldn’t tell us apart when we were growing up.”

Slowly climbing back to his feet, he looked at the door and scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “You gotta help me here. You gotta help me make sense of this. Because I feel like I’m losing my mind. I don’t know whether I’m relieved that you’re alive or livid that you’ve been playing me.”

“I wasn’t playing you. Everything I told you was the truth.”

“Except the fact that you aren’t her mother! And that you aren’t Hadley. You’re…” His breathing shuddered. “Oh, fuck, I gotta sit down.” He moved to the couch and sank down, putting his elbows to his knees and looking about as comfortable as if he were sitting on a bed of nails.

“Okay,” I breathed, wringing my hands to keep from reaching for him. I was a nervous wreck, but on the inside, I was just was so damn happy that he wasn’t racing from my house like a man on fire.

He used his thumb and his forefinger to rub his eyes. “Start from the beginning. And how about, for once, you don’t fucking lie to me.”

“Okay. Okay.” I swallowed hard. “Hadley never recovered from the shooting. After the first bullet was fired, she was trampled, her arm was broken, and she hid in a cabinet for hours, all alone, terrified out of her mind. After she heard my story about you, she became obsessed with all things Caven. You were the hero she’d needed.”

He tugged at the top of his hair. “Don’t call me a hero. Don’t you ever fucking call me a hero. Do you understand?”

He’d never been more wrong, but arguing with him about technicalities wasn’t going to keep him from leaving. Then again, when this conversation was over, nothing would.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “She was alone. I had you and she hated me for it. She talked about you all the time growing up. Any time she wanted to hurt me, she’d tell me that she’d found you or had run into you or…whatever lie she could think up at the time.” I shrugged, fighting back tears. “And I, uh…guess, one day, she got sick of threatening me and she followed through on it.”

“Why did you care?” he asked, the confusion so genuine that it made me sad.

“Because whether you like the word or not, when I needed a hero, you were there for me. And my eight-year-old heart fell in love with you before you ever said the word go.”

“Jesus Christ,” he cussed.

“Yeah. So. I did lie to you about some things, but the majority of it was the truth. She did steal your computer for Kaleidoscope. Just not to look up pictures of our parents.” I walked over to the couch and sat on the other end, tucking into the corner to give him as much space as I possibly could. His eyes tracked me every step of the way. “My father was the first person to die. And when it happened, Hadley was taking a picture of me with my parents. She was looking through the lens of a disposable camera, but she swore it was a woman who fired the gun. The picture even showed a blurry woman in the background, but there was no gun or anything to back up her claim. Honestly, it could have been anyone. The police wouldn’t listen to her, and in true Hadley fashion, she became obsessed with figuring out who it was.”

His brows drew together. “Malcom worked alone. There was no woman.”

“I know. Everyone knew. A therapist once said her brain was creating a story of the woman to block what she had really seen. You know…of my dad dying. I saw him fall, but she got a front-row seat. We were very different people before the shooting, but after that, it was like night and day. I struggled a lot for a long time. But Hadley, she was…gone. She had no interest in figuring out how to survive. By the time we hit high school, she’d gotten into drugs and started stealing things. I tried really hard to help her. She was the only family I had left. I would have given up everything to make her better. But there was no saving her. She died in a car accident in November.”