Written with You (The Regret Duet #2)(25)

My emotions were an ever-swinging pendulum.

The highs were high when I found relief in the entire situation. Willow wasn’t Rosalee’s mother. She couldn’t take my daughter. It was everything I’d feared since I’d seen the woman at Rosalee’s birthday party.

The lows on that pendulum were so low that I swear I could feel my body being raked across the gravel. Those were the moments I realized that not only had I lost the first woman to truly make me feel, but I’d also lost Willow, the girl I owed my life.

And then like someone had broken that pendulum and thrown it off the edge of a mountain, I’d had to accept that Rosalee’s mother was gone, and in a roundabout way, it was my fault.

However, with the exception of the highs, lows, and all-consuming guilt, the rest of my emotional grid was filled to the brim with anger.

After Ian declared he was spending the night, I went to bed. Well, I went to pace my bedroom, anyway. I’d hung Hadley’s—shit, I was never going to get her name right—Willow’s painting of Rosalee on the wall in my bedroom. I immediately took it down. Considered breaking it because she had made it. Considered not breaking it because it was of my daughter. Hung it back up. Felt like I was going to implode. Took it down again. Considered breaking it again. Then, finally, I hid it behind a row of suits in the back of my closet.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. Partly because adrenaline was almost as good of a drug as denial, but predominantly because Ian cracked the door open every few hours to check on me. He didn’t come in or try to strike up a conversation; it was more like a drive-by health-and-welfare check. What he thought I was going to do, I had no idea. I didn’t even have the balls to break a fucking painting she’d made. But that didn’t stop him from making sure I was okay. He was a worrier and I had always provided him with more than enough product to feed his habit.

It was around five in the morning when I finally gave up on sleep and decided to distract myself with coffee, work, and absolutely nothing to do with Hadley—dammit, Willow.

I stopped in my tracks when I got downstairs and saw Ian sitting at the dining room table with a stack of spiralbound notebooks in front of him.

“What are you doing? What’s all that?” I asked, heading straight for the coffeemaker.

“Hadley’s journals.”

I froze, my hand hanging in midair as I reached for a mug. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Willow left them at the gate a few hours ago.”

I couldn’t deny the flicker of disappointment when I realized she’d been there and I’d missed her. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to be around her. I didn’t want to even think about her. Or so I told myself. The tightness in my chest told a different story altogether.

“She looked like shit if it helps at all?”

It didn’t.

It made it worse.

“I don’t care what she looked like. Did she say anything? Did you talk to her?”

He leaned back in his chair and shot me a side-eye. “Yeah, you sound like a man who doesn’t care.”

“Fuck you. I’m just curious.”

“Okay, then I didn’t talk to her. She only stopped long enough to slip the notebooks through the gate with a note that said, I gave you my truth. This is Hadley’s.”

“Jesus,” I breathed.

“Do you want me to tell you what she was wearing, or has your curiosity been quelled and we can move on to the portion of the program where we discuss a mentally ill woman’s notebooks and the relief I feel that she can never get anywhere near Rosalee?”

I bypassed the caffeine and headed straight to the table. There had to be at least a dozen notebooks, and as I flipped through the pages, I found them filled back and front with sloppy handwriting, making the pages more black than white. “What the hell are you doing reading these? This is none of your business.”

“Somebody had to read them. And I needed to know how much clothes to pack if I was going to temporarily move in as an emotional support dog. After reading this shit, I scheduled my U-Haul for tomorrow.” He reached around me and started lining the notebooks down the length of the table. “She was not a stable woman, Caven.” He pointed to the first with a blue cover. “This is your notebook. It starts when she was fourteen and carries on until she was around twenty or so. I don’t even know what half of this shit says because it’s mostly incoherent ramblings. But the gist is she both idolized and hated you.”

My stomach wrenched as I picked up the notebook, but just as quickly, Ian plucked it from my hand.

“Nope. She was a selfish kid in a lot of it. Her thoughts were not rational or realistic. You do not need to add that to your conscience. Take my word for it.” He slid over a stack of at least five notebooks. “From what I can tell, these are mostly about Willow. A lot of stories from when they were kids. Good times. I’m not sure when they were written, but there are subject starters at the top of a lot of the pages, so I’m thinking homework from therapy.” He pushed the pile to the back and slid forward an even bigger pile. “These are all dated a year ago, and she talks about being in rehab. They start with the night she tracked you down at the bar in hopes of accessing Kaleidoscope. She had this picture of a woman she wanted to see if she could find a match to. It continues to finding out she was pregnant and debating whether she was going to keep the baby, right up until the night Rosalee was born. You want to know something I found interesting?”