Written with You (The Regret Duet #2)(26)

My heart was in my throat. This was too much. All of it. My quota for bombshells had been met for the next century. I had the sudden urge to box those journals up and toss them into the trash bin. Trash—not recycle. Because my pettiness at the moment had no boundaries.

But I knew myself, and they’d just end up in my closet, next to the painting of Rosalee, because as much as I didn’t want to think about the Banks twins, one day when Rosalee was at a hundred and five and finally mature enough to handle this level of insanity, she would want those journals. God knew I’d clung to as much of my own mother as I could and I’d had her for ten years. Rosalee hadn’t even had her mother for ten minutes.

“No. I don’t want to know what you found interesting. I don’t care. I don’t care what Hadley had to say. I don’t care what—”

He suddenly pushed to his feet. “Nothing. I found nothing interesting. Willow told you the truth about pretty much everything.”

“Well, ya know. Except for her name.”

“Except for that. But the rest of it was all true. She sat in front of you and took responsibility for every off-the-wall, morally wrong, and utterly unforgivable thing her sister had ever done. She let me blame her. She let you blame her. And from what I can tell, she was ready to let the law blame her as well.”

“Well, it’s not too late for that,” I snarked.

“Oh, really? You’ve been having a nervous breakdown all night, but not once have you mentioned calling the cops or even Doug. You got big plans to hit up the FBI tomorrow? I’m sure we could get her on some kind of fraud.” He retrieved his phone from his pocket. “Say the word, Cav. I’ll call it in myself.”

That would have been the right thing to do. She was fucking with people’s lives—my daughter’s life. But I didn’t want Willow in jail.

I wanted this to be one big fucking nightmare.

And I wanted to wake up.

My only response was to clench my teeth.

“Right?” he mumbled. “So, as I was saying, if her attorney hadn’t been able to get her off on that theft of property charge and you had pressed the issue of child abandonment, she could have been sentenced to years in prison. Why would someone risk that?”

I didn’t want the answer to that question. I wasn’t to the point where I could see any positive in this kind of mind fuckery. For all I knew, those notebooks were filled with more lies. Shit, maybe Willow had written them herself. Maybe every single thing that had ever come out of her mouth had been a lie.

Maybe her promise to forgive me while we had been at the mall was her biggest lie of all.

“No,” I stated matter-of-factly while collecting all the notebooks and stacking them into a pile. “After months of hating Hadley, you do not get to read a fucking diary and decide that she’s some kind of martyr.”

“Whoa, slow down. First of all, I still hate Hadley. She was exactly the manipulative and dangerous woman I was afraid she was when she came back. The one that I thought was pulling the wool over your eyes, playing on your emotions, biding her time, and warming your bed until she could get her talons into your back. But I gotta say: That’s not who we got.” He leaned toward me. “And all I’m saying is I’m relieved. I don’t know Willow’s next move. I don’t know your next move. All I know is that I can sleep at night knowing”—he poked his finger at the notebooks—“she’s not that woman.”

“Who knows? Maybe she’s worse.”

“And yet hours ago you were waxing poetic about how she floats on rainbows and makes you feel. I thought she was just a good con woman, but this makes more sense.”

Losing my tempter, I barked, “None of this makes sense! Okay? Nothing in my entire life. Not since the day I was fifteen and found Polaroids buried under the floorboard in my dad’s closet.”

I watched in horror as confusion crinkled his face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Okay. So, maybe Ian didn’t know everything about me.

Shit.

“Nothing,” I groaned, turning toward the kitchen, desperate for an escape. This was not a conversation for tonight. This was a conversation for when I was six feet under the ground. “Go home.”

“Caven—”

“Go home, Ian. I can handle it from here.”

He cussed under his breath, but eventually, he relented and left me alone.

The way Hadley had been at the mall.

And, if I stayed true to my word, the way Willow would be forever.





WILLOW


“What is this?” Beth snapped as she walked into my spare bedroom-slash-studio.

The backyard studio was almost finished thanks to Caven’s “chat” with the contractor. But it had been hard to get excited over anything in the week since Caven had stormed out of my house. I set the paint down and checked my phone for the five millionth time.

He hadn’t replied to the one text I’d sent him when I’d missed her first art class.



Me: Please tell her I’m sorry and that I love her very much.



I didn’t figure that would get relayed to Rosalee, but it was worth a shot.

I missed them. A lot. But I had no tears left and the pain in my chest had become so constant that I didn’t feel it anymore.