Written with You (The Regret Duet #2)(67)

He’d barely collapsed into a sitting position on the bottom step before she careened into his open arms.

“Hey, baby,” he murmured, shifting her to one side and reaching for me.

As much as I wanted to fall into his arms and never leave, there was too much blood to set my mind at ease. “Oh my God, Caven. Are you okay? I heard a gunshot. I thought… Are you hurt?”

His face paled. “It wasn’t me.”

Three whispered words had never been louder.

He was okay.

Trent was not.

He was nothing but a coward whose final act of emotional terrorism was to leave his death on his brother’s conscience.

“Oh, Caven,” I breathed, dropping to my knees in front of him. I hooked one arm around his neck, my other around Rosalee’s shoulders.

“None of that matters. It’s over. It’s finally over. We’re living in the seconds. And nothing matters except for this second right now. We’re safe. We’re okay.” His voice cracked, but he still managed to force out, “We’re going to be just fine.” He kissed my forehead and then Rosalee’s. “Okay?”

“Absolutely.” I squeezed them tight. “We’re a family. We’ll get through this too.”

He nodded, and as I peered up at him, I saw that all-too-familiar storm brewing in his eyes.

“Don’t say it,” I whispered. “Don’t you dare apologize. Not now. Not for this. Not ever. You did not do this, Caven. None of this.”

He nodded again, but he didn’t believe me. He was a good man with a heavy conscience. It was going to take a long time to convince him that he couldn’t carry the weight of the world.

Luckily for me, I had forever.





CAVEN



One month later…



“What’s taking them so long?” Willow asked, the sound of waves crashing in the background. Rosalee was a few yards away, giggling and racing the waves up the beach.

I shrugged, digging my toes into the sand. “Royal Rumble off the balcony?”

“God, I hope not. We don’t have enough ice for Ian’s balls.”

The side of my mouth curled. “And what makes you think Beth would win?”

She shot me a pointed glare. “You’ve spent the last week with Beth. Tell me you seriously think Ian could take her.”

“Take her? No. Handle her? Absolutely.”

She rolled her eyes. “I kinda wish they would have sex and get it over with already so they’d stop bickering all the damn time.”

I glanced back at the beach house. “Who says they’re not?”

Willow lifted her phone and flashed the screen my way. “No texts. Trust me, I’ll know if Beth is getting laid before Ian does.”

I let out a loud laugh and brought her hand to my mouth to kiss the back of it.

A wise woman had once told me that we aren’t given a hundred years all at once. Time was doled out one very manageable second at a time. If all you focus on is the big picture and worry about tomorrow, you lose the happiness that can be found in the seconds.

And God, had we earned some good seconds.

After Willow had rushed out of my house with Rosalee in her arms, my anger had broken through the all-encompassing fear. A raw betrayal had branded my soul. I hadn’t been able to hit Trent hard enough to make myself feel better, and while he’d landed a few blows of his own, it was when he fumbled the gun that I knew it had to end once and for all. I pulled the trigger on my own brother. And after seeing him hold that gun to my daughter’s head, there would never be a day when I regretted it.

I’d sworn to Willow that Trent wasn’t my father. And he wasn’t.

He was worse.

When the police searched his house, they found not just my father’s stack of Polaroids—the ones Trent had claimed to have burned all those years earlier—but a stack of Trent’s own victims, including a picture of Hadley dead in her car.

From what the police could piece together, Hadley had figured out Trent was the woman in the picture and had been hell-bent on exposing him. Files from Aaron White’s computer showed surveillance footage he and Hadley had taken during one of their stakeouts. It was a very clear, very damning video of Trent disposing of a body. The authorities surmised that these were what he’d been so desperate to get off the stolen flash drive that had never been recovered. Though we couldn’t be sure because, while Aaron White had been found OD’d on a park bench after he’d trashed Willow’s house, a Polaroid of him dead had been recovered at Trent’s house.

In some ways, nothing made sense.

In others, I was a fool not to see it earlier.

My father had beaten Trent every day of his life. But he’d never hated Malcom the way I had. He’d been the one to convince me that we needed to get our paychecks and leave town, but his real motive had been to buy himself time so he and his fellow sociopath could get a plan together. And considering that Malcom hadn’t seemed to care if he lived or died in the mall that day, maybe Trent had been the mastermind all along.

For years, he’d pretended to be the doting brother and uncle. He’d sat at my dining room table and taken my daughter on vacations. If I hadn’t seen his madness firsthand at my house that day, I’m not sure I would have believed he was capable of killing dozens of people. Let alone his own wife.