To Have It All(90)

“Only have myself to blame. I just . . . wasn’t ready,” he admitted. “I wanted to be . . . but I wasn’t.”

“Are you ready now?”

He shook his head. He hated to admit it, but he wasn’t. He still wasn’t ready. He wanted to be in love and move on, but he knew when it came to the woman in the flowing teal dress, it was too late. He’d done too much damage where she was concerned. It would be a long and exhausting road to make his way back into the life of the little girl he’d never even held. He wasn’t mentally strong enough to fight for that yet. He still had more to work on.

“She was mine once, the pretty one in the teal dress. That’s my little girl, too.” He nodded his head toward the church just when Liam leaned down and kissed Waverly. Max winced at the sight, his hand fisting against his thigh.

I knew my next words would cut him deeply, but they needed to be said. He needed to hear them. “They both look really happy.”

His mouth flattened, and his Adam’s Apple bobbed as he swallowed hard.

“Sometimes,” I went on, “we have to let things go . . . really let them go, especially if we know we’re no good for them.”

His head reared back as he cut a lethal glare at me. “What does that mean?”

“It means, Max, let them go. If you do, maybe your daughter will seek you out one day when you are ready. When you are better.”

Again, I read his mind. He knew I was right. He still struggled every day to find the will to move through life. It seemed cruel to him as he watched Liam kiss his daughter. He would be no good trying to be a father, but he loathed knowing someone else had taken his role. His eyes teared up as he watched his daughter kiss the man in the suit, a tear trickling down his cheek as he realized, for the hundredth time since he’d woken up in the hospital, what he’d lost. This was hell. This was his punishment for treating everyone so shitty because he felt so shitty himself. He’d lost everything. Not only had he lost everything, but he’d had to watch another man take it from him while he’d been trapped in that man’s body. He’d seen it all.

“You made the right choice,” I told him.

He snickered. Raising a hand, he motioned at the church. “The right choice? He stole my life.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

“It is true,” he insisted, his words clipped.

“Then why’d you choose to live? You knew what would happen if you did. You saw everything. You saw her fall in love with him. You watched as they made love. You knew she would choose him.”

Flicking his gaze at me, he scowled. “How do you know all of this? Who are you?”

“Answer the question, Maxwell. Why did you choose to live?”

His gaze dropped to where his fingers were threaded in his lap. “I wasn’t going to,” he admitted. “I was going to die and take him with me. Maybe I didn’t deserve them, but at least he wouldn’t have them either.”

Glancing at me again, he found me watching him, waiting for him to finish.

“But she begged me to live. She begged me not to take him.”

“She begged you for lots of things, Max,” I noted. “She begged you to love her once; she begged you to love your child. She begged you not to turn your back on them. You ignored her. Why now?”

Moving his gaze back to Waverly, he said, “Because I couldn’t do it to her. To them. He could be for them what I never could. He could be the man I didn’t know how to be.”

When he looked at me again, my eyes were glossed with tears, but I was grinning. He’d done it. He’d changed. Placing my hand on his cheek, I whispered, “I knew I was right not to give up on you.”

“You did this to me?” he asked, his expression bewildered.

“I did this foryou,” I wept.

“You gave him my life? You made me watch while he took everything? You even gave him the motorcycle letting him think I had bought it.” He shook his head in disbelief as it replayed, whizzing through his mind so fast it was almost a blur. “Why?”

“The motorcycle was for him. Liam is a kind man, and if he was going to die, I wanted to give him something special. The rest of it, Max . . . was to save you,” I whispered.

Tearing his eyes from me, he bit his tongue to keep himself from lashing out. With no place to unleash his anger, his eyes began to tear up again. It was hard to see him hurt so much, but at the same time, it was one of the most beautiful moments I’d ever experienced. He was accepting his pain.

“Put good out, Max,” I spoke in a masculine voice after I changed form, causing him to snap his eyes toward me. “It will come back.” Max gaped at me, his mouth parted in shock. The woman who’d been sitting beside him moments before was gone, and in her place was his doorman Braxton. Smiling softly, I held out a handkerchief to him. His heart thundered in his chest as he reached out a trembling hand and took the cloth. He stared at me as he blotted at his wet face, wondering if he was going mad. He was on quite a few medications for depression, and he suddenly wondered if they were causing him to hallucinate? It was then I decided he’d had enough, and it was time for me to go—or at least vanish so he could not see me anymore—but I left him something. When he looked back at me, he saw only the black stuffed cat I’d been petting moments before resting on the bench.