Coming Home(93)

She stared at him until her eyes welled with tears again.

“This is a lot to take in,” she said as they spilled over her lower lashes.

“I know,” he whispered, wiping them away with his thumbs.

“I just…I need to think. There’s so much…” She trailed off and shook her head, and he nodded.

“I know. It’s okay.”

She looked down at him, and he smiled at her, hoping she couldn’t see the sadness behind it.

Leah brought her hand to his cheek, and he leaned into her touch.

“I just…I want you to know that no matter what happens, I know you, Danny,” she said. “I know who you really are.”

He stared up at her, and the vice-like pain in his chest began to soften for the first time since he had entered her apartment. There was nothing she could have said in that moment more perfect than the words she’d just spoken.

Because no matter what she decided after this, even if she chose to walk away and never look back, in a way, she had just absolved him.

She had looked straight through all the horror and the ugliness, and she still saw him.

And when she laid her head back down on his chest, he rested his cheek against her hair and closed his eyes, wondering if there would ever be a man on this planet who was worthy of her.





Leah sat at her desk, spinning a paper clip between her fingers.

She just wanted this day to be over.

Every Tuesday she ran the After-School Help program, or ASH, as the students called it. From two to four thirty, students could come to receive extra help in whatever classes they were struggling with, although most often it was overrun with athletes just looking for a quiet place to do their homework before practice began.

By the time the bell rang after Leah’s last class, it had already felt like the longest day she’d ever experienced, so the two and a half hours she still had to endure before she could go home seemed insurmountable.

She thought work would provide her with a much needed distraction, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t focus on anything except what had happened the day before. She could see everything so vividly—the scene he described, his face as he told her—and she’d spent most of the day on the verge of tears because of it.

The images of Bryan trying to defend himself against three guys—the vicious kick to the head—were burnt into her consciousness, and she hadn’t even been there. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Danny.

She knew if it were her, she would never get over it—watching something that disturbing happen to her best friend.

But Bryan had been more like Danny’s brother.

For a split second, she imagined what it would feel like to watch Christopher suffer that way, and the thought alone was enough to incapacitate her.

And when it wasn’t those images torturing her, it was the memory of that look on his face as he explained everything to her; even worse than the guilt and sadness in his eyes was the defeat, as if he were waiting for her to condemn him, or dismiss him, or recoil from him.

It was absolutely heartbreaking.

He had told her he’d understand if her feelings for him changed, but the truth was, it only reinforced them. Because when he spoke, all she could hear was how he had tried to defend his brother—how he had attempted to protect someone he loved, and he had failed.

He was a good person who made an impulse decision with disastrous results, and Leah just couldn’t get past the unfairness of it all—that Bryan was gone over something so senseless, that Danny would be paying such a heavy price for something that was clearly an accident.