Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(145)

Gia and I added pages to her calendar book today. She was stoic and brave, but God, her eyes.



and



I’m not enough. I can’t be enough for Bo and Gia both. He needs too much, and she lets me put her aside for him. I let her let me, because it’s too much, and I’m not enough.



and



Today was the day we first thought you’d come home. This is the worst day so far. By far. This day seemed so far away once. Now it’s here, but you’re still gone, and the days ahead without you just seem infinite.



and



I can’t do it.



and



I can’t do it.



and



I can’t do it.



And so much more. Page after page after page of pain, desolation, inadequacy, disappointment.

Isaac had come out of the shower to find Lilli and Kodi still gone and, feeling disoriented in his own bedroom—in his own house, his own town, his own life—he had started reacquainting himself. This room had seemed like a good place to start, the one he shared only with Lilli. There were changes, but not too many. New curtains—the ‘new’ cats, when they had been kittens, had torn the old ones up. A couple of knickknacks from the kids. A television on top of his dresser. He’d been looking for a remote when he’d come across the drawer full of the scented purple paper he loved so much. That drawer was chock full of the paper, all of it covered in Lilli’s handwriting. He’d seen his name on a top page and had pulled it out.

And then he’d fallen into a heaving, vicious vortex of guilt and sorrow.

She was there now, watching him, her face pale and stricken.

“Isaac, no. Don’t.”

His heart felt like it had been sliced open and spread wide. “Lilli. God, baby. My God.”

She walked over and tried to take the page from his hands. He let her. She gathered all the pages he’d taken out and read, and she put them neatly back in the drawer, then slid the drawer into its slot in her nightstand.

“I’m so sorry, Lilli. I don’t—I…” He let the sentence die. No words were worthy of the regret he felt.

She sat next to him on the side of the bed and took his hand. “It doesn’t matter. You’re home. That matters.”

Turning his hand and linking fingers with her, he pulled her onto his lap. She laid her head on his shoulder. “Your strength has always amazed me. You are a warrior, Sport.”

She smiled sadly and scoffed, a quiet, gentle sound without bite. “Not anymore.”

With a tug on her ponytail, he brought her head back up and looked into her eyes. “You are. I think you still know it’s true, even if you forgot. My life turned your life to shit, but you made it into something. You stuck it out and raised our kids and ran business and kept everything going.”

“Isaac, I’d say you had a harder sentence than I did.” She brushed her fingertips over the scar across the bridge of his nose, made by a guard’s baton, and then over another scar, in the corner of his forehead, earned in the stalls. “Wouldn’t you?”

“My choices, though. I made the choices you had to live. My life turning yours to shit.”

Something altered in her eyes then. They went hard, and she pushed off his lap and crossed the room.

Standing in front of her dresser, she muttered, “Don’t be an *, Isaac.”

Still reeling with guilt, he couldn’t comprehend the change in her, but he couldn’t tolerate the thought of her anger with him so soon. Every moment of their connection was precious. He stood and followed, standing directly behind her, his hands reaching for her hips.

“Lilli. I don’t understand.”

“It’s not your life and my life. It’s our life. Just one life. I’m not some f*cking passenger in your life.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah, it is. When I chose you, I chose all your choices, too. And vice f*cking versa.”

He took her arm and turned her to face him. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been angry.”

Again, that stony chill in her lovely eyes. When she spoke, her voice had the sharp edge it got just before she erupted, and Isaac was surprised at his reaction to that sound—excitement. Pleasure. Arousal. He hadn’t seen fire like this in her in a long, long time, and it made his heart pick up and his cock stretch out.

She hit his chest with the heel of her hand, mostly for effect, he thought, but with some pop. “Yes, I’ve been angry!” She hit him again, harder. “I’ve been so packed with rage for so long that my soul feels stretched out of shape. I’m sagging with rage.” And again. “But not at you. For this, never at you. It would have been easier to be angry at you. That’s focus.” Again. “It would have been easier to be angry at myself.

Something”—another hit—“I could take it out on. But there’s been nothing. Nothing.” Both hands, now, hard enough to make him grunt, but if she’d been trying to hurt him, she could have. “NOTHING.” The next hit had force enough to push him back a step, and then her eyes changed again, and Isaac knew that one of two things would happen next, and that his move would determine which. All of this was blessedly, intimately, fantastically familiar. He made a choice.