Because I didn’t want to see the look in their eyes when they realized I was like our dad—the worry that I would become him someday. A man who physically and verbally abused his own kid for years.
Worse than all that . . . that my own wife would realize I wasn’t any better than him. That she was truly afraid of me.
My knees hit the wooden porch.
My fingers dug into my chest. Trying to tear at it. To relieve the fierce pain. To take my heart and offer it up to Savannah because I didn’t want it if I didn’t have her.
I had nothing if I didn’t have her or our kids.
It’d been one thing when I’d thought she’d been keeping them from me because of Hunter and Madison. Because of the betrayal and lies. I would’ve gone to the ends of the earth to fix that. To make it right.
But taking our kids to protect them from me?
Saying she knew I wouldn’t hurt them only to say she was afraid she couldn’t stop me?
There was no fixing that.
Savannah had known me most of my life. She knew the way I worked better than anyone. Better than me. And she’d been witness to the past ten years of keeping that anger leashed.
If she was scared, she had every reason to be.
And I’d put that fear there.
“Why are you sad?”
“Avalee.”
I forced my head up to see Madison holding her daughter to her. Protecting her. Stopping her from coming closer to me.
“Avalee, go back to the kitchen,” Madison continued, voice a hushed plea.
But her daughter just tilted her head as she studied me. “I saw you that one time when I was with my friends, Quinn and Wyatt, and you were mad. But right now, you’re sad. Like, so, so sad. This sad,” she said, spreading her arms wide.
My heart wrenched at the names of two of my children, the shock of the pain stealing my breath.
“I’m sorry,” Madison whispered as she stepped backward with her daughter in tow.
“Beau,” Hunter began after they’d left, voice uncertain, but I spoke over him.
“Am I Dad?” I met each of my brother’s blank stares when there wasn’t a response, my chest pitching with my uneven breaths the rougher they came. “Am I Dad?” I demanded harshly.
Hunter’s stare flashed Cayson’s way for a moment before meeting me again. “Come inside, man. Dry off. We’ll talk.” He reached for my shoulder, and I jerked back.
Staggered to standing and continued backward as he followed.
“Beau—”
“Answer me,” I shouted as I reached the lip of the top step.
“Let’s go inside and talk,” he said calmly as he neared me.
One of my hands shot out to shove him back, but he grabbed my forearm and twisted it to the side before I could touch him. In the next second, I had the collar of his shirt clenched tight in my other hand and was pulling him closer.
My jaw aching in protest as I seethed, “Be a fucking man and answer me.”
His nostrils flared as he watched me slowly give over to that haze of anger. “You want a real answer? Then you need to talk to all of us,” he ground out. “Sawyer’s been there nearly every day—he sees you with your kids. Cayson lived through the bullshit with Dad—he’s the only one who saw that side of him. I was your best friend before you destroyed my life.” His grip on my arm tightened as I struggled to escape the anger surrounding me. “But it’s been ten years since we’ve seen each other, Beau. I can’t answer that.”
“You can. You won’t.” I shoved him back and raked my trembling hands through my hair as that pain continued to tear through me like a dull, jagged blade.
I turned. Moving down the porch steps instinctively as Hunter called out my name.
His voice getting closer and closer as I walked through the rain even though my feet were moving faster as I reached the cluster of cars and trucks.
“Beau, stop,” he shouted. Grabbing my arm and jerking me to a stop.
I had a hand around Hunter’s throat and had him slammed up against the side of a truck in the next second.
My entire body trembling with the rage that always stayed just beneath the surface. Ready to explode. Racing through my veins and consuming me.
His brows were drawn close and his eyes were narrowed. One of his hands was on my chest to keep me back, the other was wrapped around my rain-soaked wrist and was squeezing in an attempt to make me loosen my hold on him.
I gripped tighter.
“You got what you wanted,” I seethed. “You got your life back at the cost of mine.”
“Beau, that isn’t—” His jaw flexed when I shoved him harder against the window.
“We’re done,” I said slowly, making sure he heard me. “Forever. Understood?”
“Yeah.”
I pushed away from him and stalked across the gravel driveway, never stopping even as I passed my truck. Fighting to see through the red haze and pouring rain. Struggling to breathe as the agony and fear and self-hatred built so high, it felt like I was suffocating.
By the time I stepped onto the main road just off the property, I was running.
Running from my demons.
Running from the nightmare I was living in.
Trying to outrun the man I’d become—the man who had destroyed everything good and pure in my life—knowing I never could.
“I’m gonna kill you!”
Cayson took off, letting the bucket he’d used to dump mud over my head and down my back drop behind him.
Jerk was fast.
But when I was like this? When that gross feeling began in my chest and went all the way to my fingers and toes, making it so I was like someone else? There was no getting away from me.
But I kinda wished he could.
Because I didn’t like it. I didn’t like feeling like I couldn’t stop. Like there was something wrong with me or the way it always felt like I was gonna be sick once it was finally over.
Hated everything about it.
About me.
Hearing my parents when they thought they were alone. My momma crying, saying she didn’t know what to do with me anymore. That I was getting worse.
Calling me things like uncontrollable and violent. Saying I was hopeless.
I wanted to be better. Show them I wasn’t those things.
I tried. I really did.
But I couldn’t stop it.
Cayson cried out when I caught up to him and tackled him to the ground. Called out for help when I rolled him over and sank my fist into his stomach.
“Get off me!” he yelled as he tried to fight back.
But it never mattered if he fought back—if anyone did. It couldn’t slow me down.
I saw when he started crying. I heard his grunts and shouts with each hit. And it made me fight harder. Faster.
I yelled out when I was ripped away from him and slammed onto my back. My thrashing arms and legs pinned down. My dad’s face coming into view.
Talking and talking.
Saying things I couldn’t hear because I needed to move. I needed to fight. And he was stopping me.
I wrestled against my dad’s hold. My fingers clenched tight into fists as I tried to move him off me, a frustrated cry bursting free when I barely lifted my arms off the ground.
“Why are you so angry?”
I flinched and looked up and to the side. My chest shaking with deep, deep breaths as I searched for the voice that broke through everything. For the girl who’d washed away the anger and that sick feeling as soon as she’d spoken, in a way nothing ever had.