He meets my eyes with somber determination. “I can’t be with you. Not like this. Part of me will always wonder if you chose me because there aren’t other choices.”
“Sutton.”
“Maybe it does take away your power. God knows you’ve earned that much. But I love you too much to take the chance. If I took advantage of you now, I couldn’t live with myself.”
The realization makes me ache. “So what are you saying? Goodbye?”
He looks down at his hands, where they’re clasped between his knees. He’s masculine strength and contemplation. “Did you know I thought it was my fault? That Harper chose Christopher? That my love wasn’t as deep as his. That I was shallower, and she could sense that about me. That I was weaker because I loved two people instead of one.”
“Sutton, no.”
“Yes.” His voice turns hoarse. “The thing is, I was right. It was a shallower love than I was capable of, and maybe she did see it. It wasn’t diminished because there were two of them. It was diminished because I was waiting for you.”
I shake my head, unseeing. “Then why are you sending me away?”
“I loved them with a selfish, shallow love. I wanted them for myself. But you… God, Ashleigh. I love you the real way. The deep way. The way where I need you to be safe and secure and strong more than I need to breathe. So yes. Yes. This is goodbye.”
“That’s not fair.” Even as I say the words I know they make me sound my age. Like the seventeen-year-old he’s afraid to take advantage of. Maybe that’s what I am. I’m innocent and world-weary. I’m young and ineffably tired at the same time. I’m everything. Why can’t I be everything? Whoever decided we had to be only one thing—the virgin or the whore?
He taps the check. “There’s enough here for college. For medical school. Or to travel the world. Do what you want, build a life for yourself.”
I hold back tears. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by.”
“And that has made all the difference.”
My lip trembles. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
He sounds faintly wry. “Me either, honestly.”
“So you want me to go date guys? Marry them?”
“If that’s what you want,” he says hoarsely. “But if—”
“If.”
“If you build a life, and there’s room for me in it, I’ll be there.”
* * *
The funny thing about holding a check for two million dollars is that you can’t actually cash it without some form of identification. It’s Blue himself—with those familiar blue eyes I would recognize from anywhere, so like Sutton’s—who drives me away from the ranch in his black Expedition.
He looks casually competent and intimidating across the large dash. “Blue Security will manage your lodgings and care until such time as you take possession of the funds.”
“Is that your way of saying I’m not homeless anymore?”
He gives me an appreciative look. “So you’re the straightforward type of client.”
“I don’t think I’m a client at all because I’m not paying you. But yeah, I think I’d prefer things straightforward. I’ve had enough of being in the dark.”
“I assume you don’t have ID. We can get a rush application for your birth certificate and social security card. From there we can get you a state ID card.”
I look out the window, at the farmland that’s rapidly turning into city. We’re leaving Sutton. We’re leaving Haven. We’re leaving the darkest evening of the year, and there should be some comfort in that. It would feel better if it didn’t feel like my heart stayed behind. “My mother might have those things.”
“You don’t have to see her.”
Which answers the question about how much Sutton told him. “It would be quicker. And the sooner you can stop babysitting me on Sutton’s dime, the better. Besides, I want to see her.”
“You’re the boss,” he says in a tone which means the opposite.
I slide the piece of paper with her address over. “I’d like to go here.”
We don’t stop at some waystation, some beige motel where I can be transferred to someone less senior. Instead Blue punches the address into the GPS, and we take a drive into one of the sadder suburbs of Tanglewood. The cardboard McMansions have fallen into disrepair. Apartment buildings have sprung up where there used to be parks. It’s in one of those tired-looking apartment buildings that we stop.
There’s a crush of air as a bus stops down the street. Someone steps off the bus, looking thinner than I remember, older than I remember. It’s her. I’m frozen to the ground. All I feel is love and hurt. It’s a struggle to hold on to any anger.
She has her head down as she walks towards us. When she gets close she looks up. A gasp that can be heard across the parking lot. Her groceries fall to the gravel. A peach rolls through a puddle. Then she’s running to me, catching me in her arms. “My girl. My sweet girl. You’re alive.”
She hugs me, and I cry. Part of me wants to go back to the way everything might have been—if she had left with me when I first told her, if I could trust her. I would live in this sad little apartment, and I would have been happy like this. It would have been home.
Instead I give her Blue’s card. “I’m here.” My words stutter and choke out of me. “I wanted you to know that—that I’m safe now. You can call me here.”
And then I get in the passenger seat of the car and close the door.
Blue murmurs something to her, and slowly, aching, she moves to the sidewalk. He gathers up her groceries—all except the peach, which is ruined now—and gives them to her in the bags. I love her as a mother. I always will. But that love has a deep, indelible crack running through it. I want to have her in my life. But I can’t ask her for anything.
Not even my own birth certificate.
Blue backs out of the space and drives me away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sutton
It would be so easy to look her up. So easy to find out where she is, to show up where she lives. It’s the greatest struggle of my day, not searching for her. I scan every face when I walk into a restaurant or a coffee shop.
I look for her in the street, but I don’t let myself look her up.
My grief this time looks different. It’s not about drinking or feeling sorry for myself. I throw myself into work, building my own life. Building something I can be proud of.
Something that would make me worthy of her.
I’m sitting in my office, working on the plans when someone knocks.
“I’m eating,” I tell Mrs. Ness without looking up. There’s a turkey sandwich, potato salad, and a large slice of key lime pie waiting for me on my desk.
“I’m not Mrs. Ness,” comes a voice from my memory.
I look up, and there’s Christopher. He looks exactly like I remember him: handsome and diffident. Other people see him as distant, but I’ve always known that he’s shy. “Hello.”
“Can I come in?” He lifts up a white paper bag. “I brought gifts.”