“How could you?” Kallie asked Savannah with hatred in her voice, and she had every reason to.
“It’s not what you think,” Savannah tried to tell her, but the sob ripped right through her.
“You’re wrong.” She stood up and tried to hold her shoulders high. My brave, brave girl. “It’s worse than I think.” She ignored me and looked at Beau. “Can you take me home?”
“Kallie.” I stepped forward to put my hand on her, and she ripped her arm away from my touch, so I let my hand fall to my side. “Please let me explain.” I wanted to rip my hair out. I wanted to shout the truth and tell her that it wasn’t true. Nothing about this was true.
“You slept with her while you told me you loved me!” she shouted at me, each word like a knife to my heart as tears poured down both of our cheeks. Every dream I’d ever had of us getting married and having children together was erased, like it never was. “You slept with her while you made plans with me about the future. Our future.” Her voice was so loud that I finally spotted a crowd around us. The pain ripped through me, gutting me, leaving me hollow. I just had to get her alone so I could explain it to her.
“Kallie.” Beau said her name, and she turned her anger on him also.
“You knew.” Kallie pointed at him. “You had to have known. You guys are the three musketeers.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He looked as gutted as Kallie looked right now. “I didn’t know.”
“I don’t believe you,” she hissed, and then she looked at me. “I hope she’s worth it.” She turned and walked through the crowd, and my eyes followed her, my feet stuck to the ground. As I looked around, the crowd just looked at me. Some with disgust and others with sorrow.
She got into Casey’s truck, and he peeled off. She was leaving me, and I ran, I ran so fast after the truck. I pushed myself, calling her name over and over until my voice was raw. I ran until my legs burned and my knees buckled, leaving me in the middle of the road with the sight of the red taillights fading.
The phone rings, bringing me back to the present. My chest hurts just as bad as it did that day, just the same as it has since she left. “Hello?”
“You’re a hard man to get a hold of,” Casey says, and I roll my eyes.
“Not a hard man to get a hold of. Me not answering you should have been a clue that I have nothing to say to you.”
“Listen, I don’t have much time,” he says with attitude, and I laugh.
“Actually, me neither,” I say, and I hang up on him. Fuck him, he kept me from her. The next day, he kicked me off his property and refused to let me see Kallie. Then two days later, her father told me she was gone, and I found out he snuck her out of town.
Grabbing my keys, I say goodbye to Monica while I walk out into the hot Southern heat. I’m walking down the steps when I hear Ethan call my name. “Dad!” he shouts, and I turn to look at him. Luckily for both of us, my son looks exactly like Savannah, but he’s my son right down to my bones. I bend to catch him while he runs to me, and I bury my face into his neck, giving him a kiss. His laughter gets louder, and then I hear cars honking. I look at where it’s coming from, and it’s like I’m brought back to eight years ago. It has to be because there is no way I am actually seeing what I am seeing.
Kallie, looking as beautiful as she did when she walked away from me without giving me a second thought. The same Kallie who said she would always stand by me. The same Kallie I slowly started to hate. “Oh my God.” I look at Savannah beside me. “Is that Kallie?” she asks.
Chapter Four
Kallie
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” I keep chanting it over and over again, and I blink away the tears that have formed in my eyes the minute I saw him with his son. His son.
“Kallie,” Olivia whispers. She puts her hand on mine, and I just shake my head. “Is that him?”
“Oh, that was him all right.” I wipe away the lone tear that escapes and rolls down my cheek. “He and his son and probably his wife.”
“Probably his wife?” she asks. “Probably?”
My hands grip the steering wheel so hard my knuckles are white. “I don’t exactly know.”
“And why don’t you know?” She throws her hands up and huffs.
“Because I didn’t want to know,” I say, turning onto the gravel road that leads to my family’s property. “After I left, I didn’t want to know.”
“But how?” She looks out the window as the trees pass us by.
“They tried to, but I shut it down. I told them I would no longer call if they even brought him up.” I take a deep inhale. “I couldn’t think of him with her, and I didn’t want to know. I locked it away and refused to even think about it.”
“How is this going to work now that we are in town?” I’ve been asking myself that same question since we started our drive. It would be easy to pretend he didn’t exist. But now that I was home and he was so close, I knew my heart wouldn’t be able to withstand it, and I was not wrong. The pain of losing him is even more now than before. The ache in my chest is a combination of pressure and little stabs of pain.
“I’m going to make it work,” I say, trying not to make her feel any worse than she already does about bringing me back home. “Besides, I think it’s a big enough town that I won’t run into him.”
“Dude, we’ve been in your town for a hot minute, and you’ve run smack into him.” Olivia points in the direction where we can from. “Literally one street.”
“I know that, Olivia,” I say harshly. “I get it, but right now, I can’t fall apart, okay? I’m going to see my parents, and the last thing they need to see is me being a fucking basket case.” I blink as fast as I can, ignoring the stinging in my eyes. “It took a month for them to get me up and out of bed when I left here.”
“It’ll be okay,” she says softly. “Everything is going to be okay, and if it’s not, we can leave and go back home.” We drive into a clearing, and you can finally see my property. There are four black stallions running free in the fence enclosure on the right side.
“Oh, wow,” Olivia says, her eyes looking around at the vast green that surrounds my parents’ huge house. “You lived here?” she asks, gesturing to the huge white farmhouse where my mom and father still live. The same house where my mother grew up. The sight of the house makes my heart speed up just a touch, and when I finally turn into the parking area beside the house, all I can hear is the gravel crunching under the car. The sound is suddenly louder than I ever remembered.
I look over at the house. “They painted the house,” I say. The fresh white paint was applied not too long ago since it still shines. My mother opens the front screen door, and she walks out onto the covered porch, waving excitedly at us. I turn the car off and look over at Olivia. “Here goes nothing.”
Opening the car door, I put one foot out of the car before the smell of the horses hits me. It really is country. I smile to myself, and the sudden memories of me riding the horses come back to me in full force; the memories of falling off them, and the ones of me and Jacob going on the secret trails we found. It’s all too much, and I want to run away again. I want to hightail it out of here just like I did eight years ago.