“Honey.” My mom put her hand on my arm. “What can I do?”
My throat burned. “Nothing, Mom,” I said. “No one can do anything.”
I hustled back down the stairs, through the front door, across the yard to the car.
Where Eden was standing, her hands on the roof of it, her purse at her feet.
My feet crunched across the gravel.
She spun, her despair evident even in the moonlight.
“I’ll drive you wherever you need to go, baby. But I’m not leaving you.”
Her face crumpled.
Her legs collapsed.
And her knees hit the gravel hard before I had a chance to move.
Some hero.
I couldn’t even protect the woman I loved from skinned knees.
But then I was there next to her, tentatively reaching for her hand, scared she was going to push me away, terrified we’d be right back in that panic from her bedroom.
Instead, the moment I touched her, she spun and crawled into my lap, knocking me to my ass. She burrowed against my chest, sobs puffing against my throat and tears soaking through the fabric of my shirt. The gravel hurt, but not as much as the agony of Eden’s tears as I held her tight.
I don’t know how long she cried or how long I sat there holding her as she wept, but eventually I heard the soft footsteps of someone approaching.
My mom was there, a blanket in hand. She wrapped it around Eden as gently as one would swaddle a newborn . . . and I knew she’d seen the story blaring on the TV in my room.
She touched my shoulder, scooped up Eden’s purse, and then disappeared into the house.
“I’m sorry, Damon,” Eden whispered, slipping her arms around my waist, eyes wet when she glanced up at me. “I shouldn’t have said that. I know you didn’t tell anyone.”
I wiped my thumbs across her cheeks, trying to dry her tears, but they kept coming, continued dripping out of the corners of her eyes. “It’s okay, love.”
“It’s not.”
“Shh, now. We’ll figure it out later.”
“Together?” More tears. “You won’t leave?”
“No, baby. I’m here.”
She nodded, burrowing back against my chest. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shh,” I murmured. “It’s going to be okay.” We didn’t talk further or call her publicist. We didn’t do anything but sit there, with our arms around each other as the moon moved across the sky and the sun began to rise.
Eighteen
Eden
“Come on, now,” Belle said. “Just a couple of bites of toast.”
Obliging her, I picked up the toast and brought it to my lips, but I might as well have been trying to eat cardboard.
I chewed and chewed and chewed, but couldn’t swallow it down.
Gagging, I spit it into a napkin.
“It’s okay, baby,” she murmured. “Forget about the toast.” Her hand rubbed the space between my shoulder blades lightly. A motherly touch, one I didn’t even realize I hadn’t ever had.
The church had been my family.
Then I’d lost it.
I’d lost everything and retreated and closed down and . . .
Now I was sitting in Belle’s kitchen surrounded by people who cared for me, one who’d been patient for years, two who’d accepted me because I made their son happy. I shook my head firmly, trying to dislodge the fog out that had settled in my brain when I’d heard the story.
This kitchen. This place. These people.
They could be my family.
No, they were my family.
If I let them.
That, more than anything else, snapped me out of my head. I could come back to this kitchen, I could learn how to make decent tortillas, I could perfect that French toast recipe, and figure out how to properly shred pork . . . if I let them in.
My cell was on the table in front of me, turned to silent because of the sheer volume of calls and texts. Including several dozen from Maggie.
Who I needed to call first thing.
But I kept seeing the reporter’s face from that show, the near-smirk as he’d reported on what was probably the biggest story of his life, triumph and pleasure all wrapped up with my past.
There would be more like that. More triumph, more crowing, more analyzing every titillating face.
Breaking down what had gone wrong, what I’d done wrong.
And it would be horrible.
My eyes welled with tears again, but I blinked them back. I couldn’t keep sitting here, crying and sobbing over toast, not doing anything, keeping people who were trying to show they cared about me at a distance.
Because if I did that, I discounted everything else, including the fact that I’d survived.
I’d been a young and impressionable girl and . . . I’d been hurt by the people who should have looked out for me.
That was the story.
And I needed to get it out there.
“Can you hand me my phone?” I asked Damon. He and Diego were sitting across from me, concern on their faces.
“Sweetheart?”
I’d earned that concern, but I was going to ease it.
“I’ll be okay now.” I put out my hand.
“You need more time—”
“I’m going to be okay, baby,” I said. “I can do this. With you, all of you, I can figure this out.”
Diego’s face was soft, and he patted Damon on the shoulder. “Hand her the phone, son.”
Damon shook his head. “I should protect her.”
My heart pulsed with pain, with hope, with love, and any remaining armor I’d been clinging to disappeared.
It clanged against that tile floor and for the first time in more than a decade, I felt as though I were able to take a deep breath. Without pain, without straining, with nothing but a simple inhale and exhale.
I could do this.
I had to do this.
Because I wanted my happy future, and I wanted it with Damon.
And his family.
He handed me the cell. I called Maggie, then my agent, then the studio, and the next few days were a blurred flurry of events.
Only when everything calmed and the dust had settled, I couldn’t believe who was at the center of it.
The cameras found us on the second day, descending on Diego and Belle’s driveway like black-lensed locusts, reporters knocking on the door, shouting my name.
Diego had called off work, Belle was holed up in the kitchen cooking, and I was trying to figure out what to do. Or rather my team was, since the story only seemed to grow larger.
The media had gone to my hometown and found out about the pregnancy, since it was still apparently local gossip.
The judge’s name who’d signed off on the marriage had been released along with photos of a young me from the hospital, arm casted, bruises blooming on my side, a fat lip.
That had been after I’d lost the baby.
But before I’d lost Tim . . . or been freed from him anyway. Which was probably not a charitable thing to be thinking about someone who passed away, but I didn’t have enough charity in me to wish him anything but the end he’d met.
My phone rang. I set down the tortilla dough I was rolling—because at least I’d gotten better at the first part of the exercise—and glanced down at the screen. It was a number I didn’t recognize, and I’d learned enough over the last forty-eight hours to immediately reject any caller I didn’t know.