Mortified with the way I’ve hurt him, all I do is whisper apologies until he lowers his bleeding fists and his shoulders sag.
I take a step forward to examine them, and he steps back, turning a shoulder so I’m unable to touch him.
“Can’t you see, Katy? I’m still fucking fighting for you.” His voice falters as a tear slides down his cheek, tracing his jaw, before dripping to his chest. “Even when you’ve given me every reason not to.”
It’s that tear that does me in, and I give him the only truth I’m capable of. “I love you, Briggs, heart, and soul. But I can’t give you definitive answers because I don’t have them right now. I’m sorry it’s not enough, but this love we share is yours, and it’s only yours.”
“What does it matter?” he asks, his face revealing every ounce of defeat, “if he’s got you?”
I open my mouth to speak but can’t find words. I don’t say anything, because he’s right. It’s all or nothing, and I can’t give him all of me now—maybe not ever—and Christopher Paul Briggs deserves to be someone’s everything.
He brushes past me as I scream his name.
“Please! Please don’t walk away from me! Not like this, please, these can’t be the last words we say. If you’re done with me, be done with me, but don’t walk away.”
Stopping in his tracks, he stalks back toward me. “I’m not watching you do it again. I can survive being a soldier, I can survive another war, but it seems I can’t survive loving you. If I have to let you go, you have to let me go too.” He leans in on a whisper. “I love you, Katy, let me go.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Katy
The road blurs in front of me as I do my best to get myself together before finally giving in and pulling over. Burying my face in my hands, I can’t escape the feel of him. Of how it felt to be loved by him, only to lose it. I’ve just left heaven and been drop-kicked into hell. The defeated look on Chris’s face when he walked out of that barn will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was selfish to go, even more so to stay. His kiss, his touch, the look in his eyes when he made love to me, I never could have imagined feeling so whole again.
I’m too raw to feel regret. Instead, all I feel is longing as I replay the way we fit. All I want is to turn around and live one more day in a place I felt safe and free, like I wasn’t a disappointment. Shaking with sobs in my seat, I turn the rearview toward me and swat at my tears with my fingers, assessing the damage. Staring long and hard at my reflection, I wonder if I’ll ever recognize who I’ve become. For the most part, I’ve acknowledged her. Validity, more than anything, seems to be my new goal, but my treacherous heart keeps fucking up my progress. I’ve been wrong about every move I’ve made since I’ve gotten back, but I refuse to believe I’m wrong about loving him.
Chris.
Images of the last few days flash through my scattered brain as my skin warms with remembrance. The feel of his hands, the thrust of his tongue, the whisper of a smile that tilts his lips before he kisses me.
Apologies fall from my lips as I clutch my chest feeling the burn, the undeniable loss as it shatters me over and over again.
Let me go.
“I can’t. I can’t. Please, God, I can’t,” I whisper into the void. Helpless to stop the bleeding, I do it freely until I’m too exhausted to move. I can’t live with the fact that he may hate me, not after what we’ve been through, after the way we’ve loved each other.
At some point, I’ll try to remind myself that it was his hurt lashing out. At some point, I’ll pray he’ll forgive me enough to remember us for what we were and not how we ended. At some point, I’ll be thankful for what he meant to me and feel less of the loss. Maybe when the cravings stop. When I stop wanting him, needing him. Maybe when I can lift my eyes to the night sky and not wonder where he is and if he’s thinking of me from that place, I’ll breathe easier.
Maybe time will give back what it took away, and I’ll be the wiser for it.
Maybe…eventually.
For now, my heart is the reckless navigator, and I, a reluctant passenger, unable to escape the way I love him.
Minutes later, I pull back onto the highway, the weight of the last few hours threatening to drag me down. I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to that lifeless place. Gripping the wheel like a lifeline, I try to focus on the one surety I have, the only thing in my world that isn’t complicated, the one love I’m capable of feeling that’s never let me down.
My purpose, my reason for being, is coming home.
Noah.
The act of living has become a chore, with everyone but him. Noah makes it simple. Before I left for the ranch, I’d finally found some footing. I can get it back, I just need my reason, and he’s en route.
Straightening my shoulders, I cough out another threatening sob as I make time back to my house. Pulling into the neighborhood, I allow myself some small comfort in the familiarity as the raw ache threatens to swallow me whole. Breathing a little easier, I make the last two turns to my street while making promises—to myself, to God, to the void—that I won’t be so reckless in following the whims of my heart. Dread courses through me as I weigh the implications of what it’s already cost me.
It’s only when I spot Gavin’s truck in the driveway that all the wind leaves my body.
Guilt consumes me whole as I put the car in park and run a hand through my hair.
From the outside, our home looks picturesque. I only wish the life inside resembled the surface. Every step toward that door has me falling further into hopelessness. Pausing at the porch, I see trays and trays full of unplanted flowers that I know he bought for me, as his own gesture, a sign of faith on his part. Something new, something I can watch grow, something we could have watched grow together. Now I know, the day I fled to the ranch was the night he finally accepted my dinner invitation.
It’s here on these steps, I let the rest of me suffocate under the heavy. It’s here that I know I lost the other half of my heart. It’s here that I accept my fate.
I’m nowhere near ready for this. I was always going to come clean, but I’ve barely had a chance to think past amber eyes and the hole in my heart that leaving him has caused.
I have to think that this is what I deserve for what I’ve done, and maybe life is tired of waiting on me to make the decision to hurt everyone I love. In the seconds before I open the door, a river of memories floods me, reminding me that I’ve lost it all.
Stepping through the front door, I allow them in as I scan the living room and close it behind me. Gavin’s on the edge of our couch, his eyes cast down on a piece of paper.
Several bags are packed next to where he sits, his eyes roving over the page as silent tears stream down his cheeks. Swallowing hard, I take a step into the room to see my unpacked duffle a few feet away. It was delivered from Baghdad a few months after I got home, and I’d never gotten around to unpacking it. It’s been thoroughly picked through, my clothes scattered into piles on the floor. I don’t have to ask him what he was searching for—it’s written all over his face. A face that twists in unrelenting pain as he reads the declaration of a faithful wife, of the wife who left him. The woman he still searches for when he looks at me. The woman that exists inside me in pieces and is dying to stifle his ache, not just for him but for us both.
My chest caves in as a glimmer of something familiar resting on the tip of his thumb catches my eye—my wedding ring.
I never put it back on.
It slides down the page he holds, the devotional letter I wrote the night before the ambush. I sink where I stand, my limbs filling with dread.
When his red-rimmed eyes finally find mine, his voice is filled with everything his eyes convey—betrayal, confusion, devastation. “Did you mean it?”
“Every word.”
Gavin chokes on a guttural cry as he lets the letter fall from his fingertips before burying his head in his hands.
“What did you do, baby? What did you do?” He begs me for a truth I can’t give as I sink further into the void and refuse myself any reprieve from laying witness to what I’ve just done.