Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 68033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
“We both messed up.”
“But if I hadn’t left the house that night, Amalie would be alive.” Cam closed his eyes like he wanted to block out the world.
“And if I hadn’t driven out in the rain…”
They’d said these words before to each other, and she realized neither of them had banished the guilt. She stowed the words in her head where she collected regrets and wishes and dead hopes.
“I’m sorry you never got to hold her, Kerris. She was beautiful.” Cam ran his long, sensitive fingers over the headstone. “She was perfect.”
They nursed a quiet between them for a few moments, both lost in their private thoughts, until Cam spoke again.
“I think about her every day.”
“I do, too.” Kerris worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “They say it gets easier, and in some ways it has. In other ways…”
“In other ways it feels like it keeps happening over and over again, and the pain gets no better.”
“Yeah, some days it does feel like that.” Kerris tossed a handful of grass away. “I wanted her so badly.”
“I did, too.” Cam snapped his dark brows together. “Maybe I wanted her for the wrong reasons. I thought having a family would be some kind of reset, give me some kind of clean slate. Make the past…hurt less.”
“Me, too. And I thought she could save us.”
“Nothing could have saved us. I see that now.” Cam paused before looking at her, his eyes filled with certainty but no peace. “I saw that when I left for Paris.”
“I think I knew that, too, but it still hurt when you left.” Kerris’s hollow laugh bounced between them in the eerie quiet. “A lot of things hurt when we were together.”
Cam caressed the headstone again, swallowing and clenching the muscles in his strong jaw.
“Nothing has ever hurt like this, and I’ve been through some shit.” He looked at her for a moment before returning to the headstone. “We both have.”
Kerris wasn’t sure what emboldened her to reach for Cam’s hand, but she did. After all they’d been through—how he had hurt her, how she had hurt him—she expected him to flinch from her touch. He didn’t. He looked into her eyes, a teary mirror of his own grief, and held on, somehow hallowing this moment between them for their baby girl. Something in that contact healed more than words. Like their hands were conductors for forgiveness, for resolution. For peace?
“Did you find any peace in Paris?”
“Pshht.” Cam blew his cynicism out as a truncated breath. “I thought marrying you would bring me peace, but we just ended up adding new wounds. I thought having Amalie would bring peace, but I’m standing here in a graveyard, more fucked up than I’ve ever been. I’m done looking for peace, Kerris. It knows where to find me.”
Kerris knew from experience that any peace she had obtained over the last year, she had relentlessly pursued. She had ripped her insides out, dumped them on the table, sorted through the hurt. It had been hard. It had been work. Peace didn’t come looking for you. It sometimes hid in the pain. Sometimes camouflaged itself in the disappointments of the past, and until you looked hard enough to understand, to put it in perspective, peace could not be found. That wasn’t a lesson you could relay in a conversation. You couldn’t walk through that fire for anyone else. She certainly couldn’t walk through it for Cam.
Kerris shifted on her haunches, legs getting stiff, and decided to stand, brushing the last of her tears away. Cam eased himself off the ground, too, wiping grass and dirt from the dark slacks he wore with a crisp white poet-collared shirt. He was dressed for court.
“So you and Walsh, huh?” Cam didn’t look at her, but looked at his black boots.
“Yeah.” That one word told Cam what she should have told him years ago. That she was in love with his best friend. “He’s in Tokyo.”
Cam nodded, and Kerris searched his eyes for bitterness and the lines of his face for anger. She didn’t see those things, but what scared her was that she saw nothing else either. Cam, who had always been like a wire over water, volatile and crackling with the promise of explosion and passion, had vacant eyes. It frightened Kerris. Before she could probe, poke around the emptiness she sensed in him, he spoke again.
“We should get going. It’s almost time.”
He was right, and Kerris was ready to sever her ties to the past, to make her way into the future, but more than ever, with Ms. Kris’s promise lodged in her heart, she was determined they would not leave Cam behind.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Well, I guess that’s that.” Cam opened the cottage door for Kerris. “You’re a free woman.”
“And you’re a free man.”
Kerris hoped her eyes weren’t shining with the promise of her new life, but she was afraid they were. Afraid the happiness ahead for her and Walsh would be an insult to this man who had once been such a close friend to them both. The thought of seeing Walsh tomorrow literally made Kerris’s heart flutter. He returned from Tokyo tonight. Ten days had turned into three weeks as negotiations dragged out. It was probably best that he and Cam weren’t here at the same time.