The last time I saw her.
The words dripped. Soured. Old decayed wounds. “I won’t ever forget her face, Rynna. I’d broken her right there, and I didn’t even mean it. Ollie shouted at her to just go home, telling her she didn’t belong there, anyway. She looked at me one last time...torment in her eyes. Then she turned and started down the dirt road. And I let her go.”
I let her go.
Fuck.
I let her go.
“No one ever saw her again.” Guilt stampeded through me. Over me. Trampling me into the ground.
Rynna gasped. “Oh God, Rex,”
“I just watched her storm off into the night, Rynna. I fucking watched her go. I didn’t chase after her. Had no fucking clue she was even missing until the next day.”
She shifted onto her hands and knees and crawled the short distance across the boards of the porch until she was at my feet.
Tears shined in her eyes.
“What happened?”
A tremor rolled my throat. Horror. Hate. Fear. I’d carried it for twelve fucking years. That girl chasing me through the days and haunting me in the night.
“We searched. Searched and searched and searched for what felt like forever. I hunted through that forest every day. Months. A year. Maybe more. Screaming her name. Begging her to come back. She was gone, Rynna. Fucking gone. No trace. No suspects. No clues.”
In agony, I looked at her, fighting the moisture that had gathered in my eyes. “Now I do it in my dreams. I hunt for her. Scream her name. Desperate to find her when I know with every part of me she’s gone.” My teeth ground. “Buried in some shallow grave.”
Tears streaked her cheeks. “Oh God, Rex. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t...”
She gulped around the tragedy. Like maybe the magnitude of it was slowly sinking in. Her arms wound around her stomach like she might be sick. “Oh God. Oh My God...Ollie. Oh God,” she whimpered. Looking up at me, she set one of those tender hands on my jaw, her face pinched in anguish.
How was it even possible she was looking at me that way? Grief striking her cheeks and sympathy in the warmth of those eyes?
“Did you ever tell Ollie? Does he know you loved her?” she almost begged.
My head shook. “He’d kill me, Rynna. He’d fucking kill me. I just let her walk away. She’s gonebecause of me. I was responsible, Rynna.”
“No.”
“There’s no lie you could tell me, no lie I could tell myself, that would convince me otherwise. I know it, Rynna. I know if I hadn’t have done what I did, she would still be here.”
It sliced through us. A double-edged sword. Piercing through the atmosphere.
My gaze traveled out into the night, to the duskiness that held to the sky, trees gusting in the wind.
Swore I heard Sydney’s spirit howling back.
“You’d think what happened would have driven the three of us apart. But it tied us together some way. Ollie’s been...” I gulped around the barbs spiked in my throat. “He was a goddamned mess, Rynna. Blaming himself for that night when the blame has always been on me, and I’m the bastard who can’t bring myself to tell him. He tries to pretend he’s okay, but he’s not. None of us are.”
Tenderly, Rynna touched my chin. Her lips trembled and her tears wouldn’t stop falling.
I almost managed a grin. “Kale is like a rock. Think he’s the one who held Ollie and me together when we were falling apart.”
“Does he know?”
I gave a regretful nod. “Yeah. He called it the second things started up with Sydney and me. Think the asshole manages to see everything before it even goes down.”
Rynna gave me the softest smile before she laid her cheek on my knee, watching me, holding on to my leg like she could keep me from splitting apart. The girl my strength when that was all I’d ever wanted to be.
