The sound of her tears on the phone that day when she called me after confirming Ellen’s identity.
How she cried in my arms the night she returned home with Chase. How she’d held Ellen’s urn cradled in her arms as she walked off the plane, and how she’d sobbed later, alone with me, her fist wrapped tightly around the new pendant she wore that she hadn’t had when she left.
I suspected then what it was, especially since it matched the urn.
Her joy upon finding out George was alive.
How desperately she struggled tokeephim alive after he returned to us.
Her work sustains her every bit as much as her hidden pain fuels her. If that rug is suddenly pulled out from under her, honestly?
I don’t have the slightest clue how to keepheralive.
Regardless of her ulterior motives, I am who and where I am because Casey was there to pick me up and help me, every step of the way.
She never gave up on me.
She never gave up on George.
And, in some ways, good or bad, right or wrong, she never gave up on Ellen.
I lean in and delete the document. After I close his laptop, I spot the Rolex on my wrist. I take it off and set it on the coffee table next to the laptop, then I turn to him.
“Youneedfour more years in office,” I quietly say. “We need to try to get as much of Ellen’s legacy passed as we can. And we need to do it together. If it means four more years of pretending I’m only your deputy chief of staff… Well, I guess we’ll figure it out as we go.”
He pulls me into his arms for a kiss that erases every last vestige of my earlier rage and makes me believe in miracles. Somehow, we end up in my shower. From there to my bed, where George slowly, tenderly makes love to me. This isn’t a Master and his boy, or a sadist and his slut. There’s no teasing and denial, no pain, no bondage.
It’s a man in love with me, telling me he loves me with every ounce of his soul and every whisper of his lips across my skin.
I think he’s going to get up and leave when we finish, because it’s getting late, after six now, but he doesn’t. He tucks me against him and falls asleep with me in his arms.
That’s when I realize as hard as the past week’s been on me, it’s probably been doubly difficult on him because he hasn’t been able to sleep.
I close my eyes and breathe in deeply. He smells like me, my body wash, our sex, my clean sheets.
In this moment, he belongs totally tome—not to the state, or his kids, or memories of the woman whose soul was ripped from her body even as he held her hand.
With me he sleeps, he finds contentment.
With me he finds solace.
I guess I find my own kind of solace in him, too.
Chapter Twenty
It’s after eight when George finally awakens. This is heralded by a long intake of breath and his arm tightening around my waist, where he’s spooned along my back and molding his body against mine.
When I spend the night with Casey—which hasn’t been for a while—it’s usually me curled around her. Soft, rounded curves, her body cooler than mine, smooth skin without coarse hair along her legs or chest.
George is firm and warm, hard planes and angles, caging me in with his arms and legs and making me feel like he could keep me safe from the world. This isn’t the same man who left Nashville with his wife that morning nearly two years ago, my boss and friend and mentor.
That man had been a middle-aged father of three, a friendly guy who smiled all the time. The man who liked to take me out for lunch at the pizza place not far from the law firm, when we didn’t have to be at the capital. A guy who was in decent shape for his forty-four years, but soft around the middle and couldn’t always keep up with me when we hit the gym together. Who got winded a lot sooner than me if he tried to keep up with me on a run.
A man who would’ve died for his wife. Who I never so much as heard him make a joke about at her expense, or even look at another woman like that.
The man who stepped off that charter plane in Nashville almost two months later was practically unrecognizable. Emaciated, physically weakened, but emotionally and mentally tempered and hardened.
Stripped bare of bullshit and pride and ego.
