“It’s okay, you can say it,” she croaks. “You’re mine and I’m not going anywhere.”
“I was…withthis girl and I was thinking of you…” My skin feels too tight and itchy, and I want to crawl out of it. Washing this stuff off is impossible. “I was thinking of you and I couldn’t take it. I left her there and found something stronger. More of it. That night…I overdid it,” I rasp. “And they all left me there to die. I don’t even know who it was that called the ambulance.”
“Christian,” Lana croaks.
“You would have saved me,” I murmur, my vision clouding. “I know you would have saved me. Youdidsave me. And youdo, all the time.”
Lana’s body shakes.
I pull her closer. “I’m okay now.”
She shakes her head and somehow buries herself further into me. “I’m not.”
“Why, baby?” I pull her over me, her legs on either side of my hips. I hold her face in my hands, wipe under her eyes, and softly kiss her pout. “Why not?”
“Because you could have died,” she cries quietly. “And if you had? What would I have done? I wouldn’t have even known. I would have been here, in this town, waiting for the day you showed up. I would have been in a rocking chair on my stupid front porch waiting until I was ninety, and I wouldn’t have known.”
I push her hair back and move my hands to her neck, my thumbs over her pulse. “Can I tell you a secret?”
Lana nods.
“I thought the same thing when I woke up in the hospital.” Her lip trembles harder. “I thought of you, and I checked into rehab. I was planning to come back, Lana. I just needed to get clean forus.”
She puts her ear over my heart. “I would have killed you if you died on me,” she mutters.
I laugh softly. “I would never die on you, Lana.” She nods and I play with the ends of her hair. “I’ve made a lot ofmistakes—done things I’m not proud of. But none of those things are you.”
I feel Lana sigh and her lips press a kiss to my chest. She sits up slightly, brushing my hair back with her fingers and tracing features with the tip of her forefinger. “Are you sure you’re okay now?”
“I am, I promise.”
“One year and eight months?”
“One year, eight months, and one day,” I say.
“And was that when… you went to rehab?”
“I went to rehab right out of the hospital,” I tell her. “I was done. I didn’t want to keep having to kill myself to see you. If I died—actually died, I would have never seen you again. I would not have been able to make the life I wanted for myself. For us, baby. Our girls.”
“Christian…”
“I think I died for a minute,” I say, huffing a laugh as I recall what I saw. “I didn’t see any god or anything like that. I only saw my life if I wasn’t such a fucking mess.”
“What’d you see?”
“You. Us. The lake house we always wanted.” I smile. “Two little girls running around, and you running after them.”
“And where were you?”
“Taking your pictures.” My cheeks burn from the grin on my face. “Then one of the girls called me Daddy so I went running after all of you. I heard your laugh, and their laughs. And then I woke up in the hospital.”
“Oh, Christian,” she croaks and kisses my neck, over my pulse before she nestles her way into its crook.
“You, me, and two girls,” I say. “Could you imagine that?”
Lana chuckles. “Yes,” she says, her palms on my cheeks asshe gazes at me with those bright eyes. “I see you as a girl dad. You’d worship them—spoil them rotten.”
I laugh. “I’d spoil all of you.”
