I don't deserve this.
Don't deserve him sitting here, still fighting for me after everything I've put him through.
"Why?" The word comes out broken. Shattered. "Why do you keep doing this? I've stolen from you. Lied to you. I've disappeared for days without a word. I've done things—" I choke on the confession. "Things I can never take back. You should hate me, Garrett. You should have walked away years ago."
He's quiet for a long moment.
When he speaks, his voice is thick with emotion he rarely lets show. "Do you remember Mountaineer Field?"
The question catches me off guard. "What?"
"Mountaineer Field. We were kids. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. You dared me to chase you across the fifty-yard line." A ghost of a smile crosses his face, softening the hard lines that grief has carved there. "Your hair was flying behind you like gold in the sunlight. You were laughing so hard you could barely run. And I thought... I thought I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life."
I remember.
God, I remember.
Back when everything was simple.
Back when the worst thing I had to worry about was whether Garrett Mercer would finally get the nerve to kiss me.
Back before pills and needles and trap houses.
Before I learned that my mother's addiction wasn't just her curse—it was my inheritance.
"I caught you on the twenty," he continues, his voice taking on a dreamlike quality. "Tackled you right onto the grass. And you looked up at me with those eyes—those big, beautiful eyes—and I knew." His gaze holds mine. "I knew right then that I was going to love you for the rest of my life. That nothing and no one would ever change that."
"Garrett..."
"I've loved you since I was nine years old, Vanna. Loved you when you were the girl next door with scraped knees anda smile that could light up the whole holler. Loved you when you became the prettiest girl in Morgantown and every guy in school wanted you. Married you when I was nineteen because I couldn't imagine spending another day without you being mine." He reaches out and takes my hand—carefully, reverently, like I might shatter. "That's twenty-two years of loving you. I don't know how to stop. I don't want to know how to stop."
The tears are coming faster now, and I can't breathe around the lump in my throat.
Can't speak around the weight of his devotion, so unearned and so unwavering.
"But I need you to try," he says. "One more time. I need you to really try, because if I get another call like tonight..." He stops, swallowing hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "If I have to watch them put you in the ground, Vanna, it's going to kill me too. And I'm not ready to die. Not yet. Not when there might still be a chance for us."
I want to say yes. I want to promise him I'll go, I'll get clean, I'll be the woman he remembers.
But I've made those promises before.
Dozens of times. Hundreds. I've broken every single one.
"What if I fail?" I whisper. "What if I go and I come back and nothing changes? What if I'm just like?—"
I can't finish the sentence, but I don't have to.
We both know what I mean.
What if I'm just like my mother?
"Then we'll figure it out." He squeezes my hand. "But at least you'll have tried. At least I'll know you wanted to fight."
I think about my mother then.
The image rises unbidden—her body on the floor, lips blue, eyes open and staring at nothing.
Foam dried at the corner of her mouth.
