“Kolt,” Ruthie says with a softness to her tone, like she’s soothing an injured animal.
But I can’t see it anymore, I can’t handle it.
I don’t know why I expected her not to have moved on. Where I’ve thought of her every day since I left her, she’s forgotten about me.
It’s what I wanted so why the fuck does it hurt so fucking much.
“Kolt?” That’s Everett’s voice behind me. He steps up next to me and glances at the picture before he looks to my face, reading the expression.
“It isn’t what you think,” he says. “Go find her.”
The day is drawing to evening, the light dimming enough that the lights shine bright inside the small bungalow ahead of me.
I can see her moving around, her long blonde hair tied in a lose ponytail that sits at the nape of her neck. She’s smiling.
Fuck she’s so pretty.
She disappears from my view for a moment only to come back holding a small child with a mop of dark hair.
My breath gets lodged in my throat seeing her with a child.
I need to be closer. I need to see her in front of me, nothing between us and before I can process the thought, I’m moving through the gate and up the path, my knuckles rapping gently on the wood of the door.
“Just a minute!” She calls and then she’s at the door.
“Kolt!” She gasps, pulling the door further closed as if to stop me from seeing inside. She doesn’t realize I already know.
“Hello, trouble,” I rasp, eyes moving over every inch of her face, moving over the freckles and the dimples, staring at her amber eyes and blonde hair.
“Why are you here?” Her voice has a hint of edge, a coldness to it that was never there before.
“I’m back.” I explain.
Silence hangs between us as she stares at my face, brows knotted and causing a tiny crease between them. Behind her, a baby starts to cry.
“For how long this time?” She moves to close the door. “I’ve got to go.”
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
And then she closes the door, the sound of the lock clicking into place echoing through my head.
My eyes close as a breath works out of me, and I turn to leave. I didn’t know how to fix something that was never really mine. I took from her, and I left. I deleted myself out of her life so what did I expect? For her to just drop it all for me?
There’s another man in her life, a baby but I didn’t see a ring.
It makes me unreasonably angry that she’s not even engaged to whoever got her pregnant. Does he not realize what he has? What she has given him?
I turn to leave, as much as I’d stay all night if I could, I won’t do it to her. She doesn’t want me here, if on this island at all.
My brothers are waiting for me when I arrive back at the house though they say nothing. I should spend time with them, but isolation is all I’ve known for the past few years. I sit on the back porch in the dark, watching the night sky turn from clear and starry, to cloudy before a few flakes of snow begin to fall.
There is one thought occupying my mind as the flakes turn heavier and the wind grows colder. One thought on a loop. Over and over.
It should have been me. She should have been mine.
Chapter Twenty-three
