Warrick didn't want fear to be Asha's inheritance. He wanted her to live, not just survive. And there's a difference. A life lived in dread of its ending isn't really lived at all. And survival isn't the same as living.
I can't help but feel like, in his own misguided way, that's what he was trying to accomplish with his secrets. Days that weren't overshadowed by diagnoses and statistics. He gave her the peace of not knowing. The freedom to believe that life was something comingfromher—her choices, her dreams, her own two hands building something—and not something happening to her, some predetermined script she had no say in writing.
I think about our child. The one Asha is carrying right now, wherever she is. If they have the gene, and, years from now, they start showing symptoms, would I want them to have known all along? To have spent their childhood, their teenage years, their twenties under that shadow? Or would I want them to have what Asha had, at least for a while?
Knickers suddenly stops and blows a sharp burst of air through his nose. The sound snaps me out of my thoughts, and Iscan the trees for an animal. My spine straightens, and every one of my senses goes on alert when I spot a shadowy figure, about fifty feet ahead, moving through the clearing. I click my tongue to signal Knickers to keep walking, my eyes keenly tuned on the figure.
The closer we get to the edge of the trees, the faster my heart beats. I can't trust my eyes or this desperate thing in my chest that's been summoning her in every dark-haired woman I pass. But this shadow…it's definitely female, dressed in white, and hell if she doesn't move like her. I'd know that hourglass shape on that slender frame anywhere. I'm either seeing her, or I've finally lost my mind.
We move through the short span of woods, branches catching at my shoulders, dampening my already wet clothes more, and then we're in the clearing, and I see it. There's no more question of if. She's there—really there—standing with her back to me beside a patch of trees. Her white dress clings to her, soaked through and nearly transparent from the rain. I don't call her name as I approach. I'm too scared to say it out loud, too worried that speaking might break this spell, because that has to be what this is. There's no way I took a ride to clear my head, wound up lost, and stumbled upon my missing wife.
With each step closer, I grow more confident she hears me, Knickers’ breathing, the creak of the saddle, the pound of his hooves against the sodden grass, but still, she doesn't move. She just stands there in that rain-soaked dress like a ghost I've conjured from grief.
I'm still several feet away when I swing down from Knickers, my hands fumbling through the motion of tying him to the nearest tree. I move toward her slowly, afraid that if I rush, she'll vanish. Afraid she's not real at all.
It's not until I'm right beside her, close enough to see the delicate olive veins beneath her skin, the rise and fall of her chest, that I finally speak.
"Asha." Her name comes out like a whisper as I send up a silent prayer that this moment isn't just my mind. That the edges of my vision won't start to fade, signaling the cruel end of a dream.
She blinks, and water droplets fall from her lashes. She's real.
Slowly, so slowly that I feel every second of it, she turns to me. And God, her face. Sadness doesn't even begin to cover what I see there. It's devastation. The kind that lives in your bones and changes who you are.
"I'm sorry." Her words crack down the middle, and then tears come, sliding down her cheeks to mix with the rain.
"Don't be sorry." The words tumble out as I close the distance between us, pulling her into my arms for the first time in seven days, four hours, and a lifetime of minutes I counted in the dark. I don't let go. I can't. I won't.
Her body fits against mine exactly the way I remember, and the relief of it nearly breaks me. But she's trembling. The tremors that travel through her and into me are violent and uncontrollable, like everything is crashing down in this moment. The weight of the secret, the week we spent apart, the news of our baby. All of it is colliding into these seconds, and she's not strong enough to hold it anymore. I feel her heartbeat against my chest, too hard as her sobs come in gasps she can't contain. My hand finds the back of her head, and my fingers tangle in her wet hair before I press my lips to her temple and breathe her in, holding her through it, because there’s no other way.
I pull back just enough to shrug off the lightweight coat I'd grabbed on my way out the door. My hands are shaking as I drape it over her shoulders. She's soaked through and freezing.
And that's when my eyes drift past her. That's when I see it, and my blood runs cold.
Fresh dirt. Dark and wet and piled beside a headstone I can't quite read from this angle. The earth looks freshly turned, as if someone had been digging…like she'd been digging.
Fear claws its way up my throat, sharp and choking.
"I'm so sorry," she mumbles against my chest, the words vibrating through my ribs.
My blood turns to ice. "Asha." I pull back, gripping her shoulders, needing to see her face. "What did you do?"
Her eyes, the same ones that have haunted me for a week, are red-rimmed and lost.
"Why are you here? Why are we standing beside a grave? Asha, tell me." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. "Tell me why I'm standing beside a grave. And not just any grave, one with freshly dug dirt."
It's been one week. Seven days she's been gone. I never found the truck when I drove through town. She didn't stay with friends. She could have easily driven to Illinois in that time. Could have walked into some clinic where nobody knew her name. Where they wouldn't ask questions. Where she could make it all go away and come back here to bury the truth beside her mother.
The thought finishes itself in my mind, and I can't breathe. Can't think. Can't do anything but feel the ground dropping out from under me.
She shakes her head, and the tears come faster and harder.
"No." The word rips out of me, raw and broken, as I drop to my knees beside the grave. My vision blurs as I look at the ground and shove my hands into the dirt. "Tell me this isn't our baby." My voice shatters into pieces.
"Tell me you didn't—" I can't even say it, can't force the words through my lips because they hurt too fucking much. "Tell me you didn't get rid of our baby."
"What?" The word falls from her mouth like she's been struck. She drops beside me, her knees hitting the wet earth, and her hands circle my arm.
She trembles as rain mists between us, her eyes wide with the same fear that grips me. But she doesn't retreat. "Why would you think that?"
