I don't know if I'm talking to the baby or to myself. Doesn't matter. Neither of us believes it.
I glance to my left. TheAfrom my necklace is on the tile where it fell when Hudson ripped it from my neck. The chain is broken, but the little gold letter caught on a groove in the floor instead of sliding under the cabinet.
I pick it up. Hold it between my fingers. Press it against my lips.
"Daddy's coming to save us," I tell our baby.
And I sit. Minutes pass. Maybe hours. The world continues outside these walls, and I stand still. Frozen in this kitchen with a dead man under a blanket and a baby in my tummy and the wreckage of every choice I've ever made scattered on the floor around me.
All of it stems back to one decision. The night I looked at the boy I loved more than breathing and told him I didn't love him enough.
I was scared. Scared that he loved me too much. That he'd throw away his career, his family, his future to follow me to LA. I couldn't let him do that. So I became the villain. I said the words I knew would hurt enough to make him stop chasing me.
And it worked. He stayed. He rode. He became a champion.
And I became this. A woman on a kitchen floor in a city she hates, married to a man she killed, hiding a pregnancy from the only man she's ever loved.
My decision when I was twenty will always be the worst thing I've ever done.
But sitting here, with theApressed between my fingers and Ace's voice still echoing in my head, I know one thing.
I'm done making those mistakes.
No more running. No more letting people hold power over me. No more sacrificing myself on the altar of someone else's plan.
I'm going to build a future for this baby. On a ranch in Arizona, under a sky full of stars, with the man who rides bullsand fights in bars and has never once stopped loving me, even when I gave him every reason to.
If he'll still have me after he sees what I've done.
If he doesn't hate me when he walks through that door.
I hold the little goldAagainst my chest and close my eyes.
And I wait in silence until time doesn’t feel like it’s passing anymore.
The front door bursts open.
"Harper!"
His voice fills the house. It fills every corner of my chest that's been hollow for weeks.
"In here," I try to say, but it comes out as nothing. It doesn't matter. He finds me anyway. He always finds me.
He rounds the corner into the kitchen and stops. He doesn't look at Hudson's body.
He looks at me.
And whatever he sees, it breaks something in him. I see it happen. The jaw that was clenched goes slack. The shoulders that were braced drop.
The man who kicked down the door, ready for war, dissolves into the boy who used to hold me on his porch and promise me the stars.
I never wanted the stars; I just wanted him. I always will.
He doesn't say a word.
He crosses the kitchen, drops to his knees in front of me, and pulls me into his arms.
I shatter.
