You and our daughter were the best thing that ever happened to me. And I was the worst thing that ever happened to you both.
That’s the truth.
At least it’s part of it.
The rest is coming, Stephen.
God help me.
The rest is coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Popeye
I stared down at Christina’s journal, at the words that had just destroyed what little balance I’d managed to find since opening the damn thing.
The rest is coming.
The words sat there, quiet and threatening, written in Christina’s careful handwriting as if she hadn’t just reached out from the grave and wrapped her fingers around my throat. There was more. After everything I’d already read, after the men, the fear, the son she gave away, all the goddamn guilt she’d dumped on these pages—there was still more.
Something darker.
Something she hadn’t been ready to write.
Something she thought would make me hate her.
I closed the journal slowly and kept my palm pressed flat against the cover as if the secrets inside might crawl out if I let go. My coffee sat cold beside me, untouched. The bear claw Trudy had put in front of me had gone stale around the edges, but I couldn’t make myself eat. I couldn’t even make myself move.
I didn’t want to know.
That was the truth I didn’t want to admit, even to myself. I’d spent years wanting answers, needing them, cursing Christinafor running away and taking my daughter with her. Now I had them sitting in front of me, tied up in worn leather and black ribbon, and all I wanted to do was shove the journal into the nearest trash can and light a match.
Because the more of this shit I read, the less I fucking knew her.
The girl I remembered had been quiet. Kept her head down, let her sister do the talking, watched the room like she was counting exits. She’d fit against me at night like she was trying to disappear into my chest, her fingers running over my ink like she was reading braille. Like she thought if she touched me enough, she could figure out who the hell I was. Who the hell she was supposed to be with a man like me.
I’d thought I was her goddamn savior. Thought I was the answer to all her shit.
Christ, I was blind as a goddamn bat.
She’d been drowning the whole time, and I was too busy feeling like a hero to notice she was going under.
I looked toward the counter without meaning to. Trudy was helping a customer, placing cookies into a white box with quick, practiced hands. She glanced up at me once, and whatever she saw on my face made her movements slow. She didn’t come over immediately. That was one of the things I’d come to understand about her. Trudy didn’t rush in, trying to soothe a man’s feelings. She didn’t flutter or fuss. She watched and she waited. And that made her fucking impossible to ignore.
I dropped my eyes back to the journal.
You and our daughter were the best thing that ever happened to me. And I was the worst thing that ever happened to you both.
My jaw tightened. I hated that line. Hated every damn word of it. Hated that she believed it. Hated that part of me had believed it for too many years. I’d called her selfish in my headmore times than I could count. I’d blamed her for the years I’d missed with Grace, for every birthday and scraped knee and school dance I hadn’t been there to see. I’d blamed her because blaming her was easier than admitting I’d failed too.
But this journal didn’t read like a woman who had run because she stopped caring. It read like a woman who had spent the last years of her life bleeding out onto paper because she couldn’t carry the weight anymore. She wasn’t asking me to forgive her. That almost made it worse. She was asking me to understand just enough not to hate her.
And I didn’t know if I could give her that.
I didn’t know what the hell I could give anyone anymore.
The bell over the door jingled, and I flinched like someone had fired a gun. A couple walked in, laughing about something I didn’t hear, and Trudy greeted them with that smile I’d learned was mostly bullshit.
