It’s as if my day just keeps getting better and better. I nailed my interviews and now I come home to find Emerson’s car in front of my house and music floating out of the windows.
Grady’s cryptic text earlier of “I let her in” makes perfect sense now.
Tonight seems like it’s going to be even better than today.
What did I do to deserve this?
“Emerson?” I call when I open the door, but I see her before the word cuts through the room.
When she hears my voice, her body stiffens where she’s sitting on the floor behind the coffee table. Her head rises slowly and the look in her eyes—a mixture of devastation and anger—is enough to have the hairs on the back of my neck bristling.
“Em?”
“So, what? I don’t tell you what you want to know, so you figure, fuck my privacy. Fuck my need to quiet my own mind and deal with my own shit as I see fit . . . and take it upon yourself to figure it out on your own?” Her voice escalates in pitch with each word and warns me to proceed with caution.
“What are you talking about?”
“I trusted you!” she screams at the top of her lungs, and it isn’t the sound of her desperation that kills me. It’s the depth of grief in her eyes.
“I don’t . . .” I step into my own house and begin undoing the knot of my tie. I’m fucking suffocating all of a sudden and have no clue why all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. “I don’t understand.”
“Exactly. You didn’t understand,” she says as I round the couch and see it at the same time she speaks. “You didn’t understand, so you dug up my old case file so you could.”
Oh. Shit.
The green file folder—her file folder—is sitting squarely in the center of her lap, causing dread to drop through me like a lead weight.
“You had to call it up from wherever the fuck it was so you could pour over every goddamn detail there was about me. About what he did to me. Anything you could find so you could satisfy that hero complex of yours and come to the rescue with your cape and save me.” She stands and slams the folder down on the table with a smacking noise that sounds just like I feel. “Well, fuck you, Grant Malone. Fuck. You. If you think he violated me, what the hell do you think you just did to me?”
For the first time in my life, I’m at a complete loss for words, and yet, I know I need to find them.
“It was a mistake—”
“So were you.” Her voice is as cold as steel.
“It isn’t what you think.” I backpedal, trying to explain. “The file. It was a mistake. I had a list of files to pull to work on for Ramos. I was thinking about you. I doodled your name down—”
“And then what? Then you got the file and kept it? I’ve seen you move boxes in and out of here after a few days . . . but you kept mine. Why, Grant? Face it, you couldn’t handle me not telling you what you wanted to know.” She paces like a caged animal begging for either an escape or an attack. I guard the door, willing to take whatever she throws at me as long as it means I can explain what happened.
“At first, yes.” My confession is barely audible.
“I hate you.” The tears burning so bright and pain so raw in her voice it shatters every part of me.
“No, Em. No. It wasn’t like that. I wanted to know. And then I realized that—”
“You don’t get it, do you?” she shrieks, hysteria bubbling over in her erratic movements and flailing arms. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know every little detail. I don’t want to hate the dark again like I used to. I don’t want to lie in bed at night and listen for every damn noise because I think he’s walking down the hall to ‘love me’ again. I don’t want to remember the feeling of the hair on his legs scraping against my bare bottom when he sat me on his lap.” She covers her hands over her ears and emits the most horrid sound I’ve ever heard. It’s part sob, part yell, part protest, and if I never hear it again, I’ll be good with that. It renders me helpless. “I was fine until you, Grant. I had the memories I had and those were enough nightmares for a lifetime. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? My lack of answers wasn’t enough?”
“Em—”
“Don’t you get it? I don’t want to remember what happened after the feel of his hair scraping against my skin. It was obviously so bad that my own mind has shut the memories out—repressed the fuck out of them to protect me . . . and yet, you know. I don’t even know, but you know.” A heart-wrenching sob breaks free from her chest.
I fumble for words, for a way to get her to see that I never opened the folder, but the truth she just told me is more staggering than that.
It was so much more than her remembering the damn rocks the other day.
She doesn’t remember anything. At all.
How could I have been so stupid not to pick up on that?
“No, Emmy. No—”
“Don’t you dare call me that! Just don’t.” She takes a step back as I take a step toward her. “Please don’t.” Tears continue to streak down her cheeks, and her mascara paints their paths. She’s a broken woman, and I’ve done this to her. “Knowledge isn’t power in this case. You can’t use it to your advantage to save me from what already happened.”
“Will you fucking listen to me? I did not look at it.”
“I don’t fucking believe you!”
“Christ.” I blow a breath out and run a hand through my hair to stop myself from reaching out to touch her like every part of me wants to. “Will you quit being so goddamn stubborn and hear me? I did not—”
“How can I ever let you look at me again without thinking about how you know things about me that I don’t even know? How can I ever be with you when you cared more about feeding your own need to be the hero than how it would make me feel?”
Her words cut into the room and ram like daggers into my heart.
“I trusted you, Grant. You pinky promised,” she says, her words quietly followed by a hiccupped sob. “And you broke it. Again.” With that, Emerson rushes past me out the door.
“Em. Wait.” I jog down the path after her.
“I hate you. I never want to see you again.”
It’s those words—the ones repeated twenty years apart that hit their mark. I don’t have the heart to stop her from going . . . because she’s right.
Shell-shocked, I watch her get in her car and drive away without looking at me. I stare down the empty street long after the glow of her taillights have faded and the crickets have settled into their space in the night.
At some point, I walk into the house, turn off the oven, and blow out the candle as if I’m on autopilot. My eyes burn. My stomach churns. The pressure in my chest makes it hard to breathe.
Because she is right.
I wrote her name down. It may have been a doodle, but her name was there on the top of the list.
I held on to the file when I knew I shouldn’t. My initial intentions might have been pure behind it—find out what exactly she experienced so I could . . . so I could be the goddamn hero.
Fuck.
I’m such a damn asshole.
I didn’t want to screw this up and look what I just did.
Trust is hard for her.
And I just went and fucked that up.
I clench my fist and beg for something to hit.
The problem is, the only thing worthy of being punched is myself.