CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Teresa
A knife twists in my gut as I stare down at the money on the floor.
I can’t move.
At least until a sob wells up, the force of it tipping me backwards onto my ass.
What have I done? What have I done?
Shit. Oh God. Deep down, I didn’t expect him to react this way. Which I realize is ridiculous. Utterly stupid. But I honestly believed when I told him Silas had my brother, he would snap out of it and understand I had no choice. I did have a choice, though, didn’t I? Will was right. He has given me every reason to confide in him, despite his father’s increased threats and my trust issues with men. Will proved himself. His reward was my betrayal.
Every single part of me hurts. My face is blazing hot and covered in tears, but lifting my hand to wipe them away seems like more of an effort than I’m worth.
No. Screw that. That’s not right.
I’m worth more than the pile of money mocking me on the ground. If I’ve learned anything during my time with Will, it’s that. Or my self-worth was always there, but I needed a little push to recognize it. I need to concentrate on that newfound confidence now. I can collapse later. I can mourn the man I’ve lost with my bad decisions and fears, but not right now. Not when my brother is still in danger and my only hope of saving him just stomped on my heart and walked out the door.
I try to stand up, but my muscles shake and I drop down again onto my butt. Tears streak down my cheeks, carrying loss and nerves over the task ahead…but looking at the money piled on the floor, I’m…humiliated. Yeah. Wasn’t that the point? He wanted to hurt me and he has. He has. He turned what we did together into something ugly to get me back. Whether it was done with malice or purely out of damaged male pride, it hit the mark. Hard.
Taking a deep breath, I replay that image of him tossing down the money and I hold on to it. Tight. I disregard the conflict in his eyes and remember only the curled lip, the cold way he turned his back. The fire it lights inside me is what I need to get off the floor. Slowly. In degrees. My legs don’t want to work, but I force them to support me as I walk to the bedroom. Momentum and adrenaline kick in within seconds and I’m packing like a mad woman, shoving things into my suitcase, ripping my cell phone charger out of the wall and donning the first available pair of pants. In the process, I step on one of Southpaw’s chew toys and very nearly falter, but I keep going. And going.
Until I’m out the door.
*
Will
Ending up in the vet’s office so soon is not the plan. Southpaw has more time. We were going to live every day like it was his last, until it actually was. His last. We aren’t supposed to be in a quiet, beige room, waiting for another man in a white coat to tell me he’s got a limited amount of time. I don’t need to hear the words again. Don’t need them to rip me wide open when I’m already walking around like I’m half dead.
Southpaw is sitting on the floor between my legs, his head resting in my lap. He senses I’m fucked up and it shouldn’t be that way. I should be able to get my head together and get through this appointment for him—after all, I’m the one who lost his medicine…while pulling him and Teresa out of the rapid.
An arrow of doubt attempts to break through my defenses, but I harden myself further, letting it bounce off. Teresa was lying to me the entire time we were together. Nothing is going to change that. Not even the selfless act of jumping into the river.
Right before she almost drowned saving my dog, she’d turned down my offer to fly her back to New York. Why? Had she actually felt guilty?
No. She was just that good. I’d walked away from that conversation twice as determined to make her let me in, which was probably her intention. Little did I know I was nothing more than a means to an end from the moment we met.
A memory of her face as I emptied my wallet on the floor makes my skin feel like it’s covered in ice. I shove the heel of my hand into my right eye, trying to get rid of that final, devastated image of her, but it won’t budge. Goddammit.
Sometimes you throw a solution a dartboard when you’re trying to do the right thing for someone you love. I’ve done that for my brother, thinking I was acting out of love. I thought love meant the randomness didn’t matter. Turns out, it matters a lot.
More of that earlier doubt starts to pop up, but I swipe it away, like pawns off a chessboard. Teresa’s sore spot might be her brother, but I’m not going to accept that bullshit excuse. She came into my life under false pretenses and maneuvered me to her liking. It might have seemed real—more real than anything in my life—but it wasn’t.
I can’t forget that.
To my left, the door opens and in walks the vet. I can barely manage an acknowledgment, the goddamn memory of Teresa on her knees is biting into my brain with razor-sharp teeth. “His meds,” I force out. There’s a sense of urgency closing around my throat with every passing second, but I have no idea why. I have no reason to be anywhere. Still… “I just need the meds so we can go.”
“I need to speak with you, Mr. Caruso. About those meds.” The vet looks somewhat incredulous as he studies the file in his hands. “Southpaw doesn’t need them.”
The gut intuition that Teresa has no doubt already bailed hits me—hard—but the vet’s words knock me even further off balance. “What do you mean he doesn’t need them?”
“Before we could prescribe medication, we needed to contact your vet in New York to get Southpaw’s records. It was highly unusual of your vet to diagnose Southpaw without having the test results back from the lab, but I have to agree with him, Southpaw’s condition seemed clear. I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have drawn the same conclusions.”
Time slows to a halt. “What are you saying? Is he…”
“Originally, the lump on Southpaw’s front right paw was diagnosed as a malignant melanoma. Because of the placement, Southpaw likely spent some time agitating the area by scratching at it or using his teeth to bite the affected area, leading to pretty visible infection. I’m guessing that’s what led to the misdiagnosis. The medicine he’s been taking relieved him of the infection, thankfully, so he’s left with nothing more than a benign melanoma.” I can hear his smile stretching wide, the air is so quiet around me. “Southpaw needs surgery. There’ll be some recovery time. Lots of rest and a dip in his appetite. But the good news is he’s not…” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Dying. Your vet in New York has been leaving messages at your office for the last couple weeks. He was relieved to know you’d finally be getting the news.”
Knots upon knots untie inside me with such a swiftness, the unexpected relief would have knocked me on my ass if I wasn’t already sitting. The reprieve of darkness is so fast I’m immediately suspicious. “But he’s been sluggish, on and off. I—”
“That’s not unusual. The area is likely tender or sore, especially with all the running around he’s been doing. A few weeks after surgery, he’ll be good as new.”
“Holy shit,” I choke out, pulling my dog up onto my lap. He comes happily, wagging and panting, letting out a bark when I wrap my arms around his neck. Every time I’ve held him over the last month, I’ve wondered if it was the last time. Not having to speculate on that anymore is like being pumped full of helium. “Holy shit, buddy.”
I’ve fallen through a trap door and I’m floating, no gravity to pull me down. My dog isn’t dying. He’s going to be fine. My dog isn’t dying. But I hit bottom hard when I look around, needing to tell Teresa the news…and she’s not there. She’s gone.
*
I’ve just been handed a miracle. That’s the only reason I’m holding on to the possibility that Teresa will be inside the hotel room when we burst inside. She and I? We’re not finished having this argument—not by a damn sight. I have more to say. She was supposed to scream back at me this morning, not fall onto her knees like a stringless puppet, dammit. That’s the only reason I drove here at one hundred miles an hour.
To go another round.
But I know the moment I open the door that she’s gone. The money is still scattered on the floor. The plane reservation I printed out earlier remains untouched on the entry table. There’s no life inside, just a shell of a place that she had the nerve to make feel like home. When that last iota of optimism dries up, panic stomps all over the barrier I’ve erected.
If her brother is in New York, that’s where she’s headed.
Will, please. Please don’t call him. If he knows I told you, he could hurt my brother. Promise me.
My stomach rises up in rebellion. She failed to do the job my father gave her. She’s returning to New York without me. Empty handed. That puts her in danger—and I sent her right into it. Alone.
“Teresa!”
I shout her name, as if it’ll conjure her up. I tried calling her cell on the way here even though I suspected it was useless. Now, I storm through the rooms, stopping in hers when I find the drawers open, her things long gone. The floor seems to rise up around me, sweat forming on my forehead.
No. No, no, no. I just need the morning back. Give me the morning back.
Southpaw jumps up on Teresa’s bed and sniffs it, glancing over at me. As if to say, what did you do, asshole? On the bedside table, there are a couple balled-up tissues. To dry her tears? A sound climbs my throat at the evidence, but I’m distracted when I see a shiny black object peeking out from beneath them. I pounce like a beggar who spies a twenty on the sidewalk, snatching it up.
Her GoPro. She left it.
I start to shove the device into my pocket, but something stops me. Instead, I turn it on and hit play, holding my breath when I see…white, bubbling water on the screen. And Southpaw. It’s the rapid. In the confusion of that day, I forgot Teresa had strapped the camera to his collar to capture what he does on his own in the woods.
“Okay,” says Teresa’s voice, through the camera. “Okay, buddy. It’s fine. Just hang on.”
Instead, she caught them fighting to stay above water in the river.
“Oh, this is bad. This is really, really bad.” Teresa’s voice fills the room, full of terror and—incredibly—humor at the same time. Her words are almost inaudible because of the water rushing in the background, so I turn up the volume and press it to my ear. “You have to stay, like, as long as you can. For him, okay? Because I can’t. He’s not going to want me. Come on. Come on. Where’s the fucking shore?” The humor is beginning to slide from her voice and it’s like I’m reliving the horrific moment I saw her being carried away by the current. “I could love him. Maybe I already do. I could love you, too, even though your giant ass is the reason I’m going to die.”
I’m being flayed wide open where I stand. Hemorrhaging blood all over the carpet. She could love me? Maybe she already does?
Everything comes crashing in at once. Snippets of the last few days. Southpaw protecting Teresa in the hallway of that fleabag motel. Her vulnerability the first time I kissed her, like she wasn’t expecting to feel that fucking free fall. The same one I felt. The exhilaration on her face when she won that arm-wrestling contest. And threw herself into my arms…
Not fake. Was any of the good stuff fake?
I swallow a fist-sized lump, but another one forms in its place. One thing definitely isn’t phony. The danger she’s in. The danger she would have avoided if we’d gone back to New York together. We didn’t, though. She went. She’s gone and I’m still fucking here. While the full magnitude of what she could be walking into cuts me in half, an echo of her past fear plays in the room, like a premonition.
“Will,” she whimpers through the camera. “This is bad.”
“Dammit, Teresa.” I drop the camera and punch a hole through the wall. “Goddammit.”
Today’s nightmarish roller coaster isn’t over, though. When I get to the airport, I’m informed my flight has been pushed back because of bad weather in New York. No amount of bribing or threatening can help me. I’m left with no choice but to climb the walls praying Teresa’s flight is also grounded, somewhere in the airport. But after searching the place top to bottom—and considering the two-hour jump she got on me—that hope fades way too fast.
In the place of that hope, rage springs up like a demon from hell.
So help me God, if she has a single scratch by the time I reach her, nobody will be safe. Nobody.