My right cheek molded into the cushiony rubber of my yoga mat. Chris and Kyle lay at the end, their cold noses occasionally nudging my bare feet. Time was just something that ticked through my head in an echo. I’d been in a fetal position in the middle of my living room floor, staring out the sliding glass doors, since the early morning. Small flares of water fanned out with each drop of rain pelting the concrete portion of my patio, holding me captive in the empty abyss that had become my existence.

I’d become hollow.

I’d been wrong. I hadn’t survived worse.

This, losing Jaxxon, was worse than surviving a murder attempt.

At least once I’d physically healed, there’d been hope. Hope for a second chance at life.

There was no healing from this, and any hope I’d allowed myself to believe in had died with the close of a front door. This was not living.

My own doing.

You’re so afraid of getting hurt again you pushed Jaxxon away and in doing so, you took choice away from him. Without the entire picture, how could he make an informed decision about a potential future that included him too?

Dr. Rhodes’ words had been blaring through my head on rewind for the past week. Not because she was right, which she was, but because that had been one of the things Jaxxon had asked of me early on—not to make assumptions about how he felt or what he wanted.

And I’d done just that. If I could go back, I’d tell him. I’d trust him. But it was too late.

For all the physical strength I’d honed, trained for, bled for, and perfected to ensure my physical safety, I’d failed to emotionally evolve.

Over the past month, I had realized losing Rick hadn’t been the source of my pain. It had been his rejection, the emotional abuse. The continuous reinforcement that I wasn’t normal or whole. Rick never let me forget I was physically disfigured and couldn’t give birth—that the one attribute that made me a woman was dead.

After years of hearing this, I’d believed it.

Now Jaxxon’s last words to me made sense. The night he said them, I’d been too disoriented, too distracted, and I hadn’t realized he wasn’t talking about my nightmares. He was talking about the emotional effects from my marriage. My past coming back to me now was horrific, yes, but what he’d meant was I hadn’t gotten over the shame I’d developed or the fear of being rejected again due to Rick’s betrayal. If I didn’t trust him as a man, he couldn’t in turn trust me. It was all so clear now.

I had realized, lying catatonic on my floor, that I’d never loved Rick, because the devastation of having lost Jaxxon left me a shell of a person. When it came to the one man in my life I had genuinely wanted, I’d feared his rejection too much to take the risk of genuinely trusting him.

I’d been on auto-pilot for the past month—a rote machine, reading manuscripts, occasionally eating, training at my studio rather than my gym because I couldn’t bear the possibility of seeing him. I’d had messages from Terry, Martha, my parents, Annie, and even two from Jaxxon wanting to make sure I was okay. All left unaddressed.

My breathing hitched and I wiped a wet, sleeve-covered hand across my nose. Clothed in his navy blue hoodie and worn pajama pants, I was giving myself one more weekend to wallow in my cloud of self-pity over having made the biggest mistake of my life.

Metal grinding into a keyhole and the crack of my front door opening had Chris up and running across the living room. Kyle and I didn’t move.

The rustle of paper bags dropped to my counter in the kitchen with a thud, the crinkling paper on top of granite loud against the melodic raindrops holding me transfixed.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Annie’s voice grew louder until the warmth of her legs heated my back.

“How’d you get in?” I mumbled.

“Who else has the key to your house besides me and your mom? I told Vi I’d handle it. Answer your damn phone. You’ve got a lot of people worried.” Firm hands wedged under my head and Annie grunted as she sat down on the floor, dragging me to her by Jaxxon’s hoodie.

Moving my hair out of my face, she sighed and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Aren’t you gonna ask why I’m here?”

“Mom,” I sighed.

“Jaxxon,” she corrected.

A flood of heat rushed through me. I pushed up to turn toward Annie and the room spun before me from getting up so fast.

Jaxxon?

“What? How did he get—”

“House phone’s listed. Yeah, I got a message on my machine asking if I’d come check on you, because none of your gym buddies have heard from you in weeks and you didn’t respond to his damn texts, which is chicken shit, by the way.”

“Is that all he said?”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Is him calling me not enough? You bolt from the man’s house, don’t return his texts, and he swallows his pride enough to have me check on you. Are you fucking insane, Valentina? I mean, have you genuinely lost your damn mind this time?” She pulled my head back to her thigh. “Lay down before you fall the fuck over. You know, when you told me what happened, I figured you’d come to your senses and realize what you’d done. Beg for forgiveness. See the big picture.”

I rolled my head so I could see her face. “Annie, I do see the big picture—”

She held a hand up. “Hold up. I know you better than anyone else on this planet. I got the call from you when it went down. I put up with you dodging my calls and didn’t intrude, because I figured you had to come to some conclusions on your own, but this—” She swept a hand over my body. “—this says it’s time we had a come-to-Jesus talk, my friend.”

“It doesn’t matter what conclusions I’ve come to. He won’t forgive me.”

“Valentina! He doesn’t have all the facts.”

I swayed my head back and forth on her thigh. “Annie, we can’t evolve as a couple. I know what he was talking about now though. He meant Rick, not the attack. He doesn’t know about the attack, and he was right, but still, the nightmares come into play. Never being able to sleep here or have me sleep there. That will get old for him.”

“Okay . . . ” With a quick nod, she stared down at me. “Say it.”

I lifted my hands and slammed them down beside me. “Say what? What do you want me to say? That I fucked up? Yes, okay, yes.”

“This is me, V—not your mom, not your therapist, not Jaxxon. So, let’s get it out there. What are you really thinking?”

“I just told you! I screwed up!”

She shook her head. “Deeper than that.”

“I’m not worthy of him! Okay? He deserves better. You happy?”

“Far from it.” She narrowed her eyes and pulled me upright, holding my shoulders until I could focus. “When you need brutal fucking truth, you come to me. Since you’re stuck in self-pity mode, here I am to deliver. I’m going to ask you a question, and I want a God’s honest answer. Do you truly, in the deepest part of who you are, believe that Jaxxon will get sick of you?”

I wrapped his jacket tighter around me. “He deserves better.”

“Not what I asked. But since we’re on the subject of who deserves what, let me ask you this . . . Did you choose what happened to you when you were fourteen?”

The pressure behind my eyes built and I looked back out the screen door to the rain.

“Oh, no. You don’t get to check out on me.” Annie grabbed my thigh. “Did you?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Don’t you think twenty-five years of trying to figure out why it happened is enough time to realize you’ll never figure it out? The world can be fucked. That’s it. That’s life. The end. That motherfucker chose to take you, to hurt you. He was a goddamn predator! Rick chose to be emotionally abusive, disloyal, and to cheat on you—that’s a problem within him, a reflection on him, not you. Now you, bailing out on the best thing to happen to you since I’ve known you—that is on you, and if this was the right decision, you’d feel better, and we wouldn’t be on your floor staring at the goddamned rain.”

I thought I’d run out of tears, but they kept coming in a steady stream. I knew life wasn’t a fairytale. I knew it wasn’t my fault that the monster had taken me.

But Rick . . . While it had been his choice, I wasn’t without fault in our demise. I married him for all the wrong reasons and convinced myself it was love. And I’d lied to him. No, we weren’t right for each other, and he’d gotten tired of me.

“Rick,” I mumbled. “I gave him the power to hurt me. I tried to be what he wanted. I lost myself in that. No he wasn’t the right person, but I did lie to him about my past.”

Annie rolled her eyes and smashed her hands over my cheeks. “I never liked Rick. Not from day-fucking-one. He wasn’t good enough for you and deep down you knew it—it’s why you never trusted him with the truth. And besides that, he was cheating on you way before he saw the scars, and he’d felt them before, so fuck him. You got married to prove to yourself you’re normal, I get it. That narcissistic asshole made you feel inadequate. It’s over. Done. Do you think Jaxxon can’t handle you? All of you? Scars, infertility, nightmares, and all?”

My shoulders fell. After a month of reliving every moment spent with him, I’d realized I never doubted Jaxxon. I’d doubted me. “Annie, what I couldn’t bear, what I couldn’t handle, would be to tell him and see pity in his eyes. When he looks at me . . . he looks at me like I’m whole. You know what he said? Before he let me go, ‘I don’t quit.’ He’s protective of women, especially women he cares about. So even if he could handle my past, take the scars, tolerate the nightmares, if it did get old, he’d stay out of obligation. And what about his kids, Annie? What if I have an episode when his kids are there? No. He deserves better than to be bound by obligation and I deserve to be more than an obligation—I want to be loved.”

A small smile crossed my best friend’s face. “While you’re totally wrong on one hand, now we’re getting somewhere. This is the first time I’ve heard you say you deserve better than to settle for someone who doesn’t love you. Fucking finally!” Annie grabbed my shoulders and jerked me upright so we were face to face. “Here’s where you’re wrong about Jaxxon, and I can speak for him on this, because I’m a parent. Jaxxon didn’t strike me as the pity or the obligation type—he’s a good man, and he’s a father, V. He won’t risk his children getting attached to someone out of his obligation. While he loves you, they come first. If he’s with you, it’s because he sees something special. He’s gonna be selective about who he brings into their lives. You won’t meet them until he’s sure you two can make it. He’s straight up, and he won’t sugar coat shit.”

I smiled, because it was a perfect description of him. “He won’t.”

Annie grunted. “He deserves you at your best. Everything inside you. Everything you keep locked up tight, because you’re afraid to trust, afraid to hurt. He doesn’t expect you to conform to some ideal you think he has of you, he expects you to be you. You’re not a coward, Valentina, you aren’t, and what you’re doing is cowardly. Do you love him?”

“With everything that I am,” I admitted. “He touches something . . . deep inside me. He sees me, Annie.” I shook my head. “But—”

“Ugh!” She dropped her hands to my shoulders and shook me hard. “For fuck’s sake, Valentina, don’t you dare say someone younger. He is not Rick. He’s a fucking man. He has kids, babe. He doesn’t need that from you. He. Just. Wants. You.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.” Deep down, Jaxxon leaving me for someone younger wasn’t my fear. It seemed . . . beneath him.

I was afraid to trust someone with the truth. Someone I loved. Someone I respected. Someone I couldn’t bear to have feel sorry for me.

“He’ll never forgive me. He told me if I walked out the door, he was done.”

Annie lifted a hand and dropped it dramatically to the floor. “And yet he still called your best friend to come check on your depressed ass. Men who are truly ‘done’ don’t call the best friend. He asked for truth, so give it to him. Can you dig that deep, past the fear, Valentina? ”

I’d known while sitting in the car, staring at his closed door, I should have come clean, but I hadn’t been ready then. Was I ready now? Hell no. Not in the least. But he deserved the truth and he needed to hear it from me. Could I go to him and risk him not even wanting to hear the truth at this point? The anxious tightening in my chest said I had to. No matter the consequences, I had to try. Even though the ache in the pit of my stomach screamed for me to stay locked in my safe little world.

Reaching out a hand to grab my left wrist, Annie turned it over and smiled at me. “Your eighteenth birthday. I thought you were insane, having someone drill a needle into such a vicious-looking scar—the pain had to be unbearable. You didn’t shed one tear. Not one. Die and rise. Don’t you think it’s time to truly rise, V?” She shook her head at me and grabbed both my hands in hers. “Sometimes I look at you and you break my heart—you’re like an exposed nerve, caught between spaces of time, ready to explode any second. You’re not different with Jaxxon.”

I nodded, because again, she was right. I was whole with him. “I am. But what if I do this . . . What if I tell him everything and he doesn’t want me?”

Annie shrugged. “I highly doubt it, but if he proves me wrong, I’ll have a hole in the desert with his fucking name on it, even if I have to run his Redwood ass over with a tank to get him into it. But that’s not the case. He thinks you don’t trust him enough to try, and as close to perfect as Jaxxon is, he’s still a man. Keep that in mind. Rejection isn’t their strong suit.”

“But I didn’t reject him. I love him.”

Annie smirked and sat back, resting her weight on her hands. “Hon, the man had the most insightful, caring gift made for you. A gift that says he sees the fighter, the resilience, in you, and that he respects the hell out of you for it. And you run out of his house? How would you feel?”

I cringed at that reality check. “Point taken.” I sat for a second as all my misinterpretations and insecurities washed over me. I looked at Annie. “I can do this . . . ” I said the words, but wasn’t sure I believed them.

“Fuckin’ right you can. Now let’s feed you, because it looks like you haven’t eaten in a damn week, get you showered, and then you go do it.”