I never wanted to hear her cry like that ever again.
Ever.
I knew today was hard on her, but I didn’t think it resonated with me until the sound of her gut-wrenching sobs echoed through the laundry room, reaching into her bedroom, and effectively bottomed out my guts.
I was so horrified; I wanted to hold her instantly. The urge to rush to her was immediate. But the sound, it was so painful, so hollow I sank onto the end of her bed for long moments, just letting it beat me up until I was bleeding inside.
When I realized she’d left the hospital, my first thought was to find her and make sure she was okay. I knew she was tired. Her haggard appearance made that perfectly clear.
I didn’t know, though.
I didn’t understand until I heard that cry.
Regret was the sharpest sword because I hadn’t left the hospital right away. I’d waited until Maggie was there. Until the doctor had seen Sadie and she seemed to be resting comfortably.
I should have come sooner. Am had been in this house alone, thinking I was going to abandon her. Probably thinking everyone was.
I wouldn’t do that.
Ever.
I was lying here staring at the ceiling, my mind so wound up I genuinely thought it might never shut off. I could barely wrap my head around any of this. I didn’t know what to do. What the right thing was. No one could tell me either because this was a rare situation. I was afraid I’d screw everything the fuck up. That mistakes I might make would damage two women who were already damaged beyond repair.
Beside me, Amnesia shifted slightly, whimpering softly in her sleep.
“I got you,” I whispered, tugging her even closer.
Her arm, which was already draped over my waist, hugged tighter. Her cheek settled firmly against my chest.
Her hair was still damp from the shower, a shower I would never forget. That had been some hot, fucking epic sex.
If I did say so myself.
The chemistry between us was undeniable. The way I felt about her was seriously unmatched.
That was an answer all in itself. My love for her outweighed everything else. Therefore, my main priority was defined.
What about Sadie? a part of me whispered. My stare returned to the ceiling. God, this was fucking complicated.
A low, tentative knock disrupted the quiet. Lifting my head, I glanced over to the closed bedroom door. Another subtle knock.
“Yeah?” I whisper-yelled, cradling Am’s head in my arm and covering her ear with my palm.
“It’s Maggie,” she replied.
Carefully, I slid out from beneath Amnesia and the blankets and quickly pulled on a pair of gray sweats I always kept here—you know, in case I decided to shower fully clothed.
I didn’t bother with a shirt. It was late and Maggie knew I was in bed with Am. She wasn’t dumb.
Before opening the door, I glanced back at my girl. She looked small in the bed, her body still turned to where I’d been lying. Sometimes I ached just looking at her.
The door was soundless when I pulled it open partway and stepped into the opening. “Is everything okay?” I murmured.
Maggie was standing there looking as tired as the rest of us. Her hair was disheveled, and she wore a pair of dark pants with a long sweater overtop.
“I wouldn’t say everything was okay,” she replied, “but it’s as good as can be expected.”
“You just came from the hospital?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
She nodded. “How’s Amnesia? This has to have shaken her.”
I looked back at her before answering. “Yeah.” I sighed. “It’s been a lot. She’s finally sleeping.”
Maggie wrung her hands, shifting from foot to foot. “What’s wrong, Maggie?” I felt my gaze sharpen. “Did something happen at the hospital? Is Sadie okay?”
“Nothing like that.” She assured me. “But…” Her eyes went to the crack in the door as if she were trying to see Amnesia.
“But?” I cajoled.
“She’s asking for you. She’s been agitated since you left.”
Damn. “I thought they gave her something?”
“Yes, but some things not even sedatives can cover up. She’s been asking for her parents. She doesn’t understand why they aren’t there.”
My eyes closed. “No one told her?”
“To be honest…” Maggie began. “I thought it would be better coming from you.”
I sighed.
“I know it’s a lot to ask.” Maggie fretted. “And if you can’t, I completely understand. She’s just calmer around you, something that became evident when you left. You were always the closest person to her beside her parents. Even more than me. I’ll tell her, but maybe if you’re just there…”
“I’ll do it.” I agreed. “I’ll tell her.”
“Are you sure?” Maggie said.
I nodded. “How was she when you left?”
“She made me promise to call you, ask you to come back.”
The muscles in my neck were tight. I rubbed at them with my hand while I debated on what to do. “Am needs me,” I whispered.
“I know,” Maggie said. “Maybe just call the hospital and talk to Sadie. Tell her you’ll be there in the morning. Maybe just hearing that from you will help.”
God. It wasn’t enough. Not really. When I brought Amnesia in, I sat in the waiting room the entire night and half the next day. I had to force myself to just go take a piss. If she’d been awake, if she’d been asking for me, I would have fought everyone there just to get back into her room.
And now Sadie—the actual Sadie—was here, and I wasn’t there.
“I’ll call right now.” I promised. “Why don’t you go get some rest? It’s been a long day.”
“I’ll go back to the hospital tomorrow.” I heard the worry in her voice. “Oh, I wish Ann was here.”
My chest tightened. “So do I.” On impulse, I left the doorway and hugged Maggie. She embraced me for a few seconds before sniffling and pulling back.
“I’ll see you in the morning. Help yourself to coffee or anything in the kitchen, okay?”
“Thanks.” I nodded, softly closing the door.
I took maybe two steps before Amnesia’s voice stopped me.
“You should go.”
My body froze, head rotating toward where she lay. She was still bundled beneath the covers, but her body was turned toward me and the door, her eyes wide open.
“What?” I asked dumbly.
“Go to the hospital, be with Sadie.”
“I’ll go in the morning. First thing.”
“I know you want to be there, and knowing she’s asking for you is probably killing you. You waited a long time to find her, Eddie. Just go.”
I couldn’t tell how she felt about it. Her voice was even and the room was dark. But she sounded sure.
“I want to be here with you,” I admitted, feeling oddly ashamed. Sadie needed me.
Her pale arm appeared from beneath the blankets, stretching out toward me.
I took her hand. The mattress dipped when I sat on the edge. “I know.”
A low rumble vibrated through the room. I glanced toward the windows. A flash of light cracked through the dark. “It’s going to storm,” I murmured.
Sadie hates the rain.
“Go.”
I leaned down and kissed her, soft and not too quick. When I lifted my head, she cupped my jaw. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I went, but the entire drive, I wondered if I’d done the right thing. In the parking lot, fat raindrops began to fall—slow at first, but by the time I made it to the entrance, rain was hammering the pavement with an angry force and the sky had turned up the volume with sound effects.
On Sadie’s floor, the night nurses saw me coming. I thought they might argue with me like they used to with Am, but this time was different.
“She’s been asking for you,” they told me.
I didn’t stop or even comment; I just went on past and pushed into her room without knocking.
Sadie was curled up on her side, arms wrapped around her knees while she rocked back and forth.
Whenever I looked at her, it was like a shovel to the midsection. For a second, it was hard to breathe. She was the same, but she was also different.
A loud boom of thunder rumbled overhead, and she made a small sound.
The side of my lip curled up. “Still scared of the rain, huh?”
She jolted, surprised to see me there, but recognition was fast and her look turned to relief. “You drove here in this?”
“Heard you were asking for me,” I said, pacing across the room and dropping on the end of her bed.
“I missed you,” she said. “I’ve missed you for so long.”
Another shovel to the stomach. This one left me feeling slightly dizzy. She reached her hand out to me, and I gave mine.
“I missed you, too,” I told her.
“I think about that night a lot.” She confided, leaning a little closer as she spoke. “The night I fell into the water.”
“What happened to you that night, Sadie?” The words burst right out. I knew it was too soon to ask, but my God, I’d waited so long. Scenario after scenario had played through my head over the years.
Her brow furrowed as though she were thinking about it, trying to remember every last detail. “The current was so strong. I remember trying to swim against it, my arms burning with the effort. The water was so dark. It was so hard to tell which way was the right way.”
“I searched for you. I screamed your name,” I told her. “I swear to God, Sadie, I tried so hard to find you.”
“I know you did,” she whispered, holding my hand a little tighter. “I heard you screaming. I tried to call out.”
“What happened?” I asked again, the pain from that night returning and making my chest hurt.
“I came up for air. My lungs burned so much. Just when I got a few breaths in, I was sucked back under. The next time I came up, your voice sounded so much farther away. I called out to you, but I was so weak I barely even heard myself.”
“Ah, Sadie,” I murmured, scooting a little closer across the mattress.
The room was lit with a bolt of lightning and thunder roared outside the window. Sadie jumped, her hand falling out of mine.
“It’s just a little rain.” I promised.
She didn’t seem very convinced.
“Cross my heart,” I said, making an X over my chest.
A smile I thought I’d never see again transformed her face. “Hope to die.”
I grinned, and together we said, “Stick a needle in your eye.”
She giggled, and I laughed.
The moment didn’t last long, though.
Her voice went low once more, matching the gloomy tone of the pounding storm. “I started to run out of energy. I was so cold, sluggish. I thought I was going to drown. Drown while I listened to the sounds of your desperate yells.”
I closed my eyes.
“Just as I started to slip beneath the surface, someone lifted me out of the water and dropped me into a boat.”
My head shot up. “What?”
“I thought it was you at first. That you’d found me.”
It wasn’t me. We both knew it wasn’t.
“It was him. I hadn’t been scared at first. I thought he was going to help me. After all, he saved me from drowning.”
I nodded, trying to encourage her.
“He said my life was his because he saved it. He told me right from the start I was his.”
“I’m so incredibly sorry, Sadie. So sorry I couldn’t find you that night.”
“I don’t blame you, Eddie,” she said. “This wasn’t your fault.”
“I never should have gone out on the lake that night.”
“You just wanted to complete the dare. The dare Robbie gave you.”
I glanced up. “You remember?”
“I remember everything,” she said, her voice kind of hollow.
The storm raged on, the rain pelting the windows. Sadie shivered, pulling in on herself.
“You okay?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “Will you hold me?”
Immediately, I went to her side and put both arms around her. She laid her head against my chest, clutching the front of my shirt.
We sat there a while, quiet, her in my arms. I stared at the wall, going over everything she went through that night.
If only…
“Eddie?” she asked, lifting her face.
“Hmm?” I replied, pulling back enough to look down. She had brown eyes like Amnesia, but hers were a deeper brown, wider, and something else… Older. Wiser.
Amnesia had a certain innocence in her stare. Noting the difference between the two women now, I wondered if it was because of the memory loss. I wondered if Am would look older if she recalled everything that befell her.
“Why aren’t my parents here?”
I stiffened. How did you tell someone, after everything they already suffered, that they would never again see the two people they loved most?
“Did they move away? Are they having to travel back?”
“No, sweetheart, they didn’t move away.”
“I don’t understand why they aren’t here. Maggie wouldn’t say.”
“Maggie didn’t want to hurt you,” I said.
“I want to know!” She pulled back, a freaked-out look clouding her eyes.
“Your parents aren’t coming,” I said gently. “They would if they could. They would have been the first ones through that door.”
“Why, Eddie?” Her voice broke. “Why?”
I swallowed, remembering how much her father hated me, how much he would hate I was here now.
“There, uh, was an accident,” I explained, trying to ease into it.
“What kind of accident?”
“A car accident,” I replied. “Your mom and dad, they, uh, they didn’t make it.”
Her eyes filled with tears. Her face screwed up as if she couldn’t understand what I was telling her. “A car accident,” she whispered. After a moment, her watery eyes connected with mine. “They died?”
I nodded, my own eyes stinging. “Yes, sweetheart. They did.”
A low wail filled the room, and she collapsed in my arms, crying into my chest. I held her because there was nothing else I could do. Nothing that could make any of this even slightly better.
She cried for a long time, occasionally whispering, “Mommy,” or, “Daddy.”
Eventually, she stopped crying, but her pain still filled the room. She clutched at my shirt, leaving her face buried against me. A short while later, she turned her head, pillowing her cheek on my chest. “When I was… gone, I thought about them every day. I wondered if they missed me. If they looked for me.”
“They missed you. And they never stopped looking,” I answered, hoping it gave her even a small amount of peace. “The entire town searched for you. Even the island. More than once.”
“I heard them.” She confided. “But I wasn’t able to call out. He wouldn’t let me. Eventually, they stopped searching.”
“Eventually,” I echoed. “But no one ever stopped hoping.”
She sat up. Her face was blotchy and her eyes were bloodshot. “Even you?”
“Especially me.” I tucked some of her hair behind her ear. “Your hair isn’t as blond as I remember. It’s more gold now.”
“He said it was my best feature.”
He was a filthy, sick pig that I would gut like a fish if I got the chance.
“How long ago did they die?” she asked.
“It’s been several years.”
“Before they… before the accident, they were okay?”
I decided not to tell her about her father’s drinking problem and the strain it put on her mother. I wanted her to remember them as the people they actually were, not the ones they became because of unfortunate circumstances.
“They missed you so much,” I told her, taking her hand. “But yeah, they were fine.”
“What about you?” she asked, staring up at me with wide brown eyes.
“I missed you, too.”
“You never got married?”
I was too busy waiting for you.
I found Amnesia instead.
“I was too busy helping Dad with the store.”
“But you’re with Lily now,” she said.
“She goes by Amnesia.”
“You thought she was me, didn’t you?”
I swallowed. “Um, yeah. At first.”
She nodded slowly, trying to work it out in her mind. “Well, now you know she isn’t.”
“Do you know who she is?” I had to ask.
“I told you. She’s Lily.”
“How do you know her? Where did she come from?”
“I’m tired,” she replied.
Of course she was. I was a damn insensitive moron for throwing out so many questions. Especially after I just told her about her parents.
“It’s okay. You’ve been through a lot. Get some sleep, and I’ll come back in the morning.”
“No,” she said, catching my wrist before I stood from the bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Stay with me, please.”
I half smiled. “Still scared of the rain?”
“He’s going to come for me,” she intoned. “He’s going to want me back. Just like he wants her back.”
“Her?” I said, alarmed. Did she mean Amnesia? Or the widow? Did she even know the widow? “Her who?”
“Please stay,” she whispered. “Just hold me.”
She pressed against me, and I gave in instantly, lying back against the sheets. Sadie slid as close as she could, laying her head on my chest. I felt awkward and wrong for being here with her like this.
“You make me feel safe,” she whispered, tucking her hand beneath her chin. “Safer than I’ve felt in a long, long time.”
My hand hovered above her for long minutes. Eventually, her words and my guilt won out, and I smoothed my hand over her hair. “It’s okay, Sadie. You’re safe.”
“Please don’t go,” she whispered.
“I won’t.” I promised.
She drifted off to sleep, but for me, rest was much harder to find. I lay there and wondered who he was and what kind of lengths this animal would go to in order to get back what he thought of as his.