Chapter Thirty-One
Alicia
Gray made me give him forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours in which he could literally uproot his and Laura’s life.
Forty-eight hours in which he could run again.
I hadn’t been through what he had. I hadn’t seen what he’d seen nor experienced the things that placed so much pain in two people’s lives for so long. I was outside of all this, a bystander who achingly wanted to help but didn’t have the audacity, the place in this to do so. Because of that, I had nothing. I couldn’t make the man fight for what was rightfully his, the right to a safe haven with his daughter.
The right to be free.
He wouldn’t take that right and I couldn’t make him have it, and therefore, he let me go. He had to. He knew I’d fight for him.
I’d do so always.
Many weeks went by after that. In fact, so many I lost count. I started to lose reality of what my life had become versus what it could have been. I was living in post-Grayden Davenport mode, a sickness that couldn’t be alleviated with any type of medicine in existence. I was addicted to him, him and his feeling and his love for a child in the beginning he never thought he wanted, but in the end, gave his entire life for. I was addicted to her, his little Laura. I was addicted to the laugh I’d fortunately gotten to hear when she found it within herself again and the life we both could have had to influence each other. I may have been the adult and could teach her things like piano and life lessons, but she taught me so many things too. I learned I had a patience within myself and purpose that went beyond the walls of the office building and conference rooms I found myself in my day to day.
I eventually went back to that life, that world that felt so hollow now in comparison to what I’d literally lived for the better part of a year in a town called Mayfield. It’d been a world of simplicity, purpose I hadn’t easily untied myself from upon Grayden’s absence. His mobile home had gone vacant within hours and my heart just as emptied. I was bitter for a long time after he left, how he could cut ties and leave things so open between us, but as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months since I’d seen him and his Laura I stopped letting it be about him and me. It became about him, a man who was desperately trying to do the right thing when it came to himself and his young child, and in the end, I found myself hard-pressed to hold anger towards him anymore. In fact, when it all came down to it, the only one I had anger toward was one person.
Myself.
The papers had showed up at my office well after the holidays and into the start of spring, the ones I’d been avoiding since I decided to pack up and leave Mayfield. I actually sat with the developers who wanted to build on my aunt’s land with my dad, him looking over everything beside me. I trusted myself and my decisions not a year ago, but now, I’d been resorted to help when asked. I relied upon my attorney father in ways that had me ashamed in regards to handling my business in Mayfield. He took the reins and found me what he considered a perfect monetary deal, absence of any other thought outside of that. Once the meetings concluded, the papers were sent over—to me now.
I signed them.
The action was almost like a symbol of the past, where I was going versus where I’d been. There was nothing there in that town for me now that had changed my life for well past a summer. When I went initially, I believed I’d be there for no more than a week and came back with a lifetime of experiences and lessons I’d take well into the rest of my life. I was sorting through it all and believed it’d literally take me the rest of my life to do so…
But then her letter showed up in the mail.