If You Were Mine

“I’m fine.”

He sat down on the couch and grabbed the remote, flipping on the TV. The sound of another car race immediately started up. Bile rose in her throat at the sight of the cars racing in circles around the track.

She wanted to scream at him, wanted to throw something at his big, thick head. Her feet unstuck from the kitchen floor and she yanked the controls off the coffee table to jam her thumb over the red Off button.

“I can’t watch that right now.” The TV screen went back to black. “How can you? Don’t you remember you almost died out there today?”

Before he could answer, Cuddles walked over with one of Zach’s leather shoes. The puppy plopped down in front of him and started chewing it, her big brown eyes trained on him as if she were waiting for a command to do otherwise.

“Aren’t you going to stop her?”

Zach barely glanced down at the puppy. “No. Summer will figure out how to get her to stop making mistakes.”

“She’s a puppy. She’s going to make mistakes.” But wasn’t the truth that some mistakes were so big that they couldn’t be undone? Like trusting someone to actually love you right. “She trusts you, Zach. Gabe and Megan and Summer are just strangers to her. You’re her family.”

And hers, too, or so she’d thought. Finally, she’d had the family she’d never thought could be hers. A future filled with laughter. And love. So much love it had made her head spin.

Now, though, it was spinning for reasons that had nothing to do with love.

Please, she thought, the word running around and around in her head just the way it had hours earlier. Only this time she wasn’t begging God, she was silently pleading with a flesh-and-blood man. Please don’t do this.

His face was like granite. “She’ll be fine.”

Every one of Heather’s instincts told her to run. To flee. To get out and protect whatever was left of her heart while she still could. But something was obviously wrong.

Very wrong.

Zach hadn’t cracked a smile, hadn’t given her one of those smug looks she always wanted to kiss right off his face.

And, she realized with a dark hit of pain in the pit of her stomach, he hadn’t so much as touched her since they’d left the track.

He was always touching her.

She forced herself to move toward him, rather than away. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Something that happened out there on the track.”

“I’m alive,” was his offhand reply. “Everything’s great.”

His eyes were so cold, so shuttered. All she’d wanted was to have him back, but not like this.

Not when he suddenly seemed to be a shell of the man she’d thought he was.

The pain in her stomach grew bigger, but the need to have the real Zach Sullivan back—her Zach—was bigger. Big enough that she kept moving closer.

“I can’t imagine how it must have felt to be in that car, trying to get out while it burned. But you walked away from it.”

Whenever she’d gotten stuck in darkness, he’d always fought for her. He’d made her laugh, he’d held her when she cried, he’d taught her how to trust again, and to believe in love when she’d thought it wasn’t possible.

Now she needed to fight for him.

“Talk to me, Zach. Tell me what’s going on.” The word please was on her tongue when the doorbell rang.

She could barely stand to watch as Zach shoved all of the puppy’s things into a grocery bag, picked up Cuddles, and pushed both the bag and the puppy into his brother’s arms.

The little Yorkie whimpered as she looked from Gabe to Zach.

“You sure about this?” Gabe asked his brother.

“I agreed to keep her for two weeks. Time’s up.”

Gabe’s eyes moved from his brother to Heather. She could see worry in them, and disappointment.

The same disappointment that was choking her until she could hardly breathe around it.

“Summer told me you needed a dog because she thought you were lonely. She was so happy that you were going to keep her. She thought you wanted the puppy.”

Heather waited for Zach to soften at the mention of the little girl...or for him to at least acknowledge the way Cuddles was struggling to get from his brother’s arms into Zach’s.

“I don’t need a dog.”

He didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t need to for Heather to hear what he was really saying.

I don’t need anyone else.

She wanted to be anywhere but there, with Gabe’s eyes taking in her devastation. But she was glad she’d stayed, glad she’d actually witnessed Zach doing what he was doing, because it was the only way she could ever have made her heart face the truth.

She didn’t realize Atlas had gotten up from his nap on his dog bed and moved to her side until she felt his big head nudge her hand. She put her hands on his neck and shoulders, letting his steady warmth give her the strength she so desperately needed.

Hadn’t she known the other shoe would drop at some point? That it had to because it always did?

But, oh, how she’d wanted to believe that it wouldn’t.

Just as badly as she’d wanted to believe in Zach.

He closed the door on his brother, walked back into the room, picked up the shoe Cuddles had been chewing on, and dropped it into the garbage can with a thud.

All the while the puppy’s cries could be heard as his brother put her in the car.