“What are you doing?” Sierra asks, standing at the mouth of the living room, staring.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” I reply sweetly, not bothering to look up. Fine, sweet may have been an exaggeration. Whatever. I’m a little short on sleep these days.

She stands there, waiting patiently until I can’t stand the sight of her bare feet anymore. I gaze up from the mess I’ve made on the carpet and latch on to dark eyes filled with worry.

“It looks like Shutterfly threw up in here.”

She may be right. My entire heritage is laid out before me.

Pictures are scattered everywhere, over every available surface. I took every tote stuffed with photo albums and loose prints I could find from my mother’s attic and brought them all home. Five plastic storage bins full of thousands upon thousands of memories. My parents’ wedding, Violet’s birth, my first birthday party, my fifth-grade graduation, Violet and me building a snowman outside the Breckenridge condo we stayed at for five days when I was eight. My parents couldn’t get me to come inside except to sleep. My cheeks were chapped for a week after we returned home.

“I’ve been meaning to organize them,” I tell her, going back to business. Once upon a time, my mother loved to snap candids and she didn’t believe in digital storage. She wanted something she could hold, touch. “A picture should live in your sight, not in the bowels of a piece of plastic,” she would say.

After Violet died, picture taking became less and less frequent, mostly at special events or holidays, so the majority of what’s in these boxes is from the first half of my life and that of my parents’ lives. Some are already organized. Most are not, living dark, dank lives tucked away in stuffy shoe boxes.

I glance at the picture in my hand and pause, stroking my daddy’s handsome, youthful face. Thick glasses made him seem much older than his seventeen years. But even then, he was stoic and handsome. You could tell he was destined for great things by the flicker in his eye and the determination in his smile.

Much like another man I know whose name I can’t even bear to think of right now without hyperventilating.

“This your dad?” Sierra asks, now standing over my shoulder.

“Watch it,” I say, tugging on the edge of a print she’s crinkling with her size-ten hoofs. She lifts her foot and sighs, then bends over and scoops several snapshots to the left, making enough room for her to squat down beside me.

“Hey,” I berate. “I had those in order.”

“In what order?”

“In chronological order. What other order is there?”

Her gaze floats around the room and she laughs. Quicker than I can react, she snatches the thick pile of photos from my hand and holds them away when I reach to get them back. Since Sierra’s arms are a good six inches longer than mine, I quickly decide my effort is fruitless and give up until she says her piece.

“I think you’re drowning yourself in crap that doesn’t matter to anyone, including you, so you don’t have to face whatever it is that’s had me fending off the posse for the last few days.”

I snort. Posse. The only one she’s fended off has been Reid. He’s shown up at the house every blessed day. Sometimes Sierra’s boorish behavior comes in handy. She makes a good guard dog.

“Why don’t you mind your own business,” I snap, gritting my teeth against the fact I’m so transparent.

“Come on now, you can do better than that, Low.”

She thinks she’s one-upped me but she hasn’t. I abandon the group of pictures she’s holding hostage in favor of another one next to me. I pick it up and start the same process I’ve been working on for hours.

Anything to keep the pain at bay.

Only she grabs the next set of snapshots from my hand, too. Bitch. I’m starting to get irked. Can’t a girl wallow in her pity party without interference?

I pick up another pile, sit up, and face her. “I can do this all day.”

“So can I,” she retorts, snatching that group, too. Lifting one eyebrow high, she smirks and waits for my next move.

“What do you want, Sierra?”

“What I want is for you to stop acting like a cunt and tell me what’s really going on.”

Damn. That was harsh, even for tactless Sierra.

“Now you’re just being a bitch,” I say.

In a huff, she tries tossing the three stacks she’s confiscated to the floor in front of her, but because they’re slick with gloss they start sliding everywhere and suddenly her lap is covered in hundreds of photos. And when a rather large daddy long legs darts out from between two pictures and starts crawling across her bare foot, she screams as if the apocalypse has descended. All four limbs start flailing and I duck to the side to avoid an unintentional right hook.

She’s squealing, jumping, thrashing around. Pictures are stuck to her feet and hands and backs of her thighs and those that aren’t are flying everywhere.

The situation is so ridiculous, so comedic I start to laugh. And I laugh and laugh and laugh until the tears finally come. And then I cry until Sierra is once again sitting beside me, holding me through my racking sobs.

“You’re starting to piss me off, you know that? You’re going to make me call him if you don’t start talking.”

“Don’t,” I wheeze. I forbid her from saying his name again seven nights ago. At least she’s respected that. “I’ll hate you forever if you do.”

“No, you won’t. You’re going to make me your fake baby’s godmother, remember?”

That only makes me cry harder. A tissue appears in front of my face and I snatch it up, wiping my dripping nose first. I free myself of her hold and scoot back a few inches so I can lean against the couch. Sierra follows, throwing her legs over the coffee table.

I’ve cried more since I met Shaw Mercer than I have in a lifetime. I wonder what that means?

“You need to talk about it sometime, Lowenbrau. Confession unburdens the soul,” says the hypocrite.

But I can’t. I won’t. I can’t think about him. I can’t talk about it. I can’t I can’t I can’t. I’m not strong enough to deal right now.

I pluck a picture Sierra missed from her calf and hold it out.

Johnny Hankins. My junior prom date. Out of all these pictures, that one had to be stuck to her.

“Oh my God, let me see that.” Sierra sneaks it from my fingers and studies it. “You had the most hideous dress. I told you not to wear something that basically looked like a cotton candy comforter.”

“Hey.” I rip it back. “It was fashionable.” It was hideous. I don’t know what I was thinking. I looked like something straight out of Beauty and the Beast, except in bright, neon pink. And not nearly as elegant.

Her face screws up. “It’s a bed warmer.”

“It was Violet’s favorite color,” I say softly. Mermaid hues were in that year. Blues, golds, greens. Pink dresses were hard to come by, and my junior prom happened to land on what would have been Violet’s twenty-second birthday. I wanted to do something for her, I guess. It was stupid.

Now Sierra’s mouth turns down and the mood in the room takes another nosedive. I tear up again. Sierra runs a finger under one eye, catching the first drop of water to leak. “Oh, Low…haven’t you learned after all this time that you don’t have to shoulder all your burdens alone? Doesn’t it wear you out?”

Yes. I’m so fucking exhausted every muscle feels atrophied.

“My father didn’t commit suicide,” I blurt. “He was trying to save Shaw’s sister Annabelle from committing suicide and he fell.”

“What?” Her brows scrunch. Her voice is pitched in disbelief. She’s as confused by this sucker punch as I was.

I tuck my knees under my chin and wrap my hands around my shins, staring at the mess I’ve created. It’s incomprehensible that fate is such a cruel, cruel bitch.

I had a decent life before Shaw came along. Hard sometimes. Lonely, perhaps. But I got by. I’d accepted where I was, who I was, flaws and all. I’d even accepted that a man or a family of my own probably wasn’t in the cards for me.

That is, until an infuriating, gorgeous, godlike man rammed his way into my world. Literally. Shaw has taken me over completely, and after only a few short months I already don’t know where I end and he begins. He’s so tangled in every thought, every action, every decision, I can’t fathom never hearing him groan my name as he drives inside me or waking in the middle of the night just to watch him sleep or mouthing back when he turns up his power to ten.

But how can I move past this? How can I accept it? All these years I’ve been living a lie and the grief that consumed me when my father first died rules me once again. I’m back to square one. How can I ever look at Shaw or Annabelle again without replaying what I lost? How can I forgive her, even if I believe it was an accident? How can I ever trust Shaw again after he kept this information hidden from me for God knows how long?

How?

God, I don’t know.

“How do you know this?”

I open my mouth to answer, ready to unburden my soul at last, when she yells, “Wait. We need alcohol for this. Lots and lots of alcohol.”

It’s two in the afternoon, but it’s five o’clock somewhere, right?

Not a minute later she’s back with two shot glasses and a full bottle of Patron. This could get ugly.

“You aren’t messing around.”

“I have a feeling Bud Light isn’t going to cut it, do you?”

My smile is thin, barely there. “Good point.” I’m not sure anything will help me through this. She pours us each a shot, which we down quickly. Then she immediately fills our glasses once more. I slide her a look but she simply raises it and holds it there until I clink and drink. I savor the warmth burning a path down my chest. It’s the first time I’ve felt warm in a week.

“So…” she prods.

I take a deep breath, “So…” and launch into what Shaw confessed to me a few nights ago. I realize as I’m rattling off details to Sierra that there are holes in the story because I didn’t stick around to listen to it anymore. Like, what had a sweet sixteen-year-old so distraught she wanted to take her own life? Did Shaw know she was in such a bad place? Did her family? Had she tried it before? Has she tried it since?

And what did my father say to her that night? Why didn’t he call the police? Why didn’t anyone else stop to help them? And why—fucking why—didn’t one of those girls come forward and put my momma and me out of our misery?

There’s also the obvious connection to Violet. If I thought it, so, too did my father, because there wasn’t a day that went by he didn’t wish he could have saved her. Just like me. I can only imagine what went through his mind when he pulled around that corner and saw a girl his dead daughter’s age perched on the ledge of that bridge.

Would it matter if I knew answers to the hundreds of questions bobbing around in my head? I think maybe it would, though I’m not ready to do what it takes to get them yet. Because that means talking to Annabelle, and I’m not sure I can stomach looking at her.

I’ve been trying to push away the distraught look on her face when I ran into her outside of the conference room, but the second I close my eyes at night she’s there.

Her eyes were haunted. She looked lost, destroyed. Completely shattered and I can’t understand why. This is not new news to her. She was there, for fuck’s sake. All this time…all this time she knew. She knew who I was. She knew what happened. She knew and she never said a fucking word, so she doesn’t get to be devastated. I do.

“That’s fucked.”

“Ya think?”

“Where does your ex fit into all this?”

“I don’t know exactly, but he knew. He knew and he never said anything either. How could he do that?” I feel so betrayed. So incredibly betrayed. By everyone.

“I don’t even know what to say.” Sierra’s speechless. That doesn’t happen often.

“I need another one.” I hold out my hand, too wrung out to lift the bottle that’s now close to a quarter gone.

Sierra obliges and we decide on a fourth, too. Pretty soon, my brain is fuzzy and my fingers start to tingle. It feels nice, numbing up. I slump down and lean my head back against the cushion, letting my gaze float upward. Sierra settles in beside me.

“What are you going to do?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I confess. “I love him so much, but I…I don’t know how to move past this, Ser.”

Sierra grabs my hand, holding tight and for once she has nothing biting or sarcastic to say. We sit in silence, as we’ve done so many times before when life took a giant crap on one of us.

I may not know what I’m going to do yet, but I do know a lot of other things.

I love Shaw Mercer to the dark depths of my being. I can’t breathe without him. I ache everywhere, and the thought of never seeing him again makes me physically ill. My skin even hurts. But how can love be enough to get us through this? I’m not sure it’s possible, though he apparently disagrees.

He’s not called me. He’s not showed up on my doorstep like Reid, but he’s also not respected my wishes to never contact me again either, and I haven’t come to grips with how I feel about that yet.

Every day I receive the same simple text. Just one: You’re worth fighting for.

And every day I delete it without responding like I did the day before. Exactly the way I did with Reid all those years ago.

Can I really let Shaw go the way I did Reid? Though the situations are totally different, my actions are exactly the same. Run, hide, suffer alone. It’s a technique I’ve practiced and I’ve mastered it well.

“Here.” Sierra shoves another full shot into my hand I take it without complaint. We spend the next few hours just like this, repeating the same process until the bottle is gone, the sun is down, and I can’t feel my limbs any longer.

Between shots and small talk, we manage to eat a little something and avoid any more depressing conversation before we pour our drunk asses into bed, knowing we’ll curse the harsh bite of the smooth-talking liquor in about six hours. Sierra snuggles in beside me without being asked and I’m secretly grateful even though I know she’s a cover whore.

I switch off the lamp, throwing us into darkness. I’m blessedly letting the alcohol drag me under when I hear it…

The soft ping of my phone.

I lay still, breathing fast, knowing it’s him. I don’t want to look but I won’t be able to fall asleep until I do either. My hand trembles as it hangs over the cell, which has now pinged a second time.

“Look at the damn thing, for Christ sake,” Sierra mumbles, turning away from me, already dragging the blankets with her.

“I’m just shutting it off,” I tell her, ignoring the uh-huh she mockingly voices under her breath.

Picking it up, I squint against the bright light in the darkened room, staring at the text message I know awaits me on the screen.

I stare at it for a while. I run my fingers over the words, feeling the smooth edge of each syllable. I hear his raspy voice whispering them in my ear as he moves over me. I let the resolution of them sink in a little more. With a long sigh, I power the device down, fully aware I didn’t perform that one last step in the ritual I’ve executed flawlessly for the past seven days.

I know at some point I’m going to have to face this, face them, talk about it, think about it, wrap my head around this new reality. Shaw is bullheaded and persuasive. It’s why he’s been so successful, how he got me into bed. It’s why I love him so much. I don’t believe he’ll give up on me anytime soon, if ever. He won’t just leave me behind like Reid did. He won’t let me leave him behind. This I already know.

So here’s the decision I’m going to have to make: Is Shaw worth fighting for? Are we worth fighting for? Am I willing to gut my way through this inconceivable hell to find out what we could be on the other side? That’s the real question because it doesn’t matter if Shaw wants us. It matters if I do.

And as I finally allow myself to drift into the void of nothingness I truly wish I had the answer to that question. But I don’t.

Not today I don’t.