One Last Chance: Small Town Second Chance Romance

by Amelia Gates

  I didn’t move.

  The call came again, louder and closer this time. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could he? Of course, it was kind of my fault for getting all stupid over seeing him in the window. I could have just ignored him then, but I hadn’t, and now I was paying for it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. No, I decided as I straightened my spine. I wasn’t the stupid one, he was.

  How dare he come sneaking around here after dark like some kind of juvenile delinquent? I was a grown woman with a job, damn it. He couldn’t just swoop in here and mess with my head like this.

  At the third call, I stood up. A small, secret part of me was hoping that he would convince me that he hadn’t killed Hunter, cement in my beliefs what I was pretty sure I already knew. Maybe he could even pitch in a believable and forgivable reason why he hadn’t answered my letters. The rest of me was just looking for an excuse to hit him. Hard.

  Chapter 6

  He might as well have been a tree for as tall and still as he stood. My heart leapt at the sight of him standing there and I scowled. I wasn’t a fan of conflict, and this one was brutal. Kash didn’t say anything as I approached, but as the moon broke out from behind a cloud, his eyes lit up like a thousand fireflies, shining with a hunger I hadn’t seen in ages. I melted clear down to my toes and crossed my arms over my chest to keep them from wrapping around him.

  “God, I’ve missed you.”

  Before the last word was out of his mouth I was swinging at his face, my hands balled into fists so tight my nails cut through my palm. Luck, or perhaps pure instinct saved him in that moment as Kash caught my wrist before my hands had a chance of connecting.

  “Missed me?” I hissed, shaking like a chihuahua in winter. “You ignore my letters, you don’t write, you don’t call, but now you’re home and you—missed me? You can go straight to hell, Kash.”

  “Been there. It didn’t agree with me. You’re talking crazy, hold on one damn minute and listen, would you?”

  Hot tears spilled down my cheeks. I glared at him and wrenched my arm out of his iron grip. I ground my teeth against the onslaught of abuse I wanted to hurl at him and squeezed my arms tight around me.

  Screw him.

  Fuck him.

  Missed me? After all these years. After all this silence.

  “There. Thank you. Nice swing, by the way. You almost had me.” His cocky grin threatened to pierce through my rage, so I rolled my eyes away from it. Not that that got me any further away from him. Seemingly believing that he wasn’t close enough, Kash took a step closer. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was still shaking so hard I was afraid I’d fall over.

  “Listen, Daisy. I couldn’t have ignored your letters because I never got a single letter from you.”

  I scoffed. “Right, okay. Lost in the mail, that’s a great excuse. All of them? You really expect me to believe that out of the hundreds and hundreds of letters I sent you, none of them managed to reach you?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “You’re a damn liar.”

  “That’s a dumb thing to lie about.”

  “I never said you were smart.” I jerked my chin up against the flash of guilt which followed the hasty words. He didn’t react. I wished he would. I wanted him to scream at me, to give me a reason to unleash all the poison that had built up in my heart over the years. It was putrid, sickening, and so very heavy.

  He ran a hand through his hair and chuckled softly. “I mean, that’s fair. Not the sharpest bulb in the box.”

  “Tool in the shed.”

  “Whatever in the wherever. You’ve always been smarter than me, Daisy. But that don’t mean you can’t be wrong sometimes. First three years I wrote you a letter every day. After that—well, a man can only take so much rejection, you know? But I kept writing. Every week, every month, whenever my thoughts got too big and I needed you to filter them for me—you were always good at that.”

  I dropped my head so he wouldn’t see my face. “I thought about that. I figured you would have had some pretty big thoughts and feelings after everything.”

  “Sure did. Only reason it took me so long to get free was because I didn’t have you around to talk sense into me. I’m sorry, Daisy.”

  I curled tighter around the ball in my chest. “Don’t say that. Don’t you dare say that. Sorry isn’t good enough, nothing’s good enough. God, Kash, why did you have to come back?”

  My words trailed into a wail and before I knew it his arms were around me. I sobbed into his chest, beating my fists against it, screaming words I can’t even remember. And Kash only held me, like the words I was throwing at him weren’t filled with insults. Like it wasn’t him I was cursing and hitting and fighting against. Holding me like he should have held me the moment we found out Hunter died.

  When I was all out of steam, he started talking. Sweet, quiet, gentle murmurs, like a brook at the end of a hot summer. “I’m so sorry, Daisy. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  “Nothing is okay.” I sniffed and scrubbed my face with my sleeve, then leaned away from him. “Nothing will ever be okay again.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “But that’s okay too.”

  I stared at him, then a broken laugh scratched its way out of my throat. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He shrugged. “I lost everything. Then I lost hope. Lost my mind for a while. Can’t come back from all that without changing.”

  I looked up at him, wondering if I even knew him anymore. “And what did you change?”

  “My attitude, believe it or not. See, for a while there, I didn’t think I could get out of that without you. Didn’t think I could make it through without you, either. I wasted a whole lot of time waiting for your big beautiful brain to show me something I wasn’t seeing, but you weren’t talking.” He shuffled around a little bit, the way he used to when he was proud of something and knew he shouldn’t be.

  “So I stopped waiting. I accepted my fate. I was going to be in there forever, alone, without you to help me, without Hunter to goad me into anything. I made alliances. Did the work I was given. Kept my head down.”

  “Sounds awful for you.”

  “Eh—it wasn’t ideal.” His mild tone hid a world of pain. I knew him too well. It made me wince.

  “So what then?”

  “Then I got bored. I started thinking. I started looking at my real options, got out of my feelings, and started thinking about you. Your silence specifically.”

  A burst of fury shot through me again and I opened my mouth indignantly. He held up a hand before I could say anything, which only made me angrier. Too angry to speak, which meant he won anyway. Damn it.

  “And I figured there were two options. Either you’d swallowed the story that I’d killed Hunter—”

  “I didn’t! I made every excuse for you, Kash. I argued for you. I got in fights over you. I told everybody who would listen that you didn’t do that, you would never do that. I told them that you’d send me a letter the second you could that would explain everything. I was so sure! I was cocky! And I made a goddamn fool of myself when you never wrote.”

  Relief flooded his eyes and his arrogant mouth softened.

  “I knew I could—”

  “But then! Then!” He couldn’t shut me up now. The dam had burst. “You never wrote. People started pitying me, Kash. Pity! They called me a poor, stupid girl, talked about how I was going to end up a crazy cat lady wearing a tinfoil hat and living in my parents’ dilapidated trailer forever, how I was living in denial—they told me I needed therapy! I almost didn’t get the job at the library because the hiring manager was convinced that I was only there to research laws and loopholes to get you out.”

  “But you did get it—”

  “And you want to know the worst part? He was right. My very first lunch break, I started reading every law book I could get my hands on, every forensic textbook, everything!” My throat tightened, but I refused to cry. My voice sounded hoarse and alien. “After a whil
e I had to face the facts. Even if you were innocent—which I still believed, somehow—you weren’t interested in telling me so. You were content to leave me in the dark.”

  “That wasn’t—”

  “I’m not finished! So I stopped looking up laws and codes and started in on psychology. Borderline personality disorder. Codependency. Trauma. Anything to explain why, in the face of all that evidence, I was still desperate for you to come home. Why, when you were locked behind bars for killing Hunter, I still couldn’t wrap my head around believing that you’d done it. Because, you know, only a crazy person would try to free the man who possibly killed her brother. Only a crazy person wouldn’t want to point fingers at anyone, at everyone, even if that someone was you.” I couldn’t fight the tears anymore and they ran down my face in a flood. I scrubbed them off, furious that they’d given me away. I turned my back to him. There was nothing left to say, and I still had some pride left.

  Long moments passed and he didn’t say anything. I could feel him behind me, a ball of contained energy that I couldn’t read. Damn it, I shouldn’t have to try to read him at all. He was the one on trial here, not me. Literally.

  “I love you too,” he said softly.

  I whirled on him. “What?”

  He shrugged and took half a step toward me. “You don’t need a psychologist to tell you why you kept waiting, Daisy. Or hoping. It’s the same reason I did. You love me. I love you, too.”

  “Oh, screw off,” I hissed. Sniffles obscured the intended vitriol.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  I sniffed again. “What, Kash?”

  He bobs his head from side to side, as though weighing the words. “How did your dad react?”

  I think my brain must have short-circuited for a minute. I stared at him wide-eyed. “To what?”

  “My arrest.”

  I frowned. “Same way he reacts to everything. He drank. Told us he knew all along that you were bad news. Drank some more. Almost lost his job until his boss made him go on FMLA. Got real protective.”

  “How protective?”

  I shifted my weight, frustrated at the conversation. “Super protective! Wouldn’t let me or mom leave the house for months. Literally wouldn’t even let me take out the trash or walk to—” Oh, no. The realization struck me like iced lightening to my gut. “—the mailbox.”

  Kash nodded slowly, his face a blank mask. He waited patiently.

  “Oh, no. No, Kash, he wouldn’t have done that. He, he encouraged me to write to you. Said it would help me deal with my feelings if I went off on you. I—I cried when I didn’t hear from you and he comforted me. In his way. Told me you weren’t shit to begin with and I didn’t need to be crying over you.”

  Still Kash said nothing. I’d forgotten how patient he could be when I was thinking something through out loud. He’d always been like that. He used to get straight As in algebra and I always struggled with it. He’d tutored me by asking me questions and letting me argue with him until I figured it out. I used to hate that he wouldn’t just give me the solution, but now I was beginning to see the merit. If he’d just told me what he suspected I would have rejected it outright.

  “Why would he do that?” I asked. “Why would he tell me to write to you and then not send the letters?”

  “Why do you think he did?” Kash asked.

  I shook my head. “There is no answer. And I’m not gonna accept that he did it to protect me, Kash. Because having me think you didn’t write back…that wasn’t protecting me. That was downright torture. You’re wrong, Kash. You’re wrong.”

  “Okay.”

  I looked at him sharply. His tone and expression hadn’t changed at all, which meant he wasn’t actually accepting that as an answer.

  “Why are you letting me win?”

  Kash sighed. “Because he’s your Dad. You know him better than I do. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You never admit to being wrong.”

  “A lot can change in six years. I’ve been wrong before. I was wrong about you.”

  My spine stiffened defensively. “What were you wrong about?”

  He clenched and unclenched his fists and took a deep breath. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

  It knocked the air out of me. The urge to reassure him and beg forgiveness rushed up inside me, pressing against my tongue. All that psychology I’d read whizzed through my head in an instant, shoring me up against the feelings. He was manipulating me. That was all. All I had to do was not let it work.

  “Well I wasn’t,” I said. “I’m—I’m not.” It was half a lie and it came out rocky. “And you can’t make me feel bad about that. I have every right to be pissed off at the person who killed my brother.”

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Yes, you damn well do. You should be pissed at that person. You should be violently furious at that person. If you know who did it, you should beat them to death and spit on their grave for taking your twin away.”

  I was shaking again. “Why are you saying that?”

  “Because it’s true. And no, I don’t have a death wish, Daisy. I have a mystery to solve and a debt to settle. When I find the person who did it, I can’t promise I’ll save you a piece of the action. He was your brother, but he was the closest thing I ever had to family.”

  Kash’s eyes burned with an intensity I’d never seen. If he wasn’t telling the truth then he’d taken some damn good acting classes in prison. But anger had been my comfort and constant companion for far too long. I couldn’t let it go. I pulled it close to me and let it fill me all the way up.

  “Why should I believe a word you’re saying?”

  A deep hurt shattered the mask he’d built over his features, striking me in my heart. That old, stale anger held its own against it. He’d have to work a lot harder than that.

  “Because I’ve never lied to you.” He said it so matter-of-factly it almost shook my foundation.

  “How would I know if you did?”

  He lifted his hands and let them drop again. “Because you know me.”

  I shook my head. “I knew you. I don’t know you anymore, though. It’s like you said. A lot can change in six years. You sure have. So have I. You don’t know me at all, Kash. And I certainly don’t know you. So try again. Why should I believe you?”

  He looked away from me. Resolve spread over his profile, a thick, dead sort of resolve.

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Daisy,” he said blankly. “But I am going to ask you for a favor. Just one, and then I’ll leave you alone forever if that’s what you really want.”

  I scoffed and shook my head. “You are unbelievable. What favor?”

  He looked back at me, eyes burning. “I want to say goodbye to Hunter.”

  Chapter 7

  That familiar loneliness threatened to swallow me whole, even with Daisy walking beside me. I used to believe that my life was ours - hers, mine, and Hunter’s. Now that she’d made it clear I’d be facing the future alone, every breath I inhaled smelled like a prison cell and my legs were heavy with phantom shackles.

  I knew I could convince her if I tried, but I didn’t want to try. It kind of defeated the purpose, didn’t it? Relationships like ours were supposed to be ride or die. If the same story was told about her, I wouldn’t have believed it for a second. I would have fought for her for decades, even if I didn’t have all the information. Even if she didn’t return my letters. Even if she didn’t call. Because I knew her heart. I thought she knew mine.

  She stopped outside the cemetery gates and gestured. “There. Say goodbye.”

  Rows and rows of dull white teeth rose up out of the ground, stretching out under the moonlight. The gate was locked, but the fence was short and easy to climb. Nostalgia washed over me, a soothing haze over my raw feelings.

  “Remember that one Halloween? I think I was sixteen, so you two must have been fifteen.”

  “Nope,” she said shortly. “Get your goodby
es over with.”

  Shut down. Fine. “Which row is he in?”

  “You aren’t going in there! It’s late.”

  I laughed, but it came out bitter as it should have because, well…because it was bitter. “I’m a criminal, remember? Time means nothing to me. Which row?”

  “What are you going to do if I tell you?”

  God, she was dead set on seeing me as the villain, wasn’t she? I wanted to shake her until her walls fell and that part of her that always believed in me could hear me again. I sucked in a deep breath instead, then blew it out slowly.

  “I told you. I’m going to say goodbye to Hunter.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Uh-huh. Sure you aren’t going to trash his grave? A little revenge for getting caught?”

  I had to step away. She’d crossed the line from stupidly stubborn to senselessly cruel and my temper was already strained. I rolled the tension out of my shoulders and stretched, swallowing my worst impulses and dulling my sharpened tongue.

  When I turned back to her, she was leaning against the wall watching me. Just watching me. I met her eyes, and stared at her as intently as she stared at me. Was that fear on her face? Really? Of all the people in the world who had a reason to be afraid of me, she didn’t even make the list. I would kill for her and die for her. Hell, I’d cut off my own arm before I hurt her. And here she was, looking at me like I was a monster. That shit hurt. A deep, sharp, bloody kind of hurt.

  Daisy twisted the fear off her face with a bitchy pout. “Are you done?” she asked.

  “Haven’t even started yet. What row is he in? No, you know what, never mind. I’ll find it myself.” I didn’t wait for her to answer and didn’t bother looking at her face. It was getting harder and harder to stomach the things I saw there.

  Soft graveyard earth embraced the soles of my boots and greeted me with that fertile pungency. Life adores death. The stones nearest me were round and smooth, the names on their faces worn down to nearly nothing. Hunter had died a hundred years too late to be laid to rest in this quarter and so I knew that I needed to keep trudging onward. I ran my hand over one of the old names, wondering how many of these people had died by violence. How many of them were victims of some senseless crime. Whether a mysterious, unnamed, faceless man or a wife, a lover, sister, best friends. Dark things happen in small towns all the time. Secrets so grim not even whispers of their truths escape the chokehold they’re held in.