by Mae Nunn
He’d been a fool to believe he could treat a family as if it were a class called Fatherhood 101. Families didn’t come with a syllabus made of paper. They came with hearts that could be broken, emotions that could be damaged and bodies that could be scarred.
“I’ve come to apologize,” Sarah said softly.
“If anybody should apologize, it’s me,” he disagreed.
“That’s not true. Cullen, whatever your reasons were for doing what you were doing, they were your own and it was not for me to judge. I just wish you’d been up-front with me from the first.”
“Wait—”
She held up her hand to stop him. “Let me get through this, please.” Her voice broke.
He nodded, the thumping of his heart resounding in his ears.
“When I repeated what my daddy said to Mama, I was completely out of line. I don’t believe those words for a moment and he really doesn’t believe them, either, especially now that my mama’s worked his clock over for spreading fifty-year-old gossip.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“I was hurting. I was hurting and I wanted you to hurt, too. Maybe I was never truly close to your heart, but I knew your family was everything to you. So I lashed out at them and I’ve been ashamed of myself ever since. If one of my girls said something so ugly I’d ground her for a month.”
“Is there more?” He wanted to make sure she had her say, wanted to make sure they covered everything since he may never get another chance.
“Almost.” Sarah hesitated as if uncertain whether or not to go on. She squared her shoulders and continued. “ Joe learned his diagnosis months before he confided it to me. I understand he meant to spare me the grief for as long as he could, but deep inside it felt like a betrayal to me. As if he didn’t completely trust me with the weight of his fear. Mama says I shouldn’t let that color the way I view other men, but I can’t seem to help it. And what you’ve done sure didn’t improve the situation.” She bowed her head, swiped away a tear.
“Mama also says forgiveness is something you do for yourself, not for the other person. You had your reasons, just as Joe did. I forgave him long ago but I never told him so. I can’t have that on my conscience again so I want you to know I forgive you, Cullen. It’s a lot to ask, but can you forgive me in return?”
“You were forgiven the moment you walked out the door and I realized there was more truth to your accusation than you even realized.”
Auburn brows pulled together over puzzled eyes the color of a summer morning sky. Cullen slowly extended one arm and offered Sarah his hand, praying all the while that she’d take it and never let go.
Especially after he revealed the secrets he’d kept for too long.
* * *
SARAH PRESSED HER palm to Cullen’s and her pulse raced as if their very hearts had reconnected. She wanted desperately to wrap her arms around his waist and lay her cheek against his chest, draw strength from him on whatever level he was willing to offer it. She should be ashamed to love him so unconditionally, but wasn’t that what giving your heart was all about?
He tugged her to the sofa, sat and pulled her down beside him.
“I have to show you something. Until you see this, nothing I have to say will make sense.”
He released her hand. The loss of his touch was painful.
He reached for the collar of his shirt and unfastened the top button. Then the second button. Then the third. But there was nothing sensual about this undressing. His dark eyes were intense as he stared at her hard, telegraphing a fear she’d never seen in his face before this moment.
With all the buttons unfastened he pulled the front of his shirt open wide.
“Ta-da!” He voiced the classic fanfare as he revealed the Rangers shirt the girls had bought him underneath his flannel.
The chuckle they shared dulled the intensity of the moment, and they both took a breath.
“Is that what was so important?”
“No. But as long as I was doing show-and-tell I figured I’d better start with something positive. Something special.”
“You did well. Buying that shirt for you was entirely Meg’s idea. Hope helped her pick it out and Carrie used her savings to pay for it. They wanted a gift for their now-daddy.”
The glint of tears in his eyes made Sarah regret using the nickname, but there had to be complete honesty between them, even if they would only remain friends.
“Let’s see the rest,” she encouraged him.
Cullen stood, shrugged out of his shirt and then sat down beside her. He pushed the sleeves of his T-shirt up to his shoulders and stretched out his bare arms. Even in the dim light of the room she was able to appreciate his fine, strong athletic build for the first time.
He waited.
“What?” she asked.
“Look closer.”
She focused on his hands, tanned from hours outdoors with the girls. Her eyes roamed up to his wrists where the dusting of dark hair began. His forearms were defined from years of working out, the muscles that connected the two bones evident and strong.
Her gaze scanned upward to his biceps, triceps and deltoids, the chisel of his body obvious even without the tan on his forearms. There was clearly something there he wanted her to notice. She reached out her hand, placed it on his arm just above the elbow and smoothed it upward over his warm skin.
When she encountered the web of lines her hand stopped and so did her heart.
“What in the world?” Sarah muttered.
She stood, caught Cullen by the hand and pulled him out the patio door. In the morning sunshine there was no mistaking the healed but always present marks.
Scars.
From cutting.
She recognized the sight from evidence photos she’d seen at their law firm. They’d defended a man arrested for harm to a child and proven to the court that his son’s scars were not from abuse but from cutting. At work, she’d recoiled from the sickening, still-fresh images.
Sarah was unable to grasp a kid making such a bizarre cry for help, but had to accept that it was very real and could happen to any of her daughters if she was not vigilant about their mental health.
But Cullen...?
“How? When?” She could hardly get the words out, couldn’t stop staring at the secret Cullen had hidden. Was there more?
Cullen took her hand again and led her to the swing where they’d been sitting the moment he’d claimed to love her. They settled close on the wooden slats and she sat quietly as he spoke.
“Within weeks of losing my folks, I started to experience anxiety attacks. I didn’t understand what was happening at first, I just assumed I was nervous and jumpy from not getting enough sleep. I had horrible nightmares about the plane crash. I couldn’t shut my eyes without imagining what Mama and Daddy must have gone through in those last moments. So, I avoided my bed at night. I’d sit in Daddy’s favorite chair in front of the television or with a book, fighting sleep until I passed out. I would stay awake for so many hours that I’d get shaky and dizzy. When the world would spin from exhaustion, my only choice was to go to bed and sleep it off. But burying my head under the covers came with its own set of problems and I couldn’t keep it to myself or make my fears go away.”
Sarah watched Cullen’s freshly shaved face as he verbalized the painful memories, the creases around his eyes deepening as he squinted against the mental images.
“Where were your brothers when this was going on?”
“They were dealing with grief, too, but in different ways.”
She nodded, understanding. After Joe’s death she’d become keenly aware that each girl’s suffering was personal and individual. She’d kept a close eye on her daughters, especially Carrie. Self-injury seemed to be an expression of the Goth culture, one of the rea
sons Sarah let Carrie use hair color and makeup to demonstrate her individuality.
“How about Alma and Felix?”
“They moved in with us so we could stay in our home, but we were all teenagers by then so they gave us our space. On the surface we seemed to be handling our new normal, but each of us had to find a way to cope.”
“And you found this way?” She placed her hand on his arm, touching the marks on his exposed skin as if she was touching the hidden scars on his heart.
“I could sense when an attack was coming on. I learned the signs—my pulse would race for no reason, my palms would sweat, my attention span would evaporate so that I couldn’t concentrate on my studies or baseball practice. It was a chain reaction that had to be broken before it got out of control. One day at school the symptoms hit and it felt like my skin was crawling. I dug my nails in deep and the pain helped ease the panic.”
He crossed his arms and gripped his biceps tightly to show what he meant.
“I focused on the pain and the jitters, and the pounding of my heart got better. I thought I’d beaten the attack, but when I got home that afternoon everything started again. I was desperate for relief.”
Cullen dropped his chin and closed his eyes. Sarah watched and waited as he collected himself. He sucked in strength and opened his eyes but kept them fixed on his hands.
“I was the only one at the house and I considered getting into the expensive bottle of Scotch that Daddy kept for special occasions. But the seal had never been broken on the bottle, and even though he was gone, it still seemed like stealing. I couldn’t do it. I went to their bathroom and poked around in Daddy’s side of the medicine cabinet, wondering if he kept any narcotics that would help.”
Cullen clenched and unclenched his fists, seemed to struggle for breath. Sarah reached for his hand, entwined her fingers with his and held on tightly, willing into him the little bit of peace she’d been able to hold on to over the past thirty-six hours.
“Fishing through the nasal spray and hair tonic, I came across his old double-edged safety razor, the kind that opened when you twisted the handle. Next to it was a little packet of blades. I unfolded the paper cover and ran my finger across the edge, pressing just hard enough to break the skin and release a drop of blood.”
He raised his eyes to hers, pleading forgiveness without words. Sarah desperately wanted to stop him from sharing more, to tell him it was okay, to tell him it didn’t matter. But that wasn’t true. What Cullen had been through mattered almost more than anything in his life. His struggle deserved to be told and, in his way, he was sharing his deepest heart with her.
“Go ahead.” She encouraged him to continue.
“You can look at my arms and figure out the rest. That day I found a distraction, a fascination that was more real than all the strange symptoms I was experiencing. But I was aware from the very first cut that it was wrong and it could only be temporary, something I had to hide from my brothers.”
“But they figured it out?”
He laughed to himself as if finding humor in the question.
“I never thought so but it seems they deserved more credit than I gave them. Hunt knew all along and eventually said something to Alma. The jig was up one day when she sat me down and explained she’d made an appointment for me with a therapist. I’ve learned a great deal since then about posttraumatic stress disorder. Dr. Sue not only saved my hide, she saved my life.”
He rotated his arm and exposed a wide scar on the soft inside of his bicep.
“Another incident like that and I might have bled to death. It probably should have had stitches but I was too ashamed to show anybody. I bandaged it myself with butterfly closures from our first aid kit and prayed it would heal.”
“How long did this go on, Cullen?”
“A couple of years. Even with therapy I’d still cut occasionally. It took a while for me to be able to recognize and avoid my stressors. Plus, they’re right when they say that time heals all wounds. I was finally able to stop cutting when I started college and began to focus my mind on new studies. Going from one degree to another became my coping mechanism. I’ve learned to keep my mind so crowded with historical facts that there’s no room for fear. It’s what worked for me, but it may be something completely different for another PTSD survivor.”
Post traumatic stress disorder.
“Is that why you’ve decided to study psychology now?” Sarah approached the subject that had to be discussed before she could begin to find healing for this new break in her heart.
Cullen shook his head, adamant.
“You totally misunderstood the deal with the book and my notes the other night.”
“Why didn’t you say so right there and then?”
“I was caught off guard. And frankly, I was embarrassed to look like such an idiot. And second, because I knew that before you could understand why I needed to approach you and the girls that way, that I’d have to explain this.” He held out his arm, once again calling her attention to the crisscross of thin, white lines. “I wasn’t prepared to expose my secret and risk losing you all.”
“So you weren’t studying us? You weren’t experimenting with different situations and grading the outcome?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s all true. Sarah, I’ve forgotten what a family feels like. I don’t know anything about little girls, and girls who’ve lost their daddy at that. In my defense I learn from reading, making notes, exploring. How else could I find a way to fit in permanently with a ready-made family?”
“Permanently? So we’re not just a short-term project for you?”
Cullen shifted in the swing to place a gentle hand on either side of Sarah’s jaw, drawing her face to his.
“Darlin’, listen to me.” His voice was husky and thick with emotion, his eyes brimming with tears, just like the ones that shimmered on her own lashes. “I love you. I love your girls. I want to build a life with the four of you. I want us to be a family.”
“But you gave us such poor grades,” she whispered.
“Those grades weren’t for you. They were for me. I know my progress report seems grim right now, but I’m willing to bring the scores up, stay after class, do extra credit, anything it takes.”
They shared a smile at the silly metaphor, but then he sobered again and pulled her face closer.
“I don’t want to be a now-daddy. I want to be a forever-daddy—if you and the girls will give me the chance.”
Sarah’s heart beat erratically as she slid her hands up to grasp Cullen’s wrists. She turned her eyes to first one of his arms and then the other, pausing to kiss the scars he’d inflicted on himself, then suffered through alone. And as she touched her lips to the faded marks, Sarah vowed silently that he’d never be alone again.
She wrapped her hands around his neck, twined her fingers behind his head and pulled his mouth to hers as their kisses, tears, hearts and lives melted together.
In an instant, the difficult years of the past were overcome and they became a forever-family.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CULLEN OPENED THE door of the jewelry store and let all his girls step through first, just as Alma had reminded him to do when they’d conspired over the shopping trip weeks earlier. Sarah’s fortieth birthday was a special occasion and deserved a gift she would treasure forever.
“Good afternoon,” the woman behind the counter greeted them. “May I help you folks?”
“We’re going to look around for a bit,” Cullen replied. “These young ladies want to buy their mother a gift.”
“Certainly. Just wave if you want me to show you something.”
“Go ahead, girls.” He swept his palm outward, indicating they were free to roam. “Help your mama find something pretty from me, too. There’s no rush. I’m gonna check out a new wristwatc
h for myself.”
The jeweler behind the counter nodded at Cullen to note their arrival and then disappeared into the workshop where custom designs were created by hand.
“Let’s see some bracelets,” Carrie insisted as she pulled her mother in the direction of the sparkling glass cases.
“Yeah, maybe the kind that has charms,” Hope suggested, unable to keep their secret any longer.
“Shush!” Meg gave her baby sister a stern warning.
Sarah bent forward to peer through the countertop as the girls pointed out first one style of sterling link chain and then another.
“Are you ladies shopping for anything in particular?” the woman behind the counter asked.
“A bracelet for Mama,” Carrie explained.
“It’s her fortieth birthday,” Hope announced.
“You’re not supposed to tell people she’s so old,” Meg admonished her sister.
The saleswoman’s brows shot up and she grinned. “Out of the mouths of babes.”
“You got that right.” Sarah returned the smile. “And now that the cow is out of the barn, I guess there’s no point in trying to close the gate. Yes, today’s my big 4-0 and my daughters want to get me something special.”
The store owner reappeared with a slender, rectangular box in his hand and moved toward them.
“I just happen to have something special right here. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes!” the girls shouted, and danced. Even Carrie bounced up and down on her toes, every bit as excited as her siblings that their surprise was going to be revealed.
The owner removed a black velvet case from the box and placed it atop a jeweler’s display tray. The girls gathered around their mama, and Cullen moved behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders.