Forgiven (Ruined)

by Rachel Hanna

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Forgiven

  Ruined 2

  By: Rachel Hanna

  www.RachelHannaRomance.com

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  Chapter 1

  My whole life has been about pulling back.

  At least, that's how it has seemed. Standing in the hallway outside the production room of the DCTV offices, all I can think is how the last four years have been about anything but living, and now suddenly I've been thrust into life so hard it's like being shoved out of a moving vehicle. Or into the path of one.

  The crazy thing is, it's made me happy. Just a couple months ago I was still feeling lost. I'd pretty much determined that happiness was something meant for anyone but me. I'd walked away from happiness, from friends, parties, boyfriends, anything to do with living a normal life. Because when I was 15, I did something irreversible, something I didn't think I could ever be forgiven for, and I'd gotten to walk away. Free. Better than free. After everything that happened, my mother remarried and we moved across the country, from wet and rainy Seattle where everyone knew what I had done, to Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly we were living in a huge house right off the Atlantic Ocean and I had the opportunity to take a year off before starting college and then at the small, private Deaton University, a tiny beachside college where nobody knew who I was. I got to start over, and how many people get to do that? I didn't feel like I deserved that second chance.

  But life kept going. My mother's new husband, my stepfather Bruce Avery, is a real estate tycoon. He had the money, the lifestyle, the position in the community. Even if I'd wanted to tell him at the time about everything that had happened – everything I had done when I was 15 – that wasn't my call to make. It was my mother's, and ultimately, neither of us thought telling him was a good idea. Which meant I had to go on living a lie and turning it into some kind of life, because not doing so would have looked strange. Bruce knew some of our history, mine and my mother's, so the fact that I was recovering from something didn't seem that strange to him. He just didn't know what I was recovering from.

  So after the year was up, the year I spent taking long walks on the beach and letting the ocean fill me with as much solace as I could gather, I started school, going forward but not living. Keeping myself to myself as if somehow that was going to change the past. It took three people to drag me out of me and make me understand that snuffing out my own light wouldn't do anything to make up for what I'd done. It just compounded the loss.

  The first of those people was Reed Miller. My first day of school he sat beside me in a required math class (there's no other reason I'd take a math class!) and because he wanted to get to know me and couldn't think of any other way, he stole my keys out of my bag and when I found myself stranded and went looking for my keys, returned them to me and struck up a conversation.

  Lame? Kind of. Only that was the only thing lame about Reed Miller. He's tall, deeply tanned, with sun-streaked brown hair, piercing blue eyes and dimples. He's got a great body and musician's hands and, it turned out, he was the operations manager of the college television station, DCTV. Which mattered a lot to me, since my major is journalism.

  All of which led to me standing in the hallway outside the production room at DCTV, my heart in my throat, my stomach churning, my hands wet with terrified sweat. Because stepping back into life, with Reed as the first of my three inadvertent coaches? That meant finding myself working with him at the station. And that led to a project that had helped me a lot to start living instead of just moving forward. But it also led to Reed leaving the station to me when he left Charleston for a job in Boston.

  And inside that production room, the rest of the team was waiting for me. This was my first meeting with them post Reed. I was terrified.

  They can't eat you, I told myself. But I didn't believe it. I've been the pariah before. After what I did when I was 15, I had friends and neighbors and classmates from my old high school turn on me. Now I was facing the people who would be my team but I'd only been at the college part of a semester. Just because Reed had faith in me didn't mean the TV station crew did.

  Didn't mean I did, either. I cracked my knuckles, a horrible habit I've been trying to break ever since junior high school. I hate suspense. I've never been any good at anticipating, either, and this was definitely both at once. Being operations manager of a television station my first year of college was a wonderful opportunity.

  Walking through the door into my first meeting was turning out to be more than I thought I could do. Which is weird. Because in the last couple months I'd done a lot of things I'd never though I could do. First I'd gotten close to Reed, almost “couples” close before his dad, Henry Tate Miller, stepped in and made certain His Son (Mr. Miller definitely saw that as being Reed's title and undoubtedly mentally capitalized those words) wasn't going to waste his future on a nowhere girl with a past like mine.

  All my progress wasn't measured in increments of Reed, though. He'd gone away before we ever did more than kiss. I'd also made a friend, Emmy, who had her own past to overcome and was still one of the sunniest, most positive people I'd ever known. And then I'd started a relationship, if you wanted to call it that, because it was pretty on and off, with a lot of off, with Kellan Avery, who was kind of my stepbrother but only because our parents were together. We weren't related in any way and that was a damn good thing. Because Kellan is definitely hot. Six-two, sculpted muscle, thick, dark hair that keeps getting longer, green eyes.

  Lots of changes for me in only a couple months and I still couldn't walk through that door?

  "You planning to ever go in there? Or should I move the meeting into the hall for you?" a voice says from behind me. I gasp and spin round, losing my balance and catching myself against the wall.

  "Reed!"

  He's only been gone a couple weeks, just long enough for me to step into his position as operations manager and do the admin work at the station in addition to the series I'm filming on forgiveness, but there have been no meetings yet. Mostly because I haven't had the guts to schedule them.

  College television stations have to adhere to FCC regulations. They have to run on a schedule and keep to that schedule. But there's a little flexibility, because everyone's still in school, so schedules have to flex, and because the broadcasting hours aren't round the clock. I've had time, and I've taken it, trying to adjust. It's one thing to be the person filing the documentary series that's gotten the station put up for a National College Broadcasting Award; it's another to come out of nowhere and step into the top student position.

  And then, too – Reed. He'd left Charleston to take a job as a producer at a Boston station, a job that station personnel had apparently recruited him based on his track record at DCTV. Definitely not based on his applying, because he hadn't. But his father had made it look like Reed had been recruited and Reed hadn't asked any questions. He'd just gone and taken the job, because who doesn't when the perfect position falls into your lap?

  I don't, apparently. I lurk in hallways, too afraid to step into the produ
ction room and start the meeting.

  "What are you doing here?" I ask, and in case that sounds accusatory, I throw my arms around his neck and give him a quick hug, backing off just as fast in case his father has any spies present in the empty hall.

  Or in case Reed gets any wrong ideas. Part of the reason he'd been so willing to go to Boston was because I'd chosen to be with Kellan. Not that Reed had said that was going to stop him forever.

  Reed gives me an appreciative squeeze before letting go of me. I go back down off my tiptoes and grin up at him. "Come to get your old job back?"

  That makes him laugh. "Yes, I thought I'd leave a paying job in a fantastic city to come back to – this." He hisses the last word, his hand gesturing to take in the faded and yellowing tiles of the hallway, the rundown but functional college TV station. But his voice holds affection. Reed loved his job here.

  Just like I would. Once I got past the fear.

  I take a breath. "Seriously?"

  "Seriously?" He smiles down at me. "Seriously I checked in with Dexter and he said you hadn't scheduled any meetings yet. Then he told me when you scheduled this one."

  I give him a considering look. "And then he said I was still standing in the hall and you got Scotty to beam you straight here?"

  Reed leans down and kisses the top of my head. "No. I decided it wasn't professional to leave you to introduce yourself and I came back to ease the transition to your becoming Queen of the Universe." He gestures at the door. "Shall we?"

  I don't move right away. "Does that mean before this you were Queen of the Universe?"

  He rubs his chin with one hand. "Do you want an introduction?"

  "Yes, please."

  Inside the production room there are only a handful of interns. No one but the college makes money from DCTV, though under Reed's guidance it has done very well. Students who work for DCTV are gaining work experience, not earning big bucks.

  It was through DCTV I'd been able to air a series on forgiveness, an idea that had come to me because of Kellan Avery. When he was seventeen, Kellan had made a bad decision. Leaving a party, he got behind the wheel of his car while drunk. While any number of 17-year-olds manage one or two drunken treks without lasting repercussions, Kellan and his victims weren't that lucky. They didn't make it home. Kellan fell asleep behind the wheel and caused a head-on collision with a family vehicle, killing Aimee Reynolds and her two young daughters, Tallie and Madison. The father, David Reynolds, a police office, was traveling behind them at the time. The family was coming home from a vacation and David had joined the family late, having stayed behind in Atlanta to finish a shift. His family was killed right in front of his eyes. Kellan walked away with barely a scratch, but his best friend, Jake Cochran, was thrown from the car and today is a paraplegic.

  Kellan served five years in prison and returned home to a father, my stepfather, Bruce Avery, who couldn't forgive him for what he'd done.

  Kellan, though. Kellan was different. In prison he'd had time to come to terms with what he did. He carried a lot of guilt, manifest in one way as a tattoo of a goofily smiling sun, a copy of a drawing that had blown from the wreckage, something drawn by Madison, one of David Reynolds' daughters who was killed in the wreck. Kellan came to realize if he let the accident define and destroy him, he was snuffing out one more light and doing nothing to make the world a better place.

  That's when I met him, when he was struggling with guilt and trying to live, just home from prison and with nowhere to go but to the house of a man who acted as if he hated Kellan. Kellan was the second of the three people to make an enormous difference in my life. He knew I was hiding something – takes one to know one, I guess – and he wasn't willing to let the secret, or me, slide. Eventually I told him my story. By then we were becoming close and I was sure I'd lose him.

  Instead, he held me close for a minute and thanked me for telling him. I think that's when I started to heal.

  And Emmy, the third of my friends to start drawing me from my self-imposed exile from life, went with me when I went to interview David Reynolds after Kellan and I went to see his best friend. Jake Cochran is engaged to be married to a beautiful, exotic girl named Bria and he's a paraplegic athlete. Neither he nor his father were angry with Kellan. Jake had made his own choice to get in that car, to not take the keys from Kellan. When that encounter initially helped Kellan and then dumped him back into his own guilt as he contemplated what Aimee's husband, Tallie and Madison's father must think, I went and interviewed Mr. Reynolds and found he was newly remarried to a woman he'd met at a Mothers Against Drunk Driving meeting, and had an 11 week old son. He didn't blame Kellan, he'd forgiven him, and he was willing to tell Kellan to his face if it would help.

  Not only did the interview help Kellan, it helped me. Because I was able to interview my mother, Emmy manning the camera again and my mother and I talking about the fact that she'd forgiven me for killing my father. I still struggle with understanding that it was all in self defense – my father was trying to kill me at the time. He was strung out on bath salts and choking me when I grabbed a butcher knife. I only meant to cut him, hard enough that he'd let go and I could run, but he stumbled and fell into the knife and died before emergency services could ever reach us. My mother arrived before the ambulance, too.

  Not that we don't both still have long dark nights. Not that we don't still have those moments of thinking we're ruined. But things are definitely improving.

  And Reed Miller had been central to the sea change. Though I started the project without telling him, after he saw the initial videos he allowed me use of the editing studio, the cameras, looked at the footage I'd shot and okayed my turning the videos into a documentary series, which had aired to acclaim. Now the series was running every six weeks with new stories, and people were contacting us, wanting to meet with people they'd hurt, wanting to tell their stories, seeking forgiveness or at least understanding, and the station was up for National Student Production Awards for best documentary series.

  Chapter 2

  The group of Deaton University students sitting in the production room has apparently run out of things to talk about. Everybody has their phones out and they're all searching online or texting or playing a game. They glance up uninterestedly as I enter, then double take when Reed walks in behind me.

  "Hey, Reed!" Collective greeting.

  Of course they're not going to welcome me like that. Not yet. Most of these people have worked together for a semester at least, or longer. I've been here what, two months? If it hadn't been for Henry Tate Miller dragging Reed away from here, I might have worked into the job naturally.

  Stop panicking! Things have been going so much better lately, I tell myself, and I'm totally up for this. I've been studying how television stations work, a crash course in broadcasting, one of my professors pitching in because she believed Reed was right to name me his successor and I was right in wanting a little more foundation under my feet before starting!

  But there's still that little residual voice that says if things seem to be going much better, something is poised to strike me down. Before it was always me, my own worst enemy.

  We'll have to see who it is now.

  If it's anyone. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

  "Are you back?" Dexter asks Reed incredulously as Reed more or less pushes me to the front of the room. If he thinks he's going to just shove me up there and start the meeting and leave me no other recourse but to lead it – he's probably right. What else would I do? I've never run from a fight. Life, yes. Fights? Not so much.

  "I'm not back," Reed says, holding up both hands to quell the noise. Amazing that six people can make as much noise as they are.

  "Told you," one of the Tylers says. This one is female. There are two Tylers, a male and a female. Just to make things interesting.

  "I wanted to be here to help pass the baton to Willow." He waves me closer and we stand together, leaning against the table in the front of the production room, w
hich holds absolutely everything that runs the station plus the video library of all media from discs to tapes. "I asked Willow to take over as operations manager for me because she was working with me so closely before I left for Boston."

  I wince. Yep, there's the catcalls. "Thank you, Dexter." Seriously, if I stand up here with Reed much longer I'm going to feel like their mother. At 19, I'm younger than some of them. But I've always been more focused than other people my age. Comes with the territory when you take yourself out of the action and start living such a constrained life.

  Which is exactly what I'm trying to get past, I remind myself. Once Reed's father's blackmail options – telling my mother's husband what I'd done in Seattle – blew up in his face because I told Bruce myself, I was supposed to start living.

  I shake my shoulders, try to relax. None of us at the station are getting paid. We all take it seriously. But a little kidding around isn't going to hurt anyone.

  Reed goes on, ignoring Dexter, talking about the forgiveness series, which gets everyone involved. Once the series took off, Ashley and Zack, "Your anchors from A to Z" as we've resisted letting them bill themselves, have done some narration and the students rotating in and out of the engineering slots have helped man the cameras and film the interviews, which are usually someone who's done something they're looking to make right, and the person they feel they wronged. The series has garnered good publicity for the station. The college supports it and the crew has gotten involved, pretty much everyone, including Dexter who wears hats of digital media manager, sports guy and sometimes camera man. Tabby's our news director but the news is from the AP wire service and local news is covered pretty lightly – a lot of DCTV's local news is college-based.

  It's a little crew and pretty tight. Which doesn't mean I'm not nervous that I'm going to be talking in front of them as soon as Reed stops.