Written With You

by Martinez, Aly

  Willow Banks was clean, bubbly, and defined.

  But it wasn’t fucking possible. Instinct told me to argue. Hadley’s note had been written within hours of her having a baby and in the middle of a PTSD episode. If there was ever a valid reason to have jagged and unusual handwriting, that would be it.

  But what I couldn’t figure out is why she had signed Willow’s name.

  Her sister’s name.

  Her twin sister’s name.

  Who had been at the mall.

  “Tell me you see that,” Ian whispered. “Tell me you know that’s not the same handwriting.”

  “This doesn’t make sense. None of this fucking makes sense!”

  “Think about it. What if she didn’t sign the wrong name?” His dark gaze came to mine. “What if she accidentally signed the right one?”

  “That’s impossible. Willow was shot at the mall. She would…” Oh, fuck me. This was not happening. This was not happening. My throat closed, oxygen becoming trapped in my lungs like poison.

  She would have a scar.

  A scar I never saw because the night Hadley and I had sex, she’d refused to take off her shirt.

  WILLOW

  The banging on my front door was so loud that I jumped, nearly dropping my laptop. I hadn’t been home long, but I’d decided not to paint that night in lieu of editing the photos of Rosalee I’d taken at her awards ceremony. I had big plans to make a painting for Caven using one of the images I’d snapped of the two of them together. It was an adorable picture. She was sitting on his hip, both hands on his cheeks. I’d lucked out and caught one just before she’d squished his face together, making him look like a fish. Though that one was pretty great too and I’d more than likely print it out for Rosalee. She’d get a kick out of it.

  After setting my computer aside, I walked to the front door and peeked through the side window. At the sight of him, my lips curled into a huge smile, warmth engulfing my entire body. I loved when he did this. The random showing-up or text messages out of the blue with excuses for why he was going to come over. We both knew the truth was he couldn’t stay away from me any more than I could stay away from him.

  I ran my fingers through my hair and smoothed my shirt down before opening the door. “Well, hello th—” The words died on my tongue the second his tormented gaze met mine.

  His jaw was hard, but his face was a heartbreaking combination of confusion and betrayal. He was holding a piece of paper in his hands, fidgeting with the seam where it had been folded. My stomach dropped, and he silently walked inside.

  He didn’t kiss me.

  He didn’t touch me.

  He just walked inside and stood in the center of my living room, his eyes locked on me like the points of a thousand daggers.

  I shut the door, the anxiety in my chest becoming heavy as I turned to face him. “What’s going on?”

  “Lift up your shirt,” he rumbled.

  I laughed awkwardly to hide the pure and utter panic that blasted through me.

  He knew.

  Oh, God, he knew.

  Trent had told him and he was there looking for proof.

  I sucked in a shaky breath. “What for?”

  He looked at the paper. Then back at me, anger rising to the surface with the tick of his jaw. His voice got louder as he demanded, “Lift up your shirt.”

  My heart was waging war with my rib cage as I inched deeper into the room, careful to keep my distance. “What’s going on, Caven? Everything okay?”

  He shook his head, but then he thrust the paper toward me. “Lift up your fucking shirt!” he roared, his pain echoing around the room, slicing me from every direction.

  I startled, raising my hands up in defense. He wouldn’t hurt me, at least not physically. That wasn’t to say he couldn’t destroy me. “Look, I don’t know what your brother told you. But it’s not true.”

  “My brother?” His head jerked to the side as if he’d been slapped. “Trent knew?”

  Fuck. I shook my head rapidly. “No. I mean… There’s nothing to know.”

  He swallowed the distance between us in three long strides. “Except for the fact that you have a twin sister named Willow. Who was also at the mall that day. Who happens to have the same name as the little girl who saved my life.” He thrust the piece of paper in my face. “The same fucking name I watched you sign months ago. Now, stop fucking with my head and lift up your goddamn shirt and tell me what the hell is going on.”

  My mouth dried. I’d signed my real name. Nobody had told him. There was no speculating like Beth had insisted. No evil brother hell-bent on ruining me.

  I’d made a mistake. Plain and simple.

  I’d been trying to figure out for weeks how to tell him the truth. But it was an unforgivable confession. One that would cost me everything. There was no way out of this. No magical fix-all. No amount of words in the English language could make this right.

  My hands shook.

  It was over.

  The masquerade.

  The dreams of watching Rosalee grow up.

  The unexpected benefit of falling in love with the boy—now man—who had once been my hero.

  I could continue lying. But he didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve any of this.

  Not from Hadley.

  Most of all, not from me.

  And for that reason alone, with tears welling in my eyes, I finally gave up on having a family. “I didn’t save your life, Caven.” I lifted the hem of my shirt, revealing the spider web of puckered flesh caused by Malcom Lowe’s bullet. “You saved mine.”

  The paper fell from his hand like a feather caught in the wind. But his knees went straight to the floor.

  I slapped a hand over my mouth and fought the overwhelming need to go to him.

  But that was no longer my right.

  And if I was being honest, it had never been my right.

  “Who are you?” he rasped, the words sounding as if they had been filtered through broken glass. “I need you to say it.”

  I’d often imagined the moment when I finally told him the truth. Though, in those daydreams, it had never felt like a knife through the heart. “I’m Willow.”

  He peered up at me with the most beautiful and soul-crushing awe. “And who is Rosalee’s mother?”

  My chin quivered. If there was one thing I could change about the entire situation, that would be it. I would never want to go back in time and erase the incredible little girl who now existed only because my sister had had an ingrained need to break me. But I wished like hell I could answer this question differently. “Her mother was Hadley. My deeply, deeply troubled sister.”

  His eyes scanned my face. Looking for something he’d missed. Some way he should have known I wasn’t her.

  Or worse—at least for my aching heart—searching for some way he should have recognized that I was the girl he’d once met.

  “You couldn’t have known,” I whispered. “My own grandfather couldn’t tell us apart when we were growing up.”

  Slowly climbing back to his feet, he looked at the door and scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “You gotta help me here. You gotta help me make sense of this. Because I feel like I’m losing my mind. I don’t know whether I’m relieved that you’re alive or livid that you’ve been playing me.”

  “I wasn’t playing you. Everything I told you was the truth.”

  “Except the fact that you aren’t her mother! And that you aren’t Hadley. You’re…” His breathing shuddered. “Oh, fuck, I gotta sit down.” He moved to the couch and sank down, putting his elbows to his knees and looking about as comfortable as if he were sitting on a bed of nails.

  “Okay,” I breathed, wringing my hands to keep from reaching for him. I was a nervous wreck, but on the inside, I was just was so damn happy that he wasn’t racing from my house like a man on fire.

  He used his thumb and his forefinger to rub his eyes. “Start from the beginning. And how about, for once, you don’t fucking lie to me.
”

  “Okay. Okay.” I swallowed hard. “Hadley never recovered from the shooting. After the first bullet was fired, she was trampled, her arm was broken, and she hid in a cabinet for hours, all alone, terrified out of her mind. After she heard my story about you, she became obsessed with all things Caven. You were the hero she’d needed.”

  He tugged at the top of his hair. “Don’t call me a hero. Don’t you ever fucking call me a hero. Do you understand?”

  He’d never been more wrong, but arguing with him about technicalities wasn’t going to keep him from leaving. Then again, when this conversation was over, nothing would.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “She was alone. I had you and she hated me for it. She talked about you all the time growing up. Any time she wanted to hurt me, she’d tell me that she’d found you or had run into you or…whatever lie she could think up at the time.” I shrugged, fighting back tears. “And I, uh…guess, one day, she got sick of threatening me and she followed through on it.”

  “Why did you care?” he asked, the confusion so genuine that it made me sad.

  “Because whether you like the word or not, when I needed a hero, you were there for me. And my eight-year-old heart fell in love with you before you ever said the word go.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he cussed.

  “Yeah. So. I did lie to you about some things, but the majority of it was the truth. She did steal your computer for Kaleidoscope. Just not to look up pictures of our parents.” I walked over to the couch and sat on the other end, tucking into the corner to give him as much space as I possibly could. His eyes tracked me every step of the way. “My father was the first person to die. And when it happened, Hadley was taking a picture of me with my parents. She was looking through the lens of a disposable camera, but she swore it was a woman who fired the gun. The picture even showed a blurry woman in the background, but there was no gun or anything to back up her claim. Honestly, it could have been anyone. The police wouldn’t listen to her, and in true Hadley fashion, she became obsessed with figuring out who it was.”

  His brows drew together. “Malcom worked alone. There was no woman.”

  “I know. Everyone knew. A therapist once said her brain was creating a story of the woman to block what she had really seen. You know…of my dad dying. I saw him fall, but she got a front-row seat. We were very different people before the shooting, but after that, it was like night and day. I struggled a lot for a long time. But Hadley, she was…gone. She had no interest in figuring out how to survive. By the time we hit high school, she’d gotten into drugs and started stealing things. I tried really hard to help her. She was the only family I had left. I would have given up everything to make her better. But there was no saving her. She died in a car accident in November.”

  The guilt was written all over his face. I swear, blaming himself was Caven’s favorite pastime, but at the moment, he had bigger problems than booking his tattoo artist to add another feather of responsibility.

  “Then why the hell does everyone think Willow died?” he asked.

  And I guessed guilt was one thing Caven and I would always have in common. “Because we got into a big fight because I’d read her journals. She’d described everything about the last few years of her life. Including every excruciating detail of her night with you and then giving birth to Rosalee. I’d never been so hurt in my life, but we were going to fix it. We were going to be a family the way we were supposed to be. She was all I had left. But it was nothing but another one of her games. The second I turned my back, she stole my car and my purse and took off.”

  I rolled the hem of my shirt between my thumb and my forefinger, desperate for a distraction from the gut-wrenching pain in my stomach. “It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I was done. Done trying to save her. Done letting her hurt me. Done trying to stop the inevitable. I took her purse, used her ID, and caught a flight back to Puerto Rico. She could keep my car and all the money she could get from my accounts. But I was done with her.” I swiped a stray tear away. “When the wreck happened, all signs pointed to it being me in the car. Beth didn’t even question it. Not surprisingly, nobody could get in touch with Hadley, so Beth buried me. Well…she buried Willow. Two weeks later, she found me when she came to clean out my house in Puerto Rico.”

  With my every word spoken, his face filled with another emotion.

  Most of them conflicting.

  All of them heartbreaking.

  “Why pretend to be her? Hadley came back and I was ready to wage war. But you… You’re Willow. Do you understand me? You. Were. My Willow. But the lies? What the fuck?”

  My Willow.

  I was his Willow.

  Devastation shook me to the core and my lids fluttered closed as I imagined that alternate universe. “I didn’t know I was anything to you. When we left that mall, I never heard from you again. I tried to reach out over the years. I wrote letters every night when I’d wake up in a cold sweat. I rode my bike to your old trailer in Watersedge when I thought I was breaking. I even called once when I couldn’t breathe anymore.”

  “What makes you think I could breathe! You were a kid. When I was eighteen, hiding under beds because of fireworks, you were eleven. The best thing I could do for you is let you forget that day in hell.”

  “People don’t forget, Caven. They learn to live with it.”

  “Nobody fucking lives with this. They live around it. They learn to not let it dictate their lives. That’s what I wanted for you. It wasn’t about if I thought about you. Or if I wanted to reach out. It was about not reminding you of all the ways I had ruined your life. I was there the day you saw Trent. You were clinging to the edge of reality with those memories. I didn’t want to be something else you had to live around.”

  My breathing stammered, and I was unable to find oxygen in the pain hanging between us. “That was why I stopped trying to get in touch with you too. If you had moved on, I didn’t want to drag you back. I’m not blaming you here, Caven. You did nothing wrong. I’m just trying to explain why I pretended to be Hadley. I can’t have kids, at least not biologically speaking. The bullet that went through me—”

  He shot to his feet like the same bullet from the past had just gone through him. “Jesus Christ. What the fuck?”

  I lifted my hands in surrender and quickly amended that with, “That’s not your fault. I’m not in any way putting that on you. It’s just Rosalee is the last remaining part of my mother, my father, and my sister that will ever exist. I couldn’t chance that you’d shut the door in my face. Willow had no rights to that child. Not as her aunt. But Hadley… She was her mother. So, when she died and then Willow was declared dead, it felt like a sign. I didn’t lie to you when I said I wouldn’t take her away from you. I would have been happy being her art teacher forever. I never wanted to hurt you. I swear.”

  He rubbed his chest. “Oh, good, because this feels fucking amazing right now.”

  I inched toward him but remained seated as he loomed over me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re sorry,” he whispered ominously. “You’re sorry about what? That you lied to me? Manipulated me? Made me feel like I was falling in love with you? Was that part of your plan too? Capitalize on whatever you think I felt for Hadley in the past to get your way in the present? Because I have news for you. I felt absolutely nothing for your sister. But you… You had me. Hook, line, and sinker. Bravo. Truly. Good job.”

  My whole body blanched. He was falling in love with me. It was what I’d always wanted to hear from him. But, now, it just felt like a slap in the face.

  “Caven, please.” Unable to resist any longer, I stood up and reached for him.

  He backed away, each step crumbling my heart. “No. Don’t touch me. I don’t even know who the hell you are.”

  “I’m me.” I patted my chest, my voice breaking with desperation. “I’m Willow. The girl from the mall. The woman who believes you were her hero. I eat brownies with ranch a
nd spill glitter all over your floor. I love your daughter with my whole soul, and I’m more than falling in love with you. I’m in love with you. And not because of our past. But because of the man and father you are in the present.” Tears were pouring down my face, and I used my shoulder to attempt the futile task of drying them. “After I told you Hadley’s truth that night at the diner, the things I’d read in her journals about the darkness that surrounded her the night she had Rosalee? After that, I always gave you Willow. You know me. You know me better than anyone else in the world.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe you now. It’s convenient. Your sister is dead. No one to back you up. Just your word about having a baby in the middle of some epic PTSD episode, making me feel like I somehow caused it.”

  “You didn’t cause it. But it is the truth. And for the record, I didn’t do any of those things, but I would have taken responsibility for every single mistake Hadley ever made to be a part of Rosalee’s life.”

  His eyes were hollow as he stared back at me. The emotion was gone. The confusion. The betrayal. He just looked…empty. “You know what? I don’t even care about the bullshit you fed me. I can handle it. But I have a daughter. And I trusted you enough to let you into her life, and now, I have to break her heart and tell her you’re gone.” He let out a loud growl. “I’ll never forgive you for that.” And with that, he turned and marched out the door.

  “Caven!” I called, hurrying after him. “Please don’t do this. Please. She’s all I have left.”

  He stopped when he reached his SUV, his angry, blue eyes finding me with the burn of a laser.

  And then Caven Hunt landed a blow far worse than the bullet that had pierced my stomach. “Then you have nothing left.”

  CAVEN

  I cut the engine and watched in the rearview mirror as the garage door slid down behind me.