Everything hurt.
My body.
My heart.
My brain.
Rosalee’s mother was dead.
The woman I was falling—oh, fuck the bullshit. The woman I was in love with was Willow. The kid who had saved my life. The girl who had forgiven me even when I couldn’t forgive myself. Now, she was the woman who had lied to me and dragged my daughter into the middle of it.
I wanted to be pissed. I wanted to be a vortex of rage. I wanted to hate her the same way I’d been able to hate Hadley.
But this fucking hurt.
I’d expected her to follow me when I’d left or, at the very least, blow up my phone with texts of explanation and profuse apology. But her silence spoke the loudest.
Movement from the interior door caught my attention. Ian was standing there, concern etched on his face. But it was my daughter sitting on his hip that got me to climb out of the car.
“Hey,” I called, doing my best to sound normal even though it felt like I was being torn in half on the inside. “Why isn’t she in bed?”
Ian half shrugged. “She said she missed her daddy. So I distracted her with a movie.”
“What happened to no TV?” I asked her.
Rosalee might as well have had Busted! painted across her forehead. “It was Uncle Ian’s idea.”
“It sure was,” he boasted. “And as we all know, you can’t punish me.”
Rosalee giggled and it nearly stole my breath.
From the day I’d brought her home from the hospital, the longest I’d been away from her was three nights. It was a business trip to LA when she was two and it’d nearly broken me. I’d watched her for hours each night on the camera I’d mounted in the corner of her room while I’d sat alone in my hotel room. Ian had been out painting the town an extremely light shade of red. Meanwhile, I’d been counting down the hours until I could get back to her. It was a tad obsessive; I’d admit it.
It was only three days, but I swear, when I got back, she looked like she was a full inch taller. As far as I knew, she wasn’t akin to a giant, so it was probably just my imagination. But when you see someone every single day, you don’t notice the subtle changes.
I’d never noticed the individual centimeters of her hair growing from peach fuzz to ringlets.
Or when her chunky baby feet had thinned and elongated.
Nor did I remember when each of her freckles had appeared across her nose.
It had all just happened sometime over the last four years.
I could see that she looked like her mother.
But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how much she looked like the little girl from the mall—how much she looked like Willow.
My chest got tight and I forced a smile around the emotion as I reached out and brushed her cheek with my knuckles. “I love you. You know that, right?”
She grinned. “I know.”
“Good. Now, get your booty in bed and let me talk to Uncle Ian for a little while. If for some miraculous reason you’re still awake, I’ll stop in for a story when he leaves.”
Her face lit and it slashed through me like the hottest knife. Jesus, how was I ever going to tell her?
Not just about Hadley the art teacher leaving, but Hadley her mother.
And Willow her aunt.
And how Hadley had died.
And why I’d kicked Willow out of her life.
And… And every other fucked-up piece of the puzzle that had created this clusterfuck of epic proportions.
Ian put her down, and she gave my legs a hug before taking off through the kitchen and up the stairs.
“Jesus, Cav,” he breathed, his hand landing on my shoulder. “Come on. Get inside. Tell me everything.”
After leaving no less than twelve scathing messages on Trent’s voicemail trying to figure out exactly what the hell he knew, I told Ian every mind-boggling detail of Hadley…er, Willow’s deception. He nodded a lot but otherwise kept his opinions to himself. Part of the reason Ian and I got along so well was because I was the basket case and he was the basket. Though, that night, there would be no preventing the dam from breaking inside me.
My emotions were an ever-swinging pendulum.
The highs were high when I found relief in the entire situation. Willow wasn’t Rosalee’s mother. She couldn’t take my daughter. It was everything I’d feared since I’d seen the woman at Rosalee’s birthday party.
The lows on that pendulum were so low that I swear I could feel my body being raked across the gravel. Those were the moments I realized that not only had I lost the first woman to truly make me feel, but I’d also lost Willow, the girl I owed my life.
And then like someone had broken that pendulum and thrown it off the edge of a mountain, I’d had to accept that Rosalee’s mother was gone, and in a roundabout way, it was my fault.
However, with the exception of the highs, lows, and all-consuming guilt, the rest of my emotional grid was filled to the brim with anger.
After Ian declared he was spending the night, I went to bed. Well, I went to pace my bedroom, anyway. I’d hung Hadley’s—shit, I was never going to get her name right—Willow’s painting of Rosalee on the wall in my bedroom. I immediately took it down. Considered breaking it because she had made it. Considered not breaking it because it was of my daughter. Hung it back up. Felt like I was going to implode. Took it down again. Considered breaking it again. Then, finally, I hid it behind a row of suits in the back of my closet.
I didn’t sleep at all that night. Partly because adrenaline was almost as good of a drug as denial, but predominantly because Ian cracked the door open every few hours to check on me. He didn’t come in or try to strike up a conversation; it was more like a drive-by health-and-welfare check. What he thought I was going to do, I had no idea. I didn’t even have the balls to break a fucking painting she’d made. But that didn’t stop him from making sure I was okay. He was a worrier and I had always provided him with more than enough product to feed his habit.
It was around five in the morning when I finally gave up on sleep and decided to distract myself with coffee, work, and absolutely nothing to do with Hadley—dammit, Willow.
I stopped in my tracks when I got downstairs and saw Ian sitting at the dining room table with a stack of spiralbound notebooks in front of him.
“What are you doing? What’s all that?” I asked, heading straight for the coffeemaker.
“Hadley’s journals.”
I froze, my hand hanging in midair as I reached for a mug. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Willow left them at the gate a few hours ago.”
I couldn’t deny the flicker of disappointment when I realized she’d been there and I’d missed her. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to be around her. I didn’t want to even think about her. Or so I told myself. The tightness in my chest told a different story altogether.
“She looked like shit if it helps at all?”
It didn’t.
It made it worse.
“I don’t care what she looked like. Did she say anything? Did you talk to her?”
He leaned back in his chair and shot me a side-eye. “Yeah, you sound like a man who doesn’t care.”
“Fuck you. I’m just curious.”
“Okay, then I didn’t talk to her. She only stopped long enough to slip the notebooks through the gate with a note that said, I gave you my truth. This is Hadley’s.”
“Jesus,” I breathed.
“Do you want me to tell you what she was wearing, or has your curiosity been quelled and we can move on to the portion of the program where we discuss a mentally ill woman’s notebooks and the relief I feel that she can never get anywhere near Rosalee?”
I bypassed the caffeine and headed straight to the table. There had to be at least a dozen notebooks, and as I flipped through the pages, I found them filled back and front with sloppy handwriting, making the pages more black than white. “What the hell are you doing reading these? This i
s none of your business.”
“Somebody had to read them. And I needed to know how much clothes to pack if I was going to temporarily move in as an emotional support dog. After reading this shit, I scheduled my U-Haul for tomorrow.” He reached around me and started lining the notebooks down the length of the table. “She was not a stable woman, Caven.” He pointed to the first with a blue cover. “This is your notebook. It starts when she was fourteen and carries on until she was around twenty or so. I don’t even know what half of this shit says because it’s mostly incoherent ramblings. But the gist is she both idolized and hated you.”
My stomach wrenched as I picked up the notebook, but just as quickly, Ian plucked it from my hand.
“Nope. She was a selfish kid in a lot of it. Her thoughts were not rational or realistic. You do not need to add that to your conscience. Take my word for it.” He slid over a stack of at least five notebooks. “From what I can tell, these are mostly about Willow. A lot of stories from when they were kids. Good times. I’m not sure when they were written, but there are subject starters at the top of a lot of the pages, so I’m thinking homework from therapy.” He pushed the pile to the back and slid forward an even bigger pile. “These are all dated a year ago, and she talks about being in rehab. They start with the night she tracked you down at the bar in hopes of accessing Kaleidoscope. She had this picture of a woman she wanted to see if she could find a match to. It continues to finding out she was pregnant and debating whether she was going to keep the baby, right up until the night Rosalee was born. You want to know something I found interesting?”
My heart was in my throat. This was too much. All of it. My quota for bombshells had been met for the next century. I had the sudden urge to box those journals up and toss them into the trash bin. Trash—not recycle. Because my pettiness at the moment had no boundaries.
But I knew myself, and they’d just end up in my closet, next to the painting of Rosalee, because as much as I didn’t want to think about the Banks twins, one day when Rosalee was at a hundred and five and finally mature enough to handle this level of insanity, she would want those journals. God knew I’d clung to as much of my own mother as I could and I’d had her for ten years. Rosalee hadn’t even had her mother for ten minutes.
“No. I don’t want to know what you found interesting. I don’t care. I don’t care what Hadley had to say. I don’t care what—”
He suddenly pushed to his feet. “Nothing. I found nothing interesting. Willow told you the truth about pretty much everything.”
“Well, ya know. Except for her name.”
“Except for that. But the rest of it was all true. She sat in front of you and took responsibility for every off-the-wall, morally wrong, and utterly unforgivable thing her sister had ever done. She let me blame her. She let you blame her. And from what I can tell, she was ready to let the law blame her as well.”
“Well, it’s not too late for that,” I snarked.
“Oh, really? You’ve been having a nervous breakdown all night, but not once have you mentioned calling the cops or even Doug. You got big plans to hit up the FBI tomorrow? I’m sure we could get her on some kind of fraud.” He retrieved his phone from his pocket. “Say the word, Cav. I’ll call it in myself.”
That would have been the right thing to do. She was fucking with people’s lives—my daughter’s life. But I didn’t want Willow in jail.
I wanted this to be one big fucking nightmare.
And I wanted to wake up.
My only response was to clench my teeth.
“Right?” he mumbled. “So, as I was saying, if her attorney hadn’t been able to get her off on that theft of property charge and you had pressed the issue of child abandonment, she could have been sentenced to years in prison. Why would someone risk that?”
I didn’t want the answer to that question. I wasn’t to the point where I could see any positive in this kind of mind fuckery. For all I knew, those notebooks were filled with more lies. Shit, maybe Willow had written them herself. Maybe every single thing that had ever come out of her mouth had been a lie.
Maybe her promise to forgive me while we had been at the mall was her biggest lie of all.
“No,” I stated matter-of-factly while collecting all the notebooks and stacking them into a pile. “After months of hating Hadley, you do not get to read a fucking diary and decide that she’s some kind of martyr.”
“Whoa, slow down. First of all, I still hate Hadley. She was exactly the manipulative and dangerous woman I was afraid she was when she came back. The one that I thought was pulling the wool over your eyes, playing on your emotions, biding her time, and warming your bed until she could get her talons into your back. But I gotta say: That’s not who we got.” He leaned toward me. “And all I’m saying is I’m relieved. I don’t know Willow’s next move. I don’t know your next move. All I know is that I can sleep at night knowing”—he poked his finger at the notebooks—“she’s not that woman.”
“Who knows? Maybe she’s worse.”
“And yet hours ago you were waxing poetic about how she floats on rainbows and makes you feel. I thought she was just a good con woman, but this makes more sense.”
Losing my tempter, I barked, “None of this makes sense! Okay? Nothing in my entire life. Not since the day I was fifteen and found Polaroids buried under the floorboard in my dad’s closet.”
I watched in horror as confusion crinkled his face. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Okay. So, maybe Ian didn’t know everything about me.
Shit.
“Nothing,” I groaned, turning toward the kitchen, desperate for an escape. This was not a conversation for tonight. This was a conversation for when I was six feet under the ground. “Go home.”
“Caven—”
“Go home, Ian. I can handle it from here.”
He cussed under his breath, but eventually, he relented and left me alone.
The way Hadley had been at the mall.
And, if I stayed true to my word, the way Willow would be forever.
WILLOW
“What is this?” Beth snapped as she walked into my spare bedroom-slash-studio.
The backyard studio was almost finished thanks to Caven’s “chat” with the contractor. But it had been hard to get excited over anything in the week since Caven had stormed out of my house. I set the paint down and checked my phone for the five millionth time.
He hadn’t replied to the one text I’d sent him when I’d missed her first art class.
Me: Please tell her I’m sorry and that I love her very much.
I didn’t figure that would get relayed to Rosalee, but it was worth a shot.
I missed them. A lot. But I had no tears left and the pain in my chest had become so constant that I didn’t feel it anymore.
I’d failed.
Glancing over at Beth, I saw she was holding a cardboard cylinder and guessed, “An empty toilet paper roll?”
“Exactly. Now, do you know where I found it?”
I blinked up at her, not in any mood for a guessing game. “Go away.”
“In the trash, Lo. In. The. Trash. The Earth is crying right now.”
“If the Earth is crying, it’s because you’ve driven over here fifteen times in the last seven days.”
She dragged an extra stool over, so close that it was nearly touching mine, and plopped down. “Yes, remind me to bill you for mileage this month.”
“Is there a purpose to this visit?”
She grinned. “Depends. How was your day?”
“Well, let’s see. I ate granola and raisins for breakfast.”
She nodded approvingly. “Good, good. Food is good.”
“I cussed out Hadley twice in the mirror.”
“More good. Get that anger out.”
“Then I cried in the car when I convinced myself it was okay to ride over to his house, but then I wouldn’t allow myself to actually leave my driveway.”
Her smile
fell. “Shit.”
“Pretty much.” I blew out a ragged sigh. “What about you?”
Her smile returned, but it was nothing more than a pretty hood ornament for the discomfort in her eyes. “I talked to Caven’s attorney today.”
My heart sank. “Oh, goodie.”
Her proximity made more sense when her hand landed on my back for a soothing rub. “He’s agreed to add Hadley Banks to Rosalee’s birth certificate.”
I shot to my feet, a tsunami of hope flooding my veins. “What?”
“Under the condition that Hadley waives her parental rights.”
And there it was—the bittersweet end. He wasn’t going to turn me into the police for lying about my identity. He wasn’t going to make this a media spectacle. He just wanted it over. And despite the way my heart was breaking, I couldn’t blame him for that one bit.
My whole body sagged with defeat. “Okay.”
It was Beth’s turn to shoot to her feet. “Okay? After all of this, you’re just going to give up?”
“I’m not giving up. He knows Hadley is gone. So signing this piece of paper means nothing, but the fact that he’s willing to add her to the birth certificate means everything. It’s a compromise. Not exactly the outcome I would have liked. But if it’s this or nothing, I’ll take honoring my sister every day of the week.”
“We don’t need his permission to add Hadley to the birth certificate though. We have DNA.”
I walked to the bathroom across the hall, and she propped her shoulder against the doorjamb as I washed my hands. “He knows that. He’s waving the white flag. I push this, he’s going to push back ten times harder. I gave him all of Hadley’s journals. One handwriting sample and he’d have all the proof he needed.”
Her mouth fell open. “You what?”
“I’m done!” I exclaimed, my voice echoing around the bathroom. “I knew when I hatched this plan that it was wrong. It was selfish and careless. I just didn’t care what it cost me. I didn’t care if I had to take responsibility for Hadley’s crimes. I didn’t care about anything except for Rosalee. But, now, I’ve lost her and hurt Caven in the process. I was wrong, Beth. I am the villain in the story. I always said I was going to make this right—for Hadley and my family. But the only right in this entire situation is for Rosalee. It’s time to make things right for her.
Written With You Page 8