Written With You

by Martinez, Aly

  I rolled over and grabbed my phone off the nightstand to see what time it was.

  Ten. Shit, how had I slept so long? I wasn’t exactly an early riser, but my internal clock had been set at eight thirty for years.

  A text notification on my home screen caught my attention, and when I opened his thread, I had to scroll up through a series of messages I’d missed while sleeping.

  Caven: Maybe you were right.

  It was followed by a GIF of elephants running free in the wild. My heart lurched as I bolted upright in bed, praying that meant what I thought it did.

  Caven: Hi, my name is Caven. Pronounced like Gavin, but with a C. Not like Kevin. Or the cave bats live in. Anyway. This might sound strange, but I saw you the other day, dragging a massive recycling bin to the curb. And I honestly thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen—and obviously ecologically conscious too. I was wondering if you would consider letting me take you to dinner on Sunday night?

  My lungs burned as I stared down at my phone, the smile on my face so wide I probably looked like a maniac. But I didn’t care one bit. He was giving me the second chance I never thought I’d have. My vision swam as I typed out a reply.

  Me: Wow. This is strange. Who gave you my number?

  His reply was almost immediate.

  Caven: I bribed it out of a contractor who was in your backyard ripping out the majority of your studio. He looked scared, like someone had threatened to sue him for doing a botch job on your plumbing.

  My already huge smile stretched wider.

  Me: First screwing up my studio then doling out my personal information. It’s possible that he is the worst contractor in history.

  Caven: Well, according to a complaint filed at the Better Business Bureau this morning, he is the worst contractor in history. But what do you say to dinner tomorrow night?

  Me: Oh, I don’t know. You seem to have me at a disadvantage, Caven. I’ll need to know a little more about you before I can decide.

  Caven: Okay. Let’s see. I’m 33. Never married. I have a 4-year-old daughter who is my entire world. I used to work in technology, but now, I own a private investing firm with my best friend. Though I’ve taken some time off recently to spend time with my daughter. My favorite color is currently red. I have one tattoo. I’m obsessed with R.K. Banks art. Oh, and you know that actor Ryan Reynolds?

  Me: Oh my God, yes! Please tell me you look like him.

  Caven: No, but we have the same color hair.

  I burst into laughter, my heart swelling beyond anything I could have imagined.

  Me: You sound like a real catch.

  Caven: I am. And you want to know the best part? I come with exactly zero baggage. What about you? Any baggage I should know about?

  Me: Nope. No baggage. I’m an unemployed mule.

  Caven: How do you feel about elephants?

  Me: That they belong in the wild.

  Caven: Great. No baggage. No elephants in the room. Just two strangers. Meeting for the very first time over dinner. Sound good?

  I stared at my phone, reading and rereading his message. It didn’t sound good. It sounded like everything I’d ever dreamed of.

  Me: That sounds incredible.

  I rested the phone on my chest and closed my eyes. My life had been one long series of heartbreak. I could never forget the pain, fear, or sadness. I lived in the seconds because they were all I could manage. But right then, with the prospect of a future with Caven—and thus Rosalee—on the horizon, I wanted the whole hundred years at once.

  I threw the covers back, and after a stop at the bathroom, I headed downstairs, my steps lighter than they had been in eighteen years.

  “Willow!” Rosalee called, jumping up from the couch.

  “Morning, beautiful,” I purred, picking her up for a quick snuggle.

  She ran right back to the couch, peering up at the cartoons playing on the TV, while I walked to the barstools overlooking the kitchen. Caven was standing over a pan at the stove. I smiled at his back, relishing in the hum only he could give me.

  “Morning, Caven.”

  He didn’t bother turning to look at me before replying, “Good morning.”

  “How’d you sleep?”

  He finally turned around, and while I was a grinning fool, his face was stoic as ever. “I slept great for the half of the night. After that, I tossed and turned. You?”

  I raked my teeth over my bottom lip. “Same.”

  His gaze dropped to my mouth, but I had to give him credit. He didn’t let it linger. “So, Rosalee and I already ate, but we saved you some bacon.”

  “Thanks. But I’m a vegetarian, remember?”

  He pointed at me with the spatula. “Right. Which is why I was going to eat the rest of the bacon and offer you some…” He opened the door to the fridge and leaned in searching for a moment before finishing with, “Grapes and yogurt?”

  I laughed. “Perfect.”

  He slid the yogurt across the bar with a spoon on top and then got busy washing the grapes. “So, listen, I got in touch with your contractor today. He’s tearing out all your flooring and will be refunding you for clean-up. I sent my guy over to handle the mural. I didn’t trust this asshole with that task. But hopefully you should be back in business next week.”

  “Someone should really report him to the Better Business Bureau.”

  “I did that too.” He pushed a bowl of grapes my way, not even a hint of a lip twitch.

  Wow. He was really sticking to this strangers thing.

  I glanced back at Rosalee who was currently enthralled by a cartoon pup riding a fire engine and decided to push my luck. “We’re friends, right, Caven?”

  He handed me a cup of coffee before replying. “We are.”

  “Okay, well, it might be weird to tell you this, given our history and all, but I’m so damn excited that I need to tell someone.”

  He canted his head. “I’m listening.”

  I leaned forward on my elbows and whispered, “I got a text from a guy who asked me on a date and he says he looks like Ryan Reynolds.”

  His eyebrows shot up, but this time, there was no hiding that damn lip twitch. “A date? With a Ryan Reynolds look-alike?”

  “Yep.”

  “But you’ve never seen him before. What if he’s catfishing you and he doesn’t look like Ryan Reynolds at all? What if they only have the same color hair?”

  “He sounds incredible, so I’m willing to chance it.”

  No matter how much he’d tried to play it off, he’d been joking around before. But suddenly, a dark shadow passed over his face, stealing all humor—hidden or not. “I hope he’s incredible for you. I truly do, Willow. But maybe you could spend the day with me today first? I have something I need to talk to you about.”

  My stomach twisted. “Yeah. Of course. What’s up?”

  He flicked his gaze to Rosalee. “Not now. We’ll talk when Alejandra gets here. We’ll go for a ride.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what was going on or how he had flipped from fun and flirty to broken and mysterious so fluidly, but then again, there was a lot I didn’t understand about Caven Hunt.

  Whatever it was he wanted to talk about, he was worried.

  And even though I had a date with Mr. Reynolds the following night, thick concern crawled up the back of my throat.

  WILLOW

  I knew where we were going the minute he took the ramp toward Bellton. A southern suburb in New Jersey, it was even quieter and sleepier than Watersedge. It was over an hour from Caven’s house, and despite the way he drove with his hand locked on my thigh, there was a heavy weight blanketing the air.

  My heart sank as he took all the familiar turns.

  And then it crumbled when I realized just how familiar they were to him too.

  As far as I knew, Caven hadn’t had any interaction with the survivors of the shooting, but then again, Truett West was no ordinary survivor. He was the tattooed man who had rushed in, helped Caven
wrestle his father to the ground, and then fired the bullet that ended Malcom Lowe’s life.

  Caven put the car into park in front of Truett’s small brick home in the downtown district of Bellton. Well, downtown was a stretch. There was a coffee shop on one end of the street and a diner on the other. Two blocks up, there was a row of mom-and-pop storefronts, but that was about it as far as shopping went. There wasn’t a chain or franchise in a fifteen-mile radius.

  Just the way Truett liked it.

  I’d shared a meal with Truett multiple times over the years. It had taken a while for me to break down his walls, but I could be persistent when I wanted to be. I wouldn’t say he was exactly fond of me, but he’d put up with me—grumbling the entire time.

  Truth be told, he’d needed those visits just as much as I had.

  Truett was a military veteran who suffered from severe PTSD after an incident overseas. After his return, he’d left the Army and become something of a recluse. The day of the mall shooting, he’d been out with his therapist on an exercise to help him reintegrate into society. His therapist had died beside him while he’d sat paralyzed with fear. Ultimately, he’d found himself again long enough to take down Malcom, but he was destroyed in the process.

  He was now in his early forties. No wife. No family. No friends. Just Truett, alone in his house. He forced himself to the diner one day every week for dinner. After I’d witnessed the sheer terror on his face as his hands trembled while eating a club sandwich, it was all too clear that the venture out of his safe space was more of a punishment than it was therapeutic.

  I rested my hand on top of Caven’s. “What are we doing here?”

  He was sitting with all the comfort of a man on death row as he drew in a deep breath and turned to look at me. “I want this with you, Willow. Even after everything. Maybe especially after everything.”

  My breath hitched. It felt like I’d been waiting my entire life to hear him say those words. He wanted this. With me. Willow.

  “I want it too. So bad, Caven.”

  “But we can’t start over and be strangers as long as there are still secrets lurking in the background. I just want you to know, whatever happens here today, Rosalee is still your niece. I promised you Mondays and Thursdays. You will always have that with her. You have my word. If you don’t want me around, Alejandra or Ian can bring her to you. But you don’t have to worry about losing her. Okay?”

  My concern caught fire. “What are you talking about?”

  “Tell me you understand. Whatever you feel or think about me after today, it will have no bearing on your relationship with her.”

  “Caven, stop. You’re scaring me.”

  He intertwined our fingers and brought them up to his mouth, where he kissed the backs of my knuckles. “Please, Willow. Just say you understand.”

  “I understand. But there’s nothing that could—”

  “My father killed twelve people before the day at the mall.”

  “What?” My whole body jerked, and he was quick to release my hand, as if he thought my reaction was repulsion rather than shock.

  He cleared his throat, but it still sounded like he’d swallowed broken glass. “I found pictures of his victims the morning of the shooting. They were the reason we got into that huge fight.” Disgust lined his forehead as he drew in a shuddering breath and then continued to confess his darkest demons. “He’d been doing it for years. Making it look like an accident or suicide. The town didn’t even realize there was a serial killer right under their noses. Trent and I had big plans to go to the police after we collected our final paychecks.” His hand inched toward mine before he stopped it. “We desperately needed the money if we were going to take off and start a new life. But Malcom had other plans. The truth was out and there would be no escaping for him. The only thing he could do was take me down with him. If I’d gone to the police first, the mall never would have happened. It’s my fault, Willow. It’s all my fault.”

  “Stop,” I begged. “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. I had all the evidence I needed to stop Malcom. But instead of turning him in right away, I gave him time to gather his weapons, create a plan, and kill forty-eight innocent people.”

  “Caven,” I breathed, his palpable anguish slashing through me.

  Like the rest of the world, I’d learned a lot about Malcom Lowe after the shooting. I was a kid when it happened, but as I got older, my curiosity about that day grew to unhealthy peaks. The computers at the library had become my best friend and greatest enemy. The world was at my fingertips, but I didn’t need to focus on the world. I needed to focus on Willow Anne Banks—a child who was quickly falling down the rabbit hole of guilt and blame.

  But in all of my years spent at those computers, I’d never, not once, seen anything about Malcom having committed any crimes before that day at the mall. Which meant…

  All at once, my stomach rolled as understanding dawned on me. Nothing would surprise me when it came to Malcom Lowe.

  But I shattered for Caven.

  “You never told anybody?” I whispered.

  He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and his forefinger. “He’d already left us in Hell. He couldn’t hurt anyone else, but Trent and I were two scared kids, worried that the world was about to crucify us for the sins of our father. Neither of us wanted to add to the list of his victims. Trent made the decision and burned the pictures. After multiple surgeries on my abdomen, I was out of it for several days. I almost died twice. When I finally came to, he’d told the police all about the fight that morning but decided not to mention the pictures. What was I supposed to say? ‘No, officer, the only person I have left is lying’?”

  He rumbled deep in the back of his throat, his frustration thick as if it had happened yesterday. “Then when he showed me the devastation of the families from the mall as they spoke to the news on TV, I truly thought he’d made the right call. The families of Malcom’s original victims had already come to terms with the fact that their loved ones had died by accident or suicide. Imagine the agony of finding out that the man who had killed your loved one lived just down the street for almost a decade. He’d even been over to some of their houses and attended their children’s birthday parties.”

  I covered my mouth, bile burning a fiery path up the back of my throat. “Oh my God.”

  He hung his head. “I could have stopped him, Willow. I could have stopped him, but instead, I’ve spent the last eighteen years covering for him. You call me a hero. But I’m not. I helped one little girl and killed forty-eight others.” He tipped his chin to the brick house outside my window. “If you want a hero, he’s in there. But it’s not me. And you deserve to know that it will never be me. I’m not just a hypocrite because you forgave me for the unimaginable. I’m a hypocrite because I’ve lived the last four years of my life trying to protect Rosalee from the monsters in this world, all the while carrying the secrets of my father, the biggest monster of them all.”

  His breathing was ragged by the time he fell silent. His blue gaze boring into me almost begged me to berate him the way he so thoroughly believed he deserved. But all I could think was how maybe those forty-nine feathers tattooed on his arm were the right number of victims after all. Because, even eighteen years later, Malcom Lowe was still killing his son.

  “Okay,” I croaked out before clearing the lump from my throat. It wasn’t the time for me to break down.

  He’d just confessed his deepest and darkest secret; the last thing he needed was pity.

  He did, however, need a good, long reality check.

  I reached for his hand and he tried to dodge me, but in the confines of an SUV, he had nowhere to go. Curling my fingers around his, I kissed his palm. “I’m glad you told me this.”

  “I’m not,” he replied, looking very much like he wanted to peel out of that car and never look back. “What do I do, Willow? Please just tell me how to make this right. Please tell me what I can possibly do that will ever make this
right to all those people and all those families.”

  I didn’t have to think about it long. It was what I’d been trying to do since I’d become Hadley Banks.

  “You live.”

  He blinked at me. “What?”

  “Personally, I don’t think it would be a bad idea for you to go to the police and tell them the truth about your father. Give yourself and those families some closure once and for all. But that’s something you and Trent are going to have to decide to do in your own time. I don’t get an opinion on that. But just know your secrets are safe with me. Now and forever.”

  “You do get an opinion. The choices I made that day ruined your life.”

  I leaned back in my seat and stared at him. “Caven, my life isn’t ruined.”

  “You know what I mean. I failed so many people that day. I’ve spent my life trying to make up for it. When I first started Kaleidoscope, I thought if I could just help one person, I’d feel better. We managed to put hundreds of criminals like my father behind bars, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing is ever enough. I just need someone to tell me what to do to make this right.”

  “Okay. Well, first off, you have to stop assuming that you could have changed what happened. It’s an illusion that has kept you locked in a prison of guilt. There is no magical key to escape. The truth is the door has always been open. You can’t change anything. There is no right to be found in tragedy.”

  “There has to be something.”

  “Okay, step two: Stop assuming it’s your something to give. Why didn’t Trent tell the police about the pictures while you were still in surgery?”

  His back snapped straight. “Don’t pin this on him. It’s not his—”

  I quirked an eyebrow. “Fault? Exactly. That’s because it’s nobody’s fault but Malcom’s. Let me ask you an honest question, and I want you to really think about it before you give me an answer. Did you have any reason to believe that he was going to show up at the mall with an arsenal of guns?”