“She showed up at the lake house the next day telling me she wanted to talk. I knew what that meant.” If she’d meant to break my heart that day, she’d dressed the part. She’d looked beautiful with her hair pulled away from her face and a thin, green sundress making her look like a wood nymph. “Em was a good girl, for the most part, and maybe she got tired of lying to her father. Maybe she thought I wasn’t worth all the sneaking around and all the bullshit it took to see me. Maybe she actually was starting to hear the shit that her dad was relentlessly spewing about me, I dunno.” I massaged my neck, hoping the tension there was temporary.
“I…I didn’t want to hear it. I thought I knew what she was going to say and it sure as hell didn’t help with my parents there, hanging out with Leann and her husband. Hell, even Tristian was there with his little brother, I just wanted us to be alone if she was going to dump me.”
Getting her on the boat had been easy enough. She’d barely spoken to my family, like she knew being too friendly with them would make cutting ties that much harder.
“We were on the lake for at least an hour. It was windy that day and a storm was coming in. I saw it in the clouds. There was lightning and the thunder sounded too close for comfort.”
The mattress dipped as Aly scooted closer but she didn’t touch me.
“Em was crying, telling me how much she loved me. How she still wanted to see me, but also make things right with her father, but he was so fucking stubborn.”
I could only stare at those roiling clouds, trying to guess how long we had until they were overhead, not really caring if they were. Wondering if Emily ripping out my heart could possibly do less harm than some fucking storm.
“Before she could end it, I sped the boat up, aiming for the middle of the lake, hitting each wave head on, reckless, because I didn’t dare touch her to try to shake some sense into her, I was afraid to stop, afraid that if I slowed down everything would change. Because I didn’t want to hear her telling me she didn’t want the hassle of being around me anymore.”
When I lowered my head, keeping my hands at the base of my skull, Aly touched me, just her palm against my back to let me know she was still there, still listening.
“I kept going faster and faster, a little drunk on her screams, more than a little dazed with the idea that she didn’t want me anymore. I just…I wasn’t myself.” I felt the burn in my eyes and tried to stop the tears with a tight squint. “I wasn’t myself that day, I haven’t been since.”
“Tell me,” Aly said, resting her chin on my shoulder and I let her, thinking that the warmth of her body, that sweet brush of her breath against my cheek would keep me calm.
“She was screaming at me. ‘Slow down, Ransom! Please!’ and I thought, at first, she was being dramatic. It made me laugh. I fucking laughed at her.”
“You kept going?” Aly asked, her voice even and I didn’t pick up any judgment, anything in her tone that told me she thought I was being cruel, even though I had been.
“I kept going, laughing like a madman, and then she screamed…” The expression was burned in my mind—a photograph of horror, shock that I’d never be able to erase. “I looked at her, asked her what the hell the problem was. I had no idea what she saw. And I’d…I’d never find out. I was going too fast, being too careless in that damned boat. The waves were so big and suddenly we hit something, hard. The cops thought it might have been a pylon. The water was so high that day, I probably wouldn’t have seen it. It…doesn’t really matter to me what I hit.” Rubbing my eyes wouldn’t take the sting away, it wouldn’t make the screams vanish. Nothing would. Not even Aly’s hand tightening on my arm. “We flipped. We…we both smacked our heads on the boat when it capsized. We both went under. I was a stronger swimmer, and was able to swim under the boat, but Emily….. I tried to find her…”
She heard something in my voice then, that crackle of pain maybe, the breaking apart of my composure, whatever it was had Aly pulling me close, had me forgetting about the tears burning my eyes. “I looked…I couldn’t find her. I looked everywhere.”
“Ransom…”
“I tried, God, Aly, I swam all around the boat, I swam under it.” Aly raked her fingernails through my hair, but it didn’t sooth me and I felt that swift pain in my chest, the same one I’d been trying to bury for over a year, sticking sharp. “I dove and I dove, over and over again. I called to her again and again, and then nothing would come out of my mouth. No sound. No breath. I was so damn dizzy, and even after all that time in the water I felt blood on the back of my head and I thought ‘okay, I’m dying now’ and I was so happy. Everything was going dark. I was fucking happy I was dying because of what I’d done. I just, I couldn’t find her and it was all my fault.”
“You passed out?” Aly prompted gently, again directing me away from the pain as I clung to her.
“I don’t remember. I remember the accident, I remember things much later, but a lot of stuff before that, even things that had happened days, months before, and especially the details of how we were found, no.” That had been one of the biggest frustrations, the not knowing. Not seeing her after that boat flipped. “It’s why I didn’t remember you or connect the dots that you were the girl whose father I ran off. My short term memory is still sort of messed up. But passing out? I just don’t know if that’s what happened or what. One minute I was hanging on boat begging God to kill me, praying that somehow Emily was on the shore or somewhere in the marsh, somewhere…and the next thing I remember is my father leaning over me as our neighbor rushed us back to the lake house in his boat.”
Dad had looked so scared. I knew why. He’d already lost Luka. That loss still ran deep, and the cost had been excruciating. And now his son?
Aly kissed my forehead, but I still had more to say. She needed to hear everything. When I moved back, looking down at her, Aly frowned, looking confused by the distance I put between us, but she let me have my space. “I left her out there, Aly. I…I left her alone.”
“That wasn’t your choice, cheri.”
I ignored her, wondering why she wasn’t listening, needing her to understand what kind of man I was. “She died out there alone.”
There was a pause, a silence, and all I could feel was my shame and my self-loathing. But then she spoke, and her voice spanned that ugly void that I carried inside of me.
“Haven’t you been doing the same thing?”
Only Aly could lay it out there for me, could stun me silent. She was right. She saw it, that I had been punishing myself—and I wasn’t done punishing myself. When Aly reached for my hand, I let her take it, still too much of a coward to keep from grasping the lifeline she offered.
“They wouldn’t let me see her…at the hospital…I knew they’d found her body because the cops came to my room and my dad cut them off at the door. My mom with was the doctor, and they wouldn’t let me…” I sat up, wiping my face dry. “I was released from the hospital the next day. But as we were leaving, Emily’s father came up to me. He was so angry. He attacked me. I thought he would kill me with his bare hands. I didn’t fight back. Part of me actually wanted him to kill me, but Kona…Dad, pulled him off and then kept him away from me. Kept telling the man, ‘this won’t bring her back. This won’t help.’” He protected me, had done what fathers are supposed to do for their children. So had Emily’s father, at least that day, because he hadn’t been able to protect her from me before then.
“Aly, when he stopped fighting… when he stopped trying to attack me, well….I’d never seen anyone look so lost in my life. It was as if everything had been taken from him. And it had. I had taken everything he loved away from him. The pain in his eyes….”
I sighed, helpless to do anything else but remember his haunted expression. But Aly, she needed to hear it all.