If I were real.
If this feeling that lulled and lapped and swam around us was just a figment of the afterlife.
It’d been close.
So close.
We’d lost him twice.
Two times he’d coded.
His body rejecting the attempts the doctors made at savin’ his life.
Two times I’d begged him to come back to me. To find me in the darkness where I’d forever been falling for him.
His thick throat bobbed as he swallowed around the dryness. “Violet.”
I edged forward and brushed back the hair from his face. “I’m right here. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Richard breathed out in relief before he was lost to torment again. “Lily?” he begged.
“She’s safe. She was injured, but it wasn’t life-threatening.”
“The rest of the girls?”
“Safe. They’re all safe. Because of you.”
His head minutely shook. “I—I never wanted to leave you. Not once. But Lily was right…I couldn’t risk getting you involved in that life. I had to walk. Stay as far away as possible. And then once I found Lily again…everything changed, Violet. The focus. My reason. I think the whole time, I felt myself on the way back to you.”
“Shh. I know, Richard. I know. Lily told me everything.”
“I’m sorry. So fuckin’ sorry.”
The corner of my mouth trembled. Emotion this ball that bubbled and grew and grasped for what we were.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. That I didn’t listen.”
Richard attempted to sit up.
“Try not to move. You still have a lot of healing to do.”
Two gunshot wounds.
One to his abdomen. One to his left shoulder.
The man my miracle.
He grappled for my hand. “All of it was on me. My fault. I wanted the band’s success so fuckin’ bad that I missed it. Missed every warning before it was too late. A fool to trust who clearly shouldn’t be trusted. I started it, and I never knew how to stop it.”
“But you risked it all. For her. For them.”
“Freeing them was all I had left to give.”
My fingers traced the shape of his unforgettable face. “Because you’re a good, good man who got lost somewhere along the way.”
“And you still found me in the darkness.”
“I just had to listen with my heart.”
Joy and sorrow.
They bustled through the atmosphere, throbbing in time with the beat of the heart monitor. Most of the machines that had surrounded us for the last week had been disconnected. No longer needed to sustain his life because he’d come back to me.
“Where is Lily?”
“In protective custody. Until they know for sure it’s safe.” I kept brushing my fingertips along the scruff of his jaw, unwilling to let go of the connection. “More than two-hundred-fifty arrests have been made.”
Anger huffed from his nose.
“They found two more houses, Richard. A total of forty captives were freed.”
Moisture clouded his eyes, and god, I loved and I loved.
This beautiful, broken man.
“Lester Ford?” he pushed out.
I nodded. “They finally got him, too. He tried to disappear, but he was arrested in South America two days ago. He’s being extradited as we speak.”
“It’s over.”
My smile wobbled. “It’s over.”Late afternoon light filtered through our childhood home. Drenching it in love and warmth and hope. I wanted to cling to it. To let love whisper its faith into my spirit.
But all of this was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
But with it came joy.
A juxtaposition that thrashed and banged and calmed.
Maybe it was hers that was crashing into mine, the trembling that reverberated from her body and flooded the room with uncertainty.
As if she no longer knew where she belonged or where she stood.
I could only let her know where I did.
I reached out and squeezed the hand of her arm that was casted. It was where she had sustained the gunshot that had shattered her upper arm. An external injury that would heal. I just prayed all the scars littered inside could one day do the same.
Liliana squeezed back. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she wheezed through a stuttered breath of pain, staring up at the staircase like it was going to swallow her.
“It’s the one thing she wanted. She needs this.”
My big sister sniffled, and my heart jerked in time.
“Just…stay with me, okay?”
“I’ve always been with you, even when you weren’t standing right next to me,” I told her, wishing she would have understood that from the beginning.
That she would have fought for herself as hard as she’d fought for me. If she would have sacrificed for herself what she’d sacrificed for the rest of us.
I still couldn’t bear it—the truth of what she’d endured.
She nodded as tears coursed down her face.
We started up the stairs.
One step joy.
Another devastation.
Another echoing with the memory of us stampeding up them when we were little, our mama yelling from the living room to be careful in her gentle way, chuckling under her breath that we might as well have been boys with the way we roughhoused.