Tears drown my vision. Tremors shake my fingers against the handlebars. All the ugly inside me crawls from my throat and hits the air in a wreckage of sound.
When Lorne was hauled away, I lost a vital part of myself. When I was separated from the ranch, I became half a person. When I left Dad face down on the couch, more pieces of me tore loose. But I still had something left. I still had Jake.
Now I have no one, nothing, and nowhere to go. I’m completely carved out.
A few miles from the ranch, the vicious shaking in my body grows so unmanageable I pull off on a dirt path and park in a grove of trees.
Killing the engine, I slide off the bike and curl up on the ground, where things get abandoned, where trash is tossed, forgotten, and never collected.
There, I contemplate dying. Ending it all. I could hang myself, all alone, swinging by a rope around my neck. Wouldn’t that be symbolic? A tragedy that began and ended on a birthday with a passionately knotted rope.
Then I think about being found that way. Being remembered as the girl who killed herself because she loved a boy. Because the boy didn’t love her back. Boo hoo. So sad. How fucking pathetic.
I’m not that girl.
Nor am I the girl he wants.
I want to be her.
Sara Gilly.
I want to wear her skin and feel his touch.
I want to be her breath and fill his lungs.
I want to embody every part of her he wants.
Lying in the dirt on my side, I tuck my knees to my mouth and yearn for all the things I’m not.
I’m like that song by Little Big Town. Girl Crush. God, the lyrics have it exactly right. I think about it, crying as I try to sing it, warbling the words I remember, scraping every note from the corroded, dried-up bottom of my soul, and hating myself more.
I can never be Sara Gilly. But I am a person, and the pain that consumes me is more than I can withstand.
Everything rises to the surface. Everything I am. Everything I feel. Every hurt, weakness, and break inside me drains from the darkest depths of my being. The night in the ravine, the abuse in Chicago, the pain in Jake’s room—I let it all out, sobbing, trembling, screaming until my throat shreds, until a mess of snot and sweat covers my skin, until I’m utterly depleted.
I cry until all that remains is a loveless, empty, unfeeling core of nothingness. I become that hardened center and shed the tender, tear-soaked wrapper. It falls off like tattered clothes and litters the ground. Then I step away from the debris.
I leave the bruises, the soggy flesh, and the puddle of susceptible emotions.
I leave the girl who loved a boy with her whole heart.
I abandon her there on the side of the road. Let her rot in post mortem.
Feeling lighter, calmer, I embrace the void of nothing at all and walk away.
I leave Sandbank.
I stand on the front lawn long after Conor rides away, arrested by the lingering echo of her beauty, her strength, and her pain. She’s always been gorgeous, but fucking hell, the woman she’s become is so stunning, so fiercely potent and bewitching there isn’t a man on the planet who could resist her.
That scares the ever-loving hell out of me.
How can I protect her when I can barely protect her from myself?
She was supposed to be safe in Chicago. I held onto that belief for two grueling goddamn years. But her dad didn’t give her refuge. He gave her bruises. Soul-deep bruises. The kind only a father can inflict.
My chest constricts, and helpless rage heats my blood.
After Conor was taken from me, I learned a great deal about Dalton Cassidy. He didn’t want to leave Oklahoma. Didn’t want to sell the ranch. Whoever’s threatening his family forced his hand. Whatever’s keeping him away from Sandbank is bigger and more powerful than the amateur hitmen in the ravine.
Conor and Lorne were supposed to die that night, and if they return to the ranch, another attempt will be made on their lives.
Most of my information comes from Lorne during my visits to the penitentiary. I can’t refute his claims. Dalton gave up his home, his job, and his happiness. He made sure his son went to prison. He moved Conor across the country. He did all this to keep them alive.
His enemies and their motivations are so intricately and deeply buried I’ve only scratched the surface. Piecing together what Lorne feeds me, along with the shady shit I’ve uncovered in the ranch’s business records, I have so many suspicions and suspects and theories. But nothing concrete. Not yet.
Lorne’s intel trickles from his dad, and it’s erratic and heavily filtered. Dalton barely talks to him. I’m certain Lorne doesn’t know about the drinking or the abuse. Of course, Conor didn’t mention it in her messages. She’d rather suffer quietly than worry us.