“She called you Holly.”
“Of course, she did. I always hated when people got my name wrong.”
“It’s close.”
“Not the same.”
“She said you were like a sister to her.”
“What else did she say?”
“That you wouldn’t approve of her moving away from your hometown to come live with the bears,” he smiles.
“She didn’t tell you that she ran off, did she?”
“I kind of figured as much, love. Nobody shows up in bear country without being on the run from something. No human, anyway.”
“You never asked her? You never wanted to find out what she was running from?”
He shrugs and then looks at me carefully, considering how much he’s going to say.
“Alexis, you’ll come to see that I’m a very patient man. I’m not about to get upset because someone doesn’t want to share information with me. She would have told me eventually. She would have told me once she was ready.”
I swallow hard.
Alexis really broke him, didn’t she?
I can’t
imagine how scared or horrified he must have been when he found out she was dead the first time. I can’t imagine how he must have felt when he discovered that she had passed away and that not only was she gone, but their baby was, too.
“Her dad found her,” I say, feeling the need to continue the story.
“How?”
“She got a new job,” I say.
“At the call center,” he sighs, knowing what I’m talking about.
“Someone recognized her and phoned her dad.”
“Fucking hell.”
“You can say that again. I guess he came to her when she was at work. She took off.”
“That explains why she left work early that day,” Jace says. “No one could figure out why. Not the people who worked there. Not the cops. Nobody seemed to understand why little Alexis would have left in such a rush or why she would have run her car off a bridge.”
“They thought it was suicide?”
He shrugs.
“Nobody who knew Alexis ever thought it was suicide. We just didn’t know.”
Chapter Four
Jace
“Let’s put the baby to bed,” she says gently. I look down and realize that Brandon has fallen asleep in my arms. He’s no longer sipping on the bottle and in fact, there’s a drop of milk on his cheek where the nipple leaked just a little.