But she told me.
She said he was going away, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
There’s a college just a few towns over, and pretty much everyone in Claw Valley does their undergraduate studies there. Brendan and I both did, but for grad school…
Well, she just said it was super important.
“I’m sorry she tricked you,” he says.
“I…”
She stole everything from me.
I never would have broken up with him. Not in a million years, but I wanted him to be happy. I wanted him to be loved and content, and I wanted him to get his own happy ending. In my mind, giving him up meant giving him a future. It meant that he was going to be able to carve his own way out in the world without the burden of taking care of me.
And then Brendan comes to me.
He gets up, and he walks over, and he pulls me up off of the couch. He tugs me into his arms, and he wraps himself around me like a guardian.
“Brendan, I’m so sorry,” I say, and that’s when the tears start to fall. “I didn’t know. I trusted her.”
“I trusted her, too. Foxy, I cried over you so many times. I shed so many tears, and she never told me. She never told me just how big of a role she played in you leaving. She never felt the need to let me know you were leaving because of her.”
“If I had known, I never would have said goodbye.”
There’s a part of me that wonders why I even listened to her.
We’ve lost so much time.
And now it’s too late.
I found myself at Brendan’s house because of the tiger who attacked me, but now…
Now I’m right back where I was all of those years ago, and my heart hurts just as badly.
“I need to go home,” I tell him, suddenly pulling back. “I’m sorry, Brendan, but I should go.”
“No.”
“What?”
He can’t keep me here. I’m not a prisoner.
“You aren’t safe, Felicity. You don’t have to do anything with me, but I want you to stay here. It’s safer here. I can protect you. Until we know who this guy is and what he wants and what he’s after, then it’s best if you stay here.”
He wants me with him, under the same roof as him, and I…
Is that a good idea?
It really, really doesn’t feel like a good idea.
“I have a guest room,” he says, like that matters.
“Yeah,” I finally choke the words out. “Okay.”
“Okay,” he agrees, and somehow, that seems to settle it. In a daze, I follow as he leads me through his cute little house, up some stairs, and to the guest bedroom. It’s decorated with these big stripes in every color of the rainbow. I turn to him and raise an eyebrow. I mean, he’s a grown man. Most people have a guest room that looks like someplace a grandmother would sleep, but not Brendan.
This room has a huge bed in the center of the room with a big red blanket on it. There are orange and yellow pillows on top. All of the other furniture in the room is equally colorful: a blue desk, a green dresser. There’s even a purple nightstand.