My knees gave out and I screamed for Sandra. I felt so lost. Sandra ran towards me, but I didn’t allow her to touch me. I didn’t want anyone to come close to me. It felt as though once again, everything had been reset and I knew absolutely nothing.
I’d never felt so defeated. “Show me what you have,” I snarled.
With a sympathetic look on his face, Bradley pulled his phone out of his pocket.
47
Caleb
Willow was coming over.
At first, I’d been surprised by her sudden call, but what concerned me even more was the coldness in her tone. She sounded like a stranger. An emotionless robot. My mind went to that bastard, and I wondered if he had finally poured his poison into her ear.
Waiting for her to arrive was the most excruciating time of my life. The last time I had been half as nervous about anything was the week after I’d been arrested, and the Sheriff told me that Willow had lost her memory. When I realized Willow had forgotten me. Twelve years later, I was experiencing it all over again at the possibility that Willow was going to forsake me again.
The very thought was enough to devastate me.
But I promised myself that even if she had learned of what I’d done, I would never tell her why I’d done it, because my love for her was greater than my love for myself. I promised myself that she would never find out what her uncle had done to her from me. I would guard her from that knowledge with my life. For as long as I lived. I would rather be in prison for the rest of my life than remind her she was abused and raped by her own uncle for a whole year.
And that was what scared me the most.
Because if she had found out then, was she coming to ask me the reason I had done it? But I would never be able to tell her. I watched her suffer once, and I’d be damned to hell if I had to watch her suffer twice from the same pain.
I met her at the elevator and she wasn’t expecting that because she froze the moment she saw me. Then she forced a smile to her lips, and stepped out. I didn’t smile back. I couldn’t. I felt as if my heart was breaking inside me.
I watched her fiddle with the strap of her purse. She couldn’t meet my eyes. Without running into my arms for a hug or kiss as was her habit, she continued on her way towards my office.
We arrived in my office, and she quickly moved towards the window.
“How have you been?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“Okay,” I murmured.
“That’s good,” she said woodenly.
“Will you take a seat?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I knew I needed to sit down for this, so I headed over to my chair and lowered myself into it, and met her gaze. With every breath I took, I could feel her slipping away. Further and further. And there was not a damn thing I could do about it. It seemed as if this would be one of the last times I would ever see her in my life. After this she would become a stranger. She was almost one already.
A smile trembled onto her lips, but I could see the tears that had welled up in her eyes. Then she began to speak.
“I just had a talk with my parents and they told me that—”
She paused a few seconds to get herself together. “They confirmed that the man who killed my uncle was named Caleb Daniel Wolfe. Bradley says … Bradley says that you’re the same person. I can’t believe I’m asking you this, but …”
She turned away as the tears rolled down her face.
I wanted to go to her. To apologize for how cruel the world was because it wouldn’t even let me show my real self to her, or allow me to keep the promise I had made to her to protect her forever. Well, I would keep that promise even though the cost of keeping the truth from her would cost me the privilege of being her man, her husband, her lover, her best-friend, the father of her children, her rock through everything life threw at her.
That, I had to live with. That, I would live with, even if it killed me.
“Are you—” she began but couldn’t continue.
I did nothing. I just stared at her. I drank in the sight of her. Memorized every aspect of her. Her hair, her eyes, her lips, her eyebrows, the curve of her cheek, her throat, her body, that she had covered in a drab shirt and the baggy jeans she used when she was planting.
A few seconds later she summoned up courage. “Are you the one? The same Caleb Wolfe?”