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“Because you’re the last person I want looking at me with pity. The last person I want looking at me and thinking that I must be consumed with grief.”
A disturbance whirled around him, and I thought it was shame that slammed me on a palpable wave.
“Aren’t you?”
His fingers encircled my wrist, stopping me from continuing to trace the lines of the tattoo. I got the impression it was causing him too much pain. Etching the scars deeper. Reopening a wound.
“I’m filled with hate and rage, Savannah, for the ones who took her from this world. At the ones who stole her from my kids and from her family.” His voice cracked. “But I have no right to grief.”
Confusion bound me, and Ezra blew out a long strain of air. He quietly began to explain, his voice so quiet, like he could hardly stand the idea of anyone hearing what he said.
“Everyone thought Brianna and I were the perfect couple. Inseparable. Two people who just were from the instant they came together.”
He might have said he didn’t have a right to grief, but I could feel it seeping from him.
I eased back a fraction so I could capture every intonation.
The cadence of his words and every innuendo hidden in his expression.
“I met her at Mack’s. She was super cool. Cute and sweet.”
Releasing my wrist, he twined a lock of my hair around his finger, as if it offered him a distraction from the tension that bound his muscles. “We started dating…more so hooking up, I guess.” Air huffed from his nose as he sorted through the memories in his mind. His gaze kept flicking away before it would return to me.
I set my hand on his cheek, needing to touch him, to let him know that I was here for him, and I’d hold whatever he needed to say.
“I liked her, a lot, and when she told me she was pregnant a few months later, we decided we were going to do the family thing together. Get married. Buy a house. I was happy. Really fucking happy because I’d always wanted kids…a whole houseful of them.”
A soft smile tugged at his mouth, riddled with the love that he had for his children.
“You have a pretty amazing houseful of them,” I told him, my voice rougher than it should be.
But his kids had managed to seep through the cracks, too, every time they were out there in the backyard this last week shouting for me, their little faces so sweet and brimming with excitement as they would fill me in on every detail of the day.
It’d become the best part of mine.
A wash of sadness infiltrated Ezra’s expression. “Those kids are my life, Savannah, and I wanted to give them the safest home. One filled with love and security. And things were good for a long time. But after the boys were born…” Sorrow had him hesitating before he said, “Something inside of Brianna broke.”
My heart chugged at the turmoil in his voice, at the regret that intruded on every word. “I don’t know if it was postpartum depression or if she’d struggled in the past or it was something brand new, if she was unhappy or what the fuck it was, but her behavior became erratic.”
Ezra blinked, and in the depths of those honey eyes was a vat of torment. “She worked as a receptionist at one of the doctor’s offices here in town, and it started with her missing shifts…calling in sick. I should have taken it more seriously. Known something was wrong, but I just thought she was tired. I mean, fuck, she had six-month-old twins and trying to keep up with their schedules was exhausting for both of us. But she’d insisted that she wanted to go back to work, and she needed time for herself, which I fully got and respected.”
His head shook on the pillow, and I ran my thumb along the stony angle of his cheek, trying to give him whatever comfort I could when it was clear he was barely keeping it together. “She’d began drinking a lot…coming and going all hours of the night…making choices that were dangerous. It wasn’t long before she’d started coming up with these outrageous stories, thinking people were after her, just completely delusional and paranoid.”
A barbed knot rolled his throat when he swallowed. “I begged her to get help, and she was supposed to be seeing a therapist and taking meds, but it turned out she hadn’t been doing either of those things. She kept promising that she would be better, but it turned into this cycle that never ended. We started fighting all the time, and each time that she left me up worrying about her in the middle of the night, I felt the threads of my love for her being ripped away. Close to the end, I found out she was having an affair.”
