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She rested her head on Gabriel’s shoulder and stared at Nathan’s passive expression. “I should tell Gabriel what I told you,” she said quietly.
“Only if you want to,” Gabriel responded.
Suzanna took a deep breath and told him all the things she’d told Nathan in the car on the ride here. Neither one of them said a word while she spoke. The fright of her college stalker, the seemingly endless moving, the lonely years she endured once he was gone, the foolish mistake with Marcus, and her journey to Montana were all revealed.
She continued, wanting to get more of her past out and away from her soul. “And it all started with one stupid blind date in college. My college roommate had Kevin in one of her classes, and he seemed nice. He asked her to set up the date between us.
“We met for coffee, and I could tell pretty much after talking to him for the first five minutes that he wasn’t for me. No spark. Nothing in common. So I made up an excuse, and left the date early. But he kept following me everywhere and asking me out again and again.”
“So you only went on one date with the guy?” Gabriel asked.
She nodded. “The worst part came later. My roommate felt horrible about him chasing me every day, so she had her very tall, weight lifter brother visit from a neighboring college to tell Kevin to leave me alone. And he did stay away, but not for long.” She shuddered recalling the memory.
“What happened?” Nathan asked.
“A few days after they ‘talked,’ my roommate’s brother was struck by a hit-and-run driver. Both of his legs were broken. He lost his football scholarship. To this day he still walks with a cane.”
“No one could pin it on Kevin, right?”
She nodded again. “I felt horrible, even though my roommate and her brother never blamed me. Not surprisingly, Kevin resumed hounding me the very next day.”
It was so cathartic to admit everything. Well, almost everything. To share and let go each and every detail of her tragic past, held bottled up for so long, was like a release of sorts. And she was spent afterwards. The only information she held back was specific details about Kevin’s death. She snuggled against Gabriel.
He kissed her forehead when she stopped talking. “May I ask a question?”
“You want to know what happened to Kevin.”
“If you’d like to share. I’m just curious.”
Nathan stroked his fingertips from her knee to her ankle. “You’ll feel better if you get it all out.”
She nodded. He was right. Best to get it all out once and for all. She’d never done that even in the privacy of her own cocooned world the last several years.
Suzanna tilted her gaze to the ceiling and started talking before she even realized she was ready to speak. The words tumbled forth without effort. “The day Kevin died was the worst day of them all.
“I had just finished moving away from ‘discovered city number ten’ to ‘hopefully impossible to find place number eleven.’ Because it always took me a while to feel safe before I contacted my parents again, I didn’t find out that they had died until it was almost too late to go to the quickly arranged funeral. My parents had both been killed in an automobile accident during a very bad snowstorm. They were trying to get my father to the hospital after he had experienced chest pains.
“I barely made it to the funeral for them both set up in my hometown. I was beside myself with sorrow, convinced that all my moving around had caused the episode with my father and led to his death. My head was filled with the most visceral guilt, and as I was walking away, there he was at the edge of the cemetery watching me. Kevin had followed me, naturally, because that’s what he did. That’s all he ever did.
“In my utter, inconsolable grief, I did the opposite of what I usually did. Instead of running, I approached him. I was so furious that he’d invaded my final moments with my parents. I marched close enough to touch him and slapped his face a couple of times. All the while I screamed at him, unleashing eleven moves’ worth of rage. I blamed him for my parents’ deaths. I blamed him for my not being with them. I blamed him for causing my father’s heart attack.
