What people didn’t understand was Mackenzie’s lifewasnormal. It was just a different kind of comfort and balance she sought. She was proud of the leaps she’d made in getting there.
Her doctors praised her for how fast she’d progressed, how she’d embraced her rehabilitation. The only thing she had yet to master was reentry. How to make her new normal work with everyone else’s normal. So when those awkward moments happened, they wouldn’t be so isolating—or devastating.
“Don’t worry.” She grabbed the harness and stood, Muttley steadily at her side. “I get that a lot.”
“I wasn’t talking about your sight,” Hunter said, coming to stand in front of her. “I was talking about you, your music, everything else I’ve missed out on. You disappeared on me. I had no idea what happened.”
His anguish was raw and real and made Mackenzie’s stomach cave in on itself—and her feet shift to find a clear path.
“What was I supposed to do? Walk into your dressing room, a few minutes before you were supposed to walk down the aisle, and tell you I was going blind?” She took a step to the right and bumped into something large with rounded corners. “That all of the plans we had for touring and the band were over for me?”
“If that’s what it took, then yeah.”
She moved forward and felt the space tighten. Her emotions were out of control, so disorienting she couldn’t remember the exact layout of the room. And she couldn’t slow down enough to let Muttley do his job.
“It was yourwedding. You had a honeymoon to go on and a tour starting right after. I didn’t want to hold you back.” Didn’t want him to witness her independence wilting away. “I knew I could handle it on my own.”
“This isn’t about what you can or can’t handle,” he said, his voice right behind her. No matter how many steps she moved, he was right there.
A total Hunter move. Get close, get personal, then get sweet-talking.
Problem was, it had been a long while since someone had sweet-talked Mackenzie, a language in which Hunter was fluent. Although his tone was far from sweet. In fact, he sounded angry—an emotion she’d never felt from him before with regard to her.
“This is about our friendship. About you deciding how much I was allowed to care for you.Jesus,you were a no-show at my wedding, then disappeared without a word.” No, not anger ... fury.
“Big Daddy knew where I was,” she said.
“And he was guilted into silence, I bet.Jesus,all I knew was that you’d quit the band and were going in a different direction. He never said much more, leaving me to replay the last six months before the wedding, what I could have said, what I could have done so wrong that you’d cut me out of your life.”
A wave of guilt washed over her, moving around her stomach before settling like hot lead in her chest. She knew better than anyone how crushing the weight of uncertainty could be, how tiring it was to obsess over where things had gone wrong. Figure out exactly where she came up lacking.
Her mother’s death had paralyzed her, but it was the all-encompassing guilt that had finally pulled her under.
“I was trying to do the right thing. My life was going to change, but that didn’t mean yours had to,” she said, finally letting Muttley lead her through the maze of furniture. “I knew if I told you about my disease, you’d want to help, postpone the tour to take care of me. But you deserved to enjoy your success, live a happy life with Hadley.”
“You were a part of that happy life. And what went down between us had nothing to do with the band or Hadley.” Suddenly he was directly in front of her, blocking her path, and it felt as if the walls wereclosing in. And that distress, the one she’d felt the first time she’d awoken to find everything had faded into the shadows, came rushing back.
Sometimes, being blind was similar to being bound: no matter how hard she fought, she’d never break free. Some days it was a lonely existence, and other days the darkness went far deeper than missing the spectrum of colors that made life warm.
“It had to do with you not trusting me,” he said.
“It had to do with trusting myself,” she clarified. “All I wanted was for you to be happy, but the engagement flew by, and working with you became harder and harder. I knew I would eventually lose my sight, next would come my home, and then my freedom.” She pushed through the emotion. “I couldn’t survive standing by and watching the last thing I loved slip away.”
Hunter stopped breathing. She felt it. Felt the energy thicken and the reality of what she’d admitted push down on the both of them.
She couldn’t see his face, didn’t know what expression he was wearing, but knew she’d dropped a bomb so destructive it had splintered Hunter’s foundation. Shredded the conversation until all that remained was her admission of love.
Mackenzie didn’t know what was worse: unrequited love or her being so far under his radar that her admission came as a shock.
“You should have told me.” His voice was so low she had a hard time picking up on the cues she needed to decipher his expression.
“Would it have made a difference?” A question she’d carried with her every day. A question that had expanded since news of the divorce hit, until sometimes it was all she could think about.
“Honestly, I don’t know, but we would have worked it out. We’ve always worked it out. It’s what made us such a strong team. Or at least I thought it had, but I must have been missing something if you thought your only option was to run.”
“What other options would there be?” she whispered. “Sit on the porch and wait. For the band to leave on tour, for you to start livingyour new life, for everything and everyone I knew to keep moving in the same direction while I walked up and down those front steps of my house over and over until my doctors thought I could handle stepping onto the sidewalk?”
“Mackenzie,” he said quietly.
