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What matters to me is that you’re safe. The money is just a start—there will be more in your bank account before nightfall. The car is yours; I’ll get another. The room is paid for. Everything that’s mine is yours, even my name if you want it.
Go do the things you were meant to do. The things that will make you the person you’re born to be. Leave the old things behind, the things that don’t matter. Find Dani Farraday, and become her. That’s all I ask—that, and that you keep yourself safe. Don’t take risks for me.
I’m not gone. I’ll help you. And if anything happens to me, you know the drill. Go to Devon, or Max Reilly in San Francisco.
If you want a divorce, say the word, because I don’t own you and I never have. You own yourself. But until I hear that word from you, I consider myself married. To you.
You know what? Even if you divorce me, I’ll still consider myself married to you. Until I die.
Whatever there is of me—it’s yours. Even if you don’t want it, and even if it isn’t much. But that’s the deal, sorry. You asked what I wanted, and that’s the answer. For me, it’s never been any other way.
-Cavan
I called him. Of course I called him. On the new phone we’d bought me yesterday, before the wedding, before we were married, before we’d done all the things we’d done that made me a different person. I called him and he picked up.
“Dani,” he said. There was white noise behind him—a highway, maybe, or traffic.
“You’re going back to Arizona, aren’t you?” I said, my voice cracking.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It does!” I shouted. I gripped the edge of the table. Tears came in a rush, up the back of my throat. I couldn’t stop them. I started to cry. He was going back to McMurphy, alone. Because of me. “Don’t do it, Cav. Please.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “And don’t cry, okay? I can’t take that.”
“If I cry, will you come back?” I said through a sob.
“No, baby, I don’t think I will. I’m not what you need right now. Not for a little while. So yeah, I’m going to Arizona. It’s the only thing to do.”
I pulled my knees up and hugged them as heartbreak hit me like a hammer. It hurt. I was still stark naked; his come was still inside me. It hurt.
“Please don’t,” I said. “I love you.” I’d never said that to him, I realized. Not once. If I’d said it, would he have stayed?
“You think you do,” Cavan said, and for the first time there was a slight crack in his voice, like he was feeling more than he let on. Only someone who knew him would be able to tell. “You feel a lot of things for me, Dani, but I’m not sure love is one of them. And we can’t be married if you’re not sure.”
“I am sure,” I said, mopping tears from my cheek with the back of my wrist. “I’ve loved you from the first, I think.”
“Ah, no. That was me,” he said. “It was over for me when you walked in that day. But for you, it’s different. You never had a chance to figure anything out on your own. You had McMurphy, and then me. You’re not in that equation anywhere, Dani. Just you. So I’m giving you that. I have to.”
“Why?” I said. I was crying again, trying to swallow it all back down. “Why are you doing this? Why did you do any of it? Leave with me, take on McMurphy, give me your money, marry me? Why me?”
He was quiet for a second, and I could hear the rush of traffic. Where was he? Had he gotten as far as Phoenix yet? “I never told you what happened with my mother,” he said.
I went quiet, waiting.
“It was my fault,” he said, that crack in his voice again. Just the sound of it wrenched my heart. “She had this boyfriend, Patrick. It was bad. The signs were there—all of them. He’d run her down, insult her, call her a cunt and a slut. He cut her off from her friends. He was always accusing her of cheating on him, fucking every man she saw. He was using drugs, dealing. He’d shout at her in public. It was fucking textbook. It was all there.”
I listened, but I had chills down my spine. I recognized all of those things. That had been my life.
“He hated Devon and me,” Cavan continued. “Devon was sixteen; I was eighteen. We’d run wild, like feral cats. We had too many years alone, too many years with her boyfriends coming and going. Mom was difficult; she wasn’t easy to like but she’d had a hard fucking life, and it made her cagey and vulnerable to a certain kind of man. There was a certain kind of man who could convince her he’d fix everything, at least at first, and she’d believe him. Patrick was that kind, but worse. The worst of all of them.”
I rested my head on my knees, the tears coming slower now. I was starting to understand.
This was me, all me. “Did he hit her?” I asked.
“She never admitted it,” Cavan answered me. “That’s what I mean when I say she was cagey. She knew Devon and I would probably pick a fight with him, the cops would come—it would be a big fucking mess. She wanted it all quiet, because she thought she could handle it. She thought she had it under control.”
I closed my eyes. Oh, yes, I knew that feeling so well. “What happened?” I asked.
