AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I had trusted him with it all.
I even told him about getting pregnant last year, how I had dropped out of school to have the baby. And how, unlike Holly, who had given birth to hers only to have to give it up—I had carried mine for just six months before the stepbeast had beaten me within an inch of my life and my little girl had died inside of me. She’d been dead a week before he took me to the hospital. Long enough for the bruises to heal.
“What is the secret of this belt?” I mused, smiling as I tugged on it, pulling him close enough so I could put my arms around his waist, the studs digging into my bruised cheek, but I didn’t care. “Is it magical? Did you trade your soul for it? Does it give you your amazing voice?”
Dale stroked my hair and I heard the click in his throat as he swallowed. “You’ve told me so much truth in the past couple weeks. I guess it’s time I told you mine.”
I blinked up at him, bemused. “It really is magic?”
“No.” He smiled, sitting next to me on the bed, taking my hand in his. “It’s my father’s.”
“John’s?”
“No. Not my dad. My father. My biological father.” He met my eyes, waiting for me to connect the dots. It took me longer than it should have.
“Well if it’s not John’s…” I paused, my gaze distracted by a photograph on the wall, the one I had painted—Tyler and Chloe, father and daughter, the picture I had transformed into my symbolic wish fulfillment.
And I remembered how he had said her name that day he saw my painting, like he knew her, and of course, he had. His mother had been having an affair with Tyler for… years.
“Tyler?” I guessed.
“She told me the day she left. I suspected, after what I saw, but she admitted it was true.”
“And John doesn’t know,” I whispered, my heart breaking for him, for both of them. “Does Tyler know?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“And your sister?”
“Tyler’s. Chrissy knows. She chose to stay with my mother.”
“You’re both his?” I blinked at him, stunned by his revelation. “And John… he never knew? How could he not know?”
“How did your mother not know your father was…” His face hardened, eyes pained.
“But she did,” I whispered. “I even told her, eventually. And still she didn’t want to believe.”
“Sometimes the truth is too hard for any of us to face.”
I rested my cheek against his chest, running my fingertips over the studs on his belt. “So why do you wear it, if it was his?”
“To remind me…” His put his hand over mine at his waist. “Every day I put it on to remind me what not to be… what are you doing?”
I had opened the locket around my neck with my fingernail and was prying out the picture of Tyler, the one Dale had cut into a heart shape and put inside.
“I don’t need this anymore.” I looked at the image of the man I had admired, the one I had created in my mind, built up and put on an impossibly high pedestal. It put it down on the bed, closing the locket with only Dale’s picture left inside—he was all I needed, all I had ever needed.
“He belongs here. But I don’t.”
“No, you belong with me.” He put his arms around me, kissing the top of my head. “You’re mine. Now and forever.”
“I love you, Dale,” I whispered against his chest as he rocked me slowly back and forth.
One soft kiss on my forehead. “I know.”
“Will you sing to me?”
“There’s nothin’ more that I can do
