Page 164 of Taken Away

His eyes lifted to hers, all shadow in the room’s dim light. “And you never knew.”

“I never knew.” A sharp, broken laugh escaped her—wild, thin, empty of humor. “She mailed them every single year. And Anne kept sending them back. Telling her to stop. Telling her I wasn’t interested.”

Bennett’s hand tightened around the card, his knuckles turning white. For a second, she thought the linen might rip under his grip, but he controlled the reflex, setting the document down on the floorboards beside them like a sacred relic.

Then, he reached for her.

He didn’t offer a speech. His large, warm arms simply came around her shoulders and hauled her forward into the solid heat of his chest. The movement was so certain, so protective, that her pride failed her completely. Her forehead hit his shoulder, and the familiar mix of clean soap and his cologne wrapped around her like an inescapable sanctuary. The last of her control broke apart.

Aubrey hated crying—hated the vulnerability, the exposure, the lack of control. But this didn’t feel like weakness; it felt like a century of hard-packed, frozen grief finally breaking apart under the sheer weight of his hold.

“I spent my whole life thinking nobody wanted me,” she choked out against his chest.

Bennett’s arms tightened around her. One hand settled at the small of her back while the other cradled her against his chest. He didn’t try to fix it with cheap corporate words. He let his large palm rest warm and steady between her shoulder blades.

“I know, baby,” he murmured into her hair, his own breathing turning ragged. “I’m here.”

“You don’t,” she rasped, her fingers fisting tightly into his shirt. “You can’t know. Every single birthday, I waited. Every year I told myself it didn’t matter, and then I’d still look at the front door. Just in case. She never came. She always had some crisis. Some man. Some excuse.” Her voice cracked completely, the words tearing out of her. “And all this time… someone did want me. Mabel wanted me. She tried. She was right here, and I didn’t know.”

Bennett’s eyes closed, his face burying into the cool blonde strands of her hair. “I know,” he whispered. “Mabel was one of a kind. She saw things other people missed entirely. She reached me when no other human being on this earth could.”

Aubrey stilled against him.

He drew back enough that she was forced to look at him. As he lifted a hand toward her face, the wedding band on his left hand caught the fading light from the bedroom window.

Aubrey’s gaze flickered to it.

Claire.

The woman he’d loved enough to still wear his wedding band six years after her death.

Something tightened in her chest. Not jealousy. Not even disappointment. The sudden reminder that a part of him still belonged to someone else.

Bennett’s thumb brushed away a tear.

“After Claire died...” Bennett said quietly, his eyes meeting hers. “I was gone. Just gone. I drank to get through the daylight, to get through the night, to get through breathing. People told me to move on. Mabel was the only one who looked at me and saw that I was actively drowning.”His gaze drifted over the forensic smudges on the nightstand, the bare mattress, and the chest.

“She wouldn’t let me go,” he said simply.

Aubrey lifted her shaking hands to his face, her palms pressing flat against his cheeks. The rough scrape of his overnight stubble grounded her instantly in the room. Then, she leaned in and kissed his mouth—soft, certain, a thank-you and a desperate promise all at once.

When she pulled back, her forehead rested against his. “She saved us both,” Aubrey whispered. “I just didn’t know it until now.”

Something shifted in Bennett’s eyes. “Sounds like Mabel,” he murmured.

She let out a long, shuddering breath, the sharpest edge of the panic finally dulling, leaving her wrung out. Bennett smoothed his large hand down her spine one final time, then glanced toward the open hallway.

“Listen,” he said gently, his mouth tipping into the barest suggestion of a smile. “You don’t have to move. We can sit right here on these floorboards as long as you need. But I did stop by Luigi’s on my way down the ridge road. There’s a paper bag of lasagna and garlic bread sitting on your kitchen counter downstairs.”

Her lips trembled around a smile. “You brought Luigi’s down here?”

“Figured you hadn’t eaten,” he said, his thumb gently brushing a tear track from her cheek. “And when you didn’t come back up to the house, I got worried. So I came looking.”

She rested her head against his shoulder and stayed there.

“Come downstairs when you’re ready,” Bennett murmured, lacing his rough fingers through hers. “We’ll heat up the food. You can tell me more, or we won’t say a damn word at all.”

Aubrey nodded, her fingers tightening around his hand. As they stood up together in the fading afternoon light, leaving the scattered cards behind, the massive, silent Victorian didn’t feel like a crime scene anymore.