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The tensing of my stomach was the only sign I needed.
Louana’s mom had arrived.
And found me.
She was a gorgeous woman, a vision of what her little girl would look like in a couple decades. If maybe Evangeline had slightly different eyes than her daughter.
“You know, I’m conflicted with you,” she said, sighing a bit as she looked at me. “On the one hand, you treated my little girl like gold. And you stepped up last night when she needed you. But on the other, I watched that girl crumble and fall to pieces when you left her, crying so hard and for so long that I almost took her to a therapist, we were so worried about her.
“And the next thing we knew, she was packing up and telling us she just couldn’t be in this town anymore. And so she wasn’t. Not for more than a week or two at a time. Foryears, Valen. Years. Your selfishness and caprice took my girl from me. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for that.”
Her words were like hot knives to the gut, one after the other after the other. I damn near doubled over at the sensation.
Because I didn’t know.
How could I?
I’d left.
I hadn’t looked back.
I hadn’t even asked around, even when it was killing me not to know how she was.
Maybe a part of me didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see the damage I had done to a girl who had been nothing but fucking amazing to me.
It was hard even to imagine that girl she’d been—confident, headstrong, unshakable—crying, let alone “crumble to pieces.”
Maybe I had convinced myself that I didn’t have to be racked with guilt every moment of every day because a girl like Louana, she landed on her feet. She didn’t cry. She got pissed.
In fact, I think when I did allow myself to think of her through the years, I always pictured her angry with me, bone-deep furious at leaving her and possibly making a fool of her, something I knew she could never forgive.
Even when she showed back up to prospect, I figured that was just still the burning embers of her anger from long ago.
Not pain.
I don’t know how it might have changed things if I had known the truth, that she wasn’t angry, but hurt.
I liked to think it would have made me turn around, go home, apologize, try to be a better man.
I just didn’t know if that was the case.
Still, the image bothered me.
Evangeline wasn’t an exaggerator by nature. So if she said that Louana had been in pieces, she meant that.
That was what I had done to the only girl I’d ever loved.
I’d ruined her.
And I’d fucked up not only her life, but her relationships with her parents and friends.
It was no fucking wonder she hated me, that she saw the first opportunity to fuck with me, and took it.
“I never meant to hurt her,” I told Evangeline, shaking my head.
“The funny thing is, your intentions don’t matter. The end result matters. And the end result was you hurting my little girl. And my little girl running off to Europe foryearsto try to outrun the memories of you.”
Evangeline took a step deeper into the kitchen, her voice going lower. “Do you know what she did in Europe, Valen?”
