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She extricates herself from me just as slowly as she approached. She stares at me like I’m something she doesn’t recognize. Her witch eyes make her seem especially strange tonight—not in a bad way, in an ensnaring way.
I avoid her silent accusation.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“You need my help. What are you going to do without me?”
I step around her and go for her purse. I find the slim black phone he gave her and curl my fingers around it. “This is my problem now. And you’re not stepping foot back in Denver until this is done.”
She laughs. “Yeah? Who made you the gatekeeper of the city?”
I don’t know—but she’s not taking this seriously enough. “I am yourhusband.”
“You haven’t been my husband in sixfuckingyears,” she yells. “You are an asshole. You’ve denied me what I want at every turn. Even knowing what you know now?—”
“This is different! I’m trying to save you!” I’m finally trying tosaveher, and I’m going to break before she does if she keeps pushing.
“You’re trying tosmotherme!” she shrieks.
She picks up a forgotten beer bottle and chucks it at me. I duck, and the bottle crashes into the wall behind me. It cracks, then shatters when it hits the floor. I don’t flinch, even when the spray of the remnant of liquid hits the backs of my ankles.
“Sunny.” My words stop. My brain is fucking scrambled around her.
“You might think you’re saving me, Knox,” she swears, “but wrapping me in cotton won’t save me. It didn’t save me back then.”
Back then.
“Or did you forget why we did this? You wanted to help set me free?—”
I shake my head. The phone slips from my fingers, hitting the couch, and I turn away from her. I go to the windows and grip my head, suppressing the flood of emotions that threaten to steal my train of thought. And my resolve.
“It didn’t save my parents the heartache, Knox,” she whispers. “All of this was for nothing. You put us through hell for nothing.”
I know it didn’t work. I know my plan was a bad one.
I know that marrying her was the best and worst decision of my life.
She doesn’t know that, though. How could she? Between sixteen and seventeen, then seventeen and eighteen, we were just teenagers. Kids. College didn’t change me—but then I came back and…
I was going to tell her. And then I saw her with Miles, and I believed Beth, and the whole world got turned upside down and inside out.
It takes me too long to remember how to breathe normally. But when I regain control, I take her in. Her arms are wrapped around her stomach, her eyes wide. Her chest heaving.
She’s too pretty.
She’s too devastating.
I’m too obsessed with her to focus, to protect her, not when she’s looking at me like that.
“You will get on the plane tomorrow morning.” I grab my phone and search for flights.
There’s an early one, that’ll get her into New York at one o’clock. I book it, her gaze searing into me from across the room. She’s not lunging at me or trying to toss my phone out the window again, at least.
“You’ll get on the plane, and your dad is going to pick you up, and you’ll spend a few weeks with family. And then I’ll come back for you. Okay?”
If there’s one thing I can control, it’s this.
If there’s one way to go back tobefore, it’s erasing the danger from her path. And she can’t be here while I try to figure out how to do that.
