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I hung up and stared blindly at the phone. At her name on the screen.
I rubbed my chest, but couldn’t dull the pain. If she’d hit me with a truck, she couldn’t have hurt me more.
Everything had been perfect. I’d finally allowed myself to believe in our happily ever after, only to have the rug pulled out from under me.
I threw my phone across the room. It hit the wall and shattered,
I tossed my head back and shouted every curse word in my vocabulary.
I felt hollow inside. Empty and used up.
Kennedy wasn’t coming back. She didn’t want me enough to leave her home and move halfway around the world to the middle of nowhere. I’d been a fool to ever have believed she could.
Now I was a heartbroken fool.
ChapterThirteen
KENNEDY
My lower lip wobbled and another round of tears crashed over me. Self-loathing and self-pity twisted unpleasantly through my veins. I’d just ended things with the love of my life, and now his last memory of me would be this awful conversation in which I’d probably made him think he wasn’t worth the discomfort of permanently leaving my home. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He was worth so much more, and right now, cold and alone in the bedroom of a house I apparently owned, I wanted more than anything to bury my face in his strong chest and have him hold me. I wanted him to murmur soft nothings in my ear, but I didn’t deserve that.
I’d hurt him.
I’d never wanted to cause him pain. After everything we’d been through, all the promises we’d made, I’d broken him. And now, I was the one breaking.
It wasn’t as though I’d had any choice though. My siblings needed me more than he did. I had to step up without any fuss, for their sake. I was the only guardian they had left.
I hadn’t wanted to break up with Liam, but doing so was the best thing for him when I knew how much Destiny Falls meant to him, and how much he’d struggle if he came to L.A.
If I’d told him everything and asked him to move, he’d either have ended our relationship anyway—which would have devastated me when I was already feeling low—or, more likely, he’d have felt obligated to uproot everything and make himself miserable by joining me. At least this way, he could eventually be happy again. Meanwhile, I’d deal with the fallout of my parents’ deaths without burdening him. I’d always managed to shoulder responsibility before, and there was no reason why this should be different.
“Kennedy!” one of the twins called from the hall outside my room. “Mina is crying again.”
I buried my face in my palms at the reminder of how out of my depths I really was. I didn’t know how to stop Mina crying. I didn’t know how to fix things for any of them. Blair had been walking around like a zombie, hardly eating, then sitting up all night on his guitar. Mina cried and cried, her eyes constantly red and swollen. The boys were fighting more than they used to, and it seemed like the tiniest thing would set them off.
Somehow, I had to get them through their grief. I could do it. I knew I could. I just wasn’t sure how yet. But Iwould.
A nonverbal teenager, a devastated preteen, and a pair of angry and confused little boys were depending on me.
We had no other family. No loving aunt or uncle to take us in. It was down to me to raise these kids and protect them from either being thrown into the foster system or palmed off on some distant relative none of them had ever met. Yes, we were wealthy, thanks to an inheritance from Malcolm, but we were also alone.
So very alone.
The call came again. “Kennedy!”
“I’ll be there in a minute.” My voice was raw.
I went to the bed and carefully wrapped the scrapbook I’d created, that chronicled my relationship with Liam, in cloth, then carried it to the closet and placed it on a shelf at the top, just out of sight. I’d made it as a surprise for him, but now he’d never see it. Never know how much I loved him.
I swallowed another sob and positioned the box containing his key beside the scrapbook. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it because that would mean throwing out everything it symbolized.
Hope. Love. A future with him.
It has to be this way, I reminded myself.It’s best for everyone… other than me.
I couldn’t uproot my family after such a massive loss and move them all the way across the world, away from the only home they’d ever known. Just like I couldn’t leave them to the whims of some distant relative or the foster system, or drag Liam away from the home he loved and thrust him into a world of chaos and grief.
I shut the closet door and turned away from my memories. Straightening my shoulders, I walked out into the hall to deal with the mess my family had become, leaving my future with Liam Braddock behind.
