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“Move on so quickly.”

I take a moment before I answer him, letting the question hang in the air, like dust particles floating through the rays of the sun. Thinking back on all the years that have flown by, I recall the utter heartbreak I felt when he was taken away in that police car. The regret I felt even after all he did. I wanted to go after him, to tell him that it would be okay.

But I forced myself to be strong. I forced myself to go on even when all I wanted to do was curl up and die. How do you survive letting go of the only thing that made sense to you? How do you ever truly move on when part of your soul is snatched away? I’m not sure I ever did.

I was alive, but I wasn’t living. Not really. I loved my husband and I tried to make a life with him, but it was never… it was never what Danny and I had, and I know he knew that, and that’s also something I have to live with. I should have let my husband go. I should have let him be with someone who could love him as much as he deserved.

I look back at Danny. “What makes you think I moved on quickly?”

His eyes bounce to the cold hardwood below my feet. “I watched you for a while. You seemed fine. You seemed…” I watch his eyes move as if he’s trying to think of the right word, and then he says, “Peaceful.”

I shake my head. “Looks can be deceiving, Danny.” I move away from the window, sliding down to the floor, hating how bad my shoulders still ache regardless that I’m no longer tied up. My mind goes back to a question I asked him after the tragic incident at the flower shop. I asked him if he was watching me. He didn’t respond, which told me he had been. Has he always watched me? I shake that from my thoughts, getting back to the conversation at hand. “I called you about a thousand times.”

“I had no missed calls from you.”

“That’s because I always hung up.”

He lifts a brow, the dried blood on the side of his face cracking. “I wouldn’t have answered anyway,” he says.

“Why? You begged me not to let you go and you wouldn’t have answered my phone call? You watched me from afar and you wouldn’t have wanted to talk to me if I called you? You’re contradicting yourself. You just told me you could have changed, that you could have lived a normal life with me, and now you’re saying what? That you know you couldn’t have.”

He exhales. “I’m saying I would have tried. But you told me no, and so I did the only thing I knew to do. I became the person I was always meant to be.”

“How?” I ask. “How did you become this person?”

He tilts his head slightly, lifting his shoulder. “I was always strong-minded, Bexley. I was determined in everything I did. In loving you, in climbing the ladder to success.”

“Okay, well, we know you failed at the first one. So, how did you win at success? Better yet, what is success to you?”

“Success is different for everyone. For me, it was not being the losing guy. It was waking up every day and making money and doing whatever I had to do to protect the way I make money.”

“And that meant hurting people.”

He tilts his head. “If they got in my way, then yes.”

I don’t say anything to that. While Danny was apparently diving deeper into the crime world, I was just trying to survive without him.

Chapter Ten

Bexley

2006

I stand in front of the flower shop window, watching as the rain falls outside. It rivers down the glass in small streams before it drips onto the windowpane. It’s been a slow day, heavy storms on and off. I hold my phone in my hand, my eyes bouncing down to the screen, looking at his name.

It’s been two weeks. I haven’t heard a word from him. We went from seeing one another every day to this. I press call, and then before it even rings, I hang up. This has become an unhealthy habit and so has listening to the voicemail he left me that night.

Over and over, I listen to his voice. As if he’s died and I’ll only ever hear it from my phone’s speakers. It’s as depressing as it sounds. It hurts as much as if he did die. I can hardly eat or sleep. I’m just here. Letting one day pass before another.

The first few days were the worst. I cried myself sick every night. Thankfully, that has stopped, and now I just stare at the ceiling wondering who I should hate more. Him or myself?

Both had a hand in destroying me.

I wonder how he is. Does he hurt like I do? I’ve almost driven to the lake house so many times. I’ve made it halfway there before I pulled over and banged my fist on the steering wheel, crying until I couldn’t breathe.

Surely heartache is the worst pain there is. There’s no cure; nothing you can take to ease it. You just have to zombie through. I hear footsteps behind me, and I look back at Billie, the owner of A-Street Flower Shop. She’s wearing jeans and a loose fitted cream sweater. Billie’s well into her thirties and has been great to me during my teenage heartbreak. She tells me one day I’ll wake up and it just won’t hurt so much anymore. I long for that.

“Bexley, I’d like to talk to you,” she says, dropping a crate onto the cement table in the center of the shop.