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His fingers trace lazy circles on my back.

I feel safe. Sated. Completely and utterly wrecked.

As my eyelids grow heavy, my last conscious thought is that I have never felt so wholly satisfied—so lust-drunk—in my entire life.

And with Cooper’s steady heartbeat beneath my ear, I drift into sleep, unaware of the way his gaze lingers on me long after I’ve surrendered to the dark.

Nineteen

Present

Ihave maybe an hour before the girls arrive at my house.

Flash gives me a pitying look from the porch. I let him inside. I slide the drawer of the console table open and pull the letter from it. Just one more peek. Just something to quell the emotions building in me.

I’ve purposefully been sticking to the best moments. Partly because we didn’t have many worst ones. But it’s worth mentioning that even in the direct path of a curve ball, you took the hit and kept on.

In our absence from each other I feel it necessary to stress that I did not know.

I didn’t.

I’ve told you before, but whether or not you believe me evades me. I didn’t know. I’m still shocked. You blew up my world in my brother’s backyard. My entire childhood was a lie. A fallacy.

But it wasn’t just me was it? Your world imploded too. What are the odds of us having a connection like that? Do you believe in serendipity? I clung to you, or needed to in that time, but you…you pushed me away.

Almost as if the very thought of me repulsed you.

I am not pointing fingers or placing blame. It was an impossible situation to be thrust into. But in that moment, I reached for you, and you leaned away.

Fuck.

Tears well in my eyes, blurring his words. I blink until it stops. It has to, I need it to stop. Holding my breath like that is ruinous.

As lost and out of control as I felt, in our short time together, he rearranged everything. He is still always on my mind as if he wrote his name on the inner walls of me.

Twenty

Past

The scent of grilled meat and charred wood drifts in from the backyard, laughter and the low hum of conversation filling the warm summer air. I’m inside Cooper’s brother’s house, wandering through, absorbing the details of his life—of their life. The home is cozy, lived-in, but in the middle of nowhere. Framed pictures line the walls, snapshots of a family I’m still trying to piece together.

My fingers skim across the frame of a photograph near the kitchen. A posed family portrait—Cooper’s parents, his brother, and a man who looks just like his father but not quite. Something about him tugs at me, a recognition that coils deep in my stomach.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

Cooper leans into me smiling. “That’s my Uncle Danny.”

My breath shudders out of me.

It is Amelia’s Danny.

A long-buried scream scratches against my throat as the memory surfaces in sharp, visceral detail—Amelia, broken andsobbing, clutching at empty space where her baby had been in the psych ward. The way they ripped her baby away after she was rescued from her kidnapper.

The unanswered questions. The pain that never healed.

“Where’s Danny now?”

Cooper looks sheepish. “Prison.”