Page 126 of After All The Wreckage

“What are you saying?” I asked, my voice low and guttural.

“I had to choose between staying and watching you die or leaving and you getting everything you wanted.”

I shook my head. “Fuck that.” But a chill coasted over my skin, and I could tell she was telling the truth. She thought I would have died if she’d stayed. Her gift… she’d seen it. My mind reeled as I remembered the times her smile had vanished after she’d touched me.

The fort incident. The happiness that had dissolved into grief.

My heart felt like it was imploding as the terrible realization hit me.

She’d done everything. The years of leaving. The grief she’d caused my dad. Monte. It had all been for me?

Barbs of guilt and remorse landed in my chest, tearing me open.

Just another way for her to have struck at me.

When I didn’t say anything, she continued. “Whenever I looked into your future, that’s what I saw—you dying in my arms. I didn’t know why, but I could sense it was because of me. So, I chose to leave. Whenever I came back, I hoped that the choices we’d both made in my absence would have changed the vision. I hoped what I saw would be different. Hoped I’d be able to stay.”

My throat felt like it was closing. I gasped for air, inhaling sharply, and the intake of oxygen caused almost as much pain as the emotions she’d set sailing through me.

“After Holland died… after I had Ivy. It was gone for a while. And then, that day you’d come back to find Monte and me in the sheet fort we’d made, I touched you, and I saw you fighting with one of Roland’s men as they tried to take Ivy. I saw you…” Her voice cracked and faded away.

“I don’t understand. Why would Dunn…” Then the realization hit me. “Dunn was her father.”

She swallowed, not meeting my eyes, but nodded. “He was already threatening to come into my life and ruin it—ruin everyone I loved—if I didn’t come back to him. And that vision… I lost you both. You died, and he took Ivy and kept her hidden from me.”

I didn’t know how to reconcile everything she was telling me. Guilt flooded me, knowing she’d stayed away because of me for so many years. Anger because she’d brought Dunn into our lives. Frustration that my family had been torn apart repeatedly by the paranormal abilities she’d passed down to us.

“Did Dad know why you kept leaving?” I asked.

“Not at first,” she said. “But later…”

It suddenly made sense why he’d kept allowing her back into his life. Why he’d never even dated someone else. Never filed for a divorce. He’d loved her, and he’d taken her back even when she’d been pregnant with another man’s child.

I stood up. I needed out. I needed to get away. I needed to… I didn’t know what.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I pushed my palms against them.

Fuck.

“Let me touch you, Gage.” It was a desperate beg. A plea to see something different from what she’d seen in the past. ButGod, what if she saw something worse? What if she saw Rory dying? Or Monte or Ivy? What if it was me who had to leave?

I shook my head.

“No.”

That one word made her crumble, and I almost took it back.

“I can’t let you do that,” I said. “I can’t live my life for a future that may or may not happen. I don’t want to. I want to live in the present, holding on to the people I love and care about, experiencing as much joy as I can right now.

“You were the one to tell me we aren’t guaranteed anything. Not even the future you see. We both know that what happens tomorrow isn’t just dependent on the decisionswemake. It could be some jerk who gets into a car after one too many beers and crashes into us. It could be some person walking into the mall with a gun. It could be a million other things that change what happens next.

“Dunn was so obsessed with the idea of what you could predict that he held you hostage for years. He was addicted to what you saw. I can’t do that. I won’t live that way. I have to follow my heart and my gut and hope it brings goodness into our lives and not darkness.”

She sobbed, and her bony shoulders shook.

I set my hand on her leg over the top of the blanket, avoiding the skin-to-skin contact she required for her to get a vision of me and my future. I squeezed gently.

“If you want to come home, Demi…” I stopped. Was I really going to invite her back in? To allow her the power to hurt Ivy? Monte? Me?