Page 140 of Burning Ember

“Did she . . . ?”

“I don’t know. All I know is she took off when she was six months pregnant. She only had a small baby bump when she left. When I found her a month later, she was stick thin and had no belly whatsoever. She wasn’t pregnant anymore and the doc told me there’s no way the baby could’ve lived if she’d had it between the time she left and the time I found her. I checked with all the hospitals just in case though.”

“Have you talked to her since to find out what happened?”

“No, I haven’t talked to her. It’s better if I don’t ever see her face again.”

I lay my palm over his heart. “I’m so sorry, Mav.” His hand lays over mine.

Meeting my gaze, he says, “It’s why I needed that promise from you.”

“I would never hurt a baby. Ever. Born or unborn.”

He leans up to kiss my forehead and then pulls me down, and I hear the rapid beat of his heart. “I know that.”

“Did you love her?”

“Yes, but not in the right way. Not in the way you’re supposed to. I didn’t love her for who she was. I loved her because she needed me. Because she could give me the future I wanted, and I loved her because she was going to be the mother of my child. I guess, I just thought it was time, you know, to move on with life. Find a girl to love, have a family, have a home to raise our kids. You can only live this life for so long before it wears and tears at you. I was more attracted to her than I’d ever been to someone else. I wanted someone to call mine. I just thought she was the one. But I was the one puttin’ in all the work, so it always felt one-sided. Lookin’ back, I see all the signs tellin’ me how wrong she was for me.”

“It’s easier to see the signs looking back.” I think about all the warning signs I missed with Warner and how glaringly obvious they are now. “It makes me feel stupid when I think about how many I missed.”

Rubbing my back again, he says, “Tell me about him.”

It’s hard to be here with Mav and think of Warner. I used to think they were so much alike. But Warner pulled me in with his All-American Boy disguise and then took off the mask to reveal something extremely ugly underneath. I feel like I’ve seen Mav’s ugly mask. The one he used to push everyone away. It’s off now, and I see the real him, and what I see is beautiful. Where Warner was a monster in disguise, Mav’s just a good man hiding behind his pain.

He’s no devil, and he’s no angel, but he sure as hell is something in between.

Letting out a puff of air, I say, “His name is Warner.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

“At the hotel where I worked. It was one of the many jobs I had to keep us afloat. He was there for a work conference.”

The first time I talked to Warner, he stopped by the cart Maria and I were sharing. I remember being a little stunned when I caught sight of him. His hair was so naturally blond, it looked angelic. His eyes were bluer than the ocean after sunset, and he was so tall. The way his body filled out his expensive suit had my brain stuttering for a moment. I saw a lot of businessmen and women come through, but no one as handsome or as nicely dressed as he was.

“Honestly, for a long time I didn’t understand what he was doing. He kept coming around, talking to me, asking me for room supplies, and I was clueless. Then he asked me out on a date. And he didn’t take no for an answer. I should’ve known then.”

“How long where you together?”

“Six months. We dated for four months before I moved in with him.” Fighting the sudden nausea in my stomach, I say, “There’s something you need to know before I tell you the rest . . .”

A bolt of nervous energy spears through my body and settles in the pit of my stomach.

I knew this moment would come sooner than I was ready for it to. This is where I trust him with my past, see if he can handle it, and I hope like hell when I’m done, he still looks at me the same way he does now.

I pull away and roll to my back. He leans up on his elbow and looks down at me.

“You know about my sister, but I never told you about Will . . . Willow.” I look over and see curiosity on his face. “I didn’t know if I could trust you before. I didn’t know if you’d use her against me. She’s my niece, but she’s much more than that to me.”

“I wouldn’t . . .”

My eyes flicker up to his. “I know that now.”

I look away and stare up at the ceiling. “My sister was already a wild child, but she took my mom leaving us a lot harder than I did. She sort of went off the deep end. I was too concerned with money, and how we were going to survive without my mom to see that Sundown needed me.

“It shouldn’t have, but it shocked the hell out of me when she told me she was pregnant. And I’ll always be ashamed that my first reaction was anger. I remember thinking, the last thing I needed was one more mouth to feed. We were already behind on every bill, and with me being a high school dropout, the best jobs I could get were barely enough to pay the rent. A baby meant more work and no time to possibly go back and finish school, or time to study to get my GED. Something I’d been planning to do.”

I skip ahead because I don’t remember a lot in between Sunny telling me she was pregnant and Will being born. All I know is, I was working my ass off day and night to pull in every dollar I could.