Page 32 of Ebbing Tides (The Lighthouse Duology #2)

She left my lap and grabbed her pants from off the floor.

Lido was barely perturbed by the movement, apparently used to our seemingly constant need for physical touch whenever we were together in this space.

He sighed and rolled onto his side, falling into a deeper sleep while Melanie pulled her pants on.

“I’m sorry,” I said, offering a weak apology for ruining at least one of the night’s plans.

She looked up from tying her sweatpants at her waist. Her eyes twinkled, her lips stretched into a smile, and in that instant, she looked younger.

God, I felt younger. Like in that moment, we weren’t a middle-aged man and woman—widowed, sad, and brought back together by an incredible twist of fate.

Instead, we were two twenty-somethings, caught in the middle of this exciting and wild thing.

Impulse wrapped its greedy hands around me, and I reached out, snagging her wrist in my hand and pulling her toward me.

She stood between my spread knees and pressed her palms to my cheeks, dropping her lips to mine for a fraction of a second, and I hung on that invisible string as she backed away, leaving me desperate for more.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” she assured me before pressing another kiss to my forehead.

She stepped away, only to open the window and grab the pack of cigarettes and lighter, while I tucked myself away and zipped my pants up.

Then she was back, sitting on my thigh and pulling a smoke out from the foil pack.

She held it out to me, I opened my mouth, and she placed it between my lips before setting the lighter aflame.

My eyes held hers, my heart thumping a proclamation I dared not utter aloud, as she brought the flickering light to the end of the cigarette.

A tendril of smoke swirled into the air, and after she flipped the lighter closed, she plucked the cigarette from my lips to slip it between her own.

“Can I ask why you wrote a letter to your dad?”

I wrapped my arm around her waist, and she settled against my body, crossing one of her legs over the other. My eyes drifted toward the envelope lying on the desk, and I slowly shook my head.

“I didn’t,” I answered, returning my attention to her and the cigarette as she passed it back to me. I pinched it between my fingers and brought it to my mouth and said, “That’s from my mom.”

“Why do you have it?”

I chuckled, a shred of boyish mischief jolting through my bones. “I stole it.”

Melanie was both amused and taken aback as she laughed. “You stole it? What is it?”

With a shrug, I took a puff of the cigarette, wishing for only a moment that I wasn’t enjoying it. But fuck it. Life was short enough. A week of spontaneous cigarette smoking wasn’t going to hurt.

My lungs were full of smoke as I passed it back to her, then said, “If I had to guess, it’s her suicide note. I found it in Dad’s desk after he begged me to kill him.”

That washed the amusement right off her face as she stared at me, aghast. “Wait, what?”

I nodded and emptied my lungs. “He wants to die and demanded I end his life. And … I don’t know.

I guess if I had less of a conscience, I might’ve considered it.

I cannot begin to imagine how he feels right now.

Just waiting to die and not knowing when the hell it’s going to happen.

But I can’t … I can’t do that. I wouldn’t be able to live with it. ”

“But you thought about it,” she answered quietly.

I gently shook my head. “No, not really. I mean, maybe for a second after he asked, but no. I have so much blood on my hands, Melanie. It’s …

” I turned my palm over, looking over the lines and calluses, the rough edges evidence of the time I’d lived and served.

“It’s a lot to carry all the time. All the fucking time.

But none of those lives came with a choice.

It was war, or it was an accident, or it was …

” I glanced toward my mother’s handwriting, scrawled across the envelope intended for my father.

I gave my head a shake and tightened my hold on Melanie’s waist. “Anyway, I won’t let myself choose to kill my father.

Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe … maybe killing him and ending his suffering could be the one thing to make him fucking like me.

But if that’s what it takes to get his approval, then to hell with it. I don’t want it that badly.”

There was hurt in her eyes as she took a steady pull from the cigarette. She felt sorry for me, and that was okay because right now, I felt sorry for me too.

Forty-eight years I had spent desperate for my father’s affection.

I had granted every one of his wishes, I had gone to war, I had done every-damn-thing I could to make the man proud, to make him love me, and the best he could do was pretend when in the presence of my dead wife and her daughters.

And now, it seemed the only thing that could make him even just the slightest bit happy with my existence would be to end his.

As if the only point to my life, the only point to me being alive, would be to act as his personal angel of death.

Melanie held out the cigarette, and I accepted it, placing it between my lips and wishing the sweetness of her taste could overpower the bitterness in my heart.

“Why did you take the letter?” she asked softly.

I shrugged, taking a drag. “I don’t know.

I think … I think maybe I didn’t want anybody else to read it first?

” I offered, saying it as if it were a question, as if I wasn’t sure of the answer myself.

“I mean, it was always assumed that she’d killed herself because of me or something I had done, or didn’t do, but it was always just that.

An assumption. We never knew for sure. And what if …

what if that letter”—I swept my hand toward that damn envelope lying on my desk—“is the proof that we were right?”

Melanie worked her bottom lip between her teeth, gnawing, as her brows tipped with concern and sympathy. She slowly turned her head this way and that as she stared ahead at me. I distracted myself, taking another puff of the cigarette. Not wanting to drown in the sadness held within her eyes.

“I’ve killed people before,” I went on, my voice rough as I passed the smoke back to her.

“But that was war. And I didn’t kill my wife.

Whatever sinister bullshit my father wants to believe I did, he’s wrong.

But if I found out that I was truly the reason my mother swallowed two fucking bottles of painkillers, I don’t, um …

” I pursed my lips and shook my head. “I don’t think I can live with that.

I don’t want to live with that. But even less than that, I don’t want my sisters to look at me and blame me for—”

“Your mother made a choice , Max,” Melanie interjected, stern and harsh. “I understand that maybe it was her sickness or whatever was wrong with her that made her feel forced to make that choice, but it was still, at the end of the day, her choice to make.”

I exhaled and raised my eyes to the ceiling. “Yeah,” I muttered, though I wasn’t convinced.

I wanted Mom’s death on my conscience just as much as I wanted my father’s. And I couldn’t expect Melanie to understand that. I couldn’t expect anyone to understand. Not when the possibility was far from reality for most people.

“Are you going to read it?”

I tipped my head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should burn it. Pretend it never existed.”

“You don’t know that it’s a suicide note,” she reasoned.

I turned my gaze on her and tipped my head, a challenging smile tugging at my lips. “Do you know it isn’t ?”

Silence befell the room as her gaze held mine. The seconds slipped through my fingers like sand in an hourglass, drifting further and further beyond my grasp, despite my heart’s desperate begging to hold on, hold on, hold on.

Melanie held out the cigarette to me, and I lowered my eyes from her to stare at it and the ash clinging to the end.

She still wears her wedding ring , I noted, and I didn’t mind. God, I didn’t mind at all, and, fuck, maybe I should’ve, but … why? I still wore mine, for crying out loud, and besides, what good was jealousy now when there was nothing for us beyond Sunday?

There is no us. There is only them .

We were as permanent as that ash, now flaking off and drifting to the floor between my feet, and I took the cigarette from her then to stamp it out in the glass that was quickly filling with butts.

“Will you read it?” I asked her.

“You want me to read your mother’s suicide note?” She sounded shocked, perhaps even appalled.

“You don’t know that it’s a suicide note,” I said with a taunting smirk.

“But you know it is,” she countered gently.

She was right about that. I knew exactly what it was, no matter how much I wished that it weren’t.

Melanie didn’t wait for my reply. She reached forward and snatched the envelope from off the desk.

She looked at my eyes and waited for me to nod before ripping it open.

She removed the letter and unfolded it. I could see my mother’s scrawling cursive through the paper, where the ink had bled through, and although I possessed the ability to read backward, only bits and pieces were legible.

My gut twisted into complicated knots as I watched her eyes scan the first few lines, watched for any change in her expression or body language, and when her eyes rounded with what I assumed to be surprise, I realized it’d come sooner than I had expected.

“What?” I asked as she put her fingers to her lips.

She shook her head, quickly lowering the letter and folding it. “I can’t read this.”

Panic struck my heart as she stuffed it back into its envelope.

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? I could’ve laughed at the asinine question. It was my mother’s last correspondence with anyone before she downed enough painkillers to kill five grown men with a bottle of Dad’s fancy wine. There was no end to what was wrong with that situation—or hell, much of my life.

Melanie’s hands were shaking as she handed the envelope to me. “ You need to be the one to read this.”

I stared at it, one corner of the crisp white paper touching my chest. “What if I don’t want to?”

“No,” she replied. “You have to. Promise me you’ll read it and promise me you’ll do it before your father dies.”

“You can’t just tell me what it says?” I laughed uneasily, swinging my gaze back to hers.

Melanie shook her head, but her eyes held more sympathy than I ever wanted directed at me. “I’m sorry.”

With a sigh of resignation, I took the envelope from her hand, noting that mine was shaking. I’d already been apprehensive, worried about what words my mother might’ve put on those pages, but now, I found I’d moved beyond worry and toward something more like fear.

I put it back on the desk. Melanie stiffened on my thigh, swallowing audibly. A quick glance in her direction told me she was uncomfortable, suddenly unsure of her place here in my office.

“Maybe I should go,” she said quietly. “I can give you space while you read it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I’m not reading that letter right now.”

“But your dad is—”

“I am more than aware of my dad’s condition,” I interrupted bluntly, albeit gently. “But I have had almost fifty years with him in my life, and that’s been more than enough time for him to tell me whatever the hell might be in that letter.”

She looked unsure, her hands moving, forever fidgeting, in the sleeves of her shirt. “That might be, but—”

“I have spent twenty years wondering what would happen if I ever saw you again,” I said, laying my shaking palm against her cheek. “That bastard has ruined enough for me. I will be fucking damned if he ruins this too.”

And she licked her lips, her eyes uncertain, but eventually, she nodded. Like she trusted what I said, like she trusted me to not let my father get in the way of one of the most significant miracles ever to affect my life.

It was just too bad I didn’t trust myself.