Page 7 of Into The Rabbit Hole

Chapter 2

Wade

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The coldnessof his cell wall seeped into his skin. It was the only thing he could feel. Everything else felt numb, and notreal.

Wade felt like he was floating around in a nightmare that he was struggling to wake up from. As if his soul was pressing on the backs of his eye lids and attempting to breakfree.

How could this havehappened?

He didn’t even care that he was in jail. That didn’t matter. That part of this event didn’t register tohim.

What mattered was Merissa was dead. She was dead, just like theirson.

He’d seen them both dead and those were images he would never be able to get out of his mind. Wade had failed themboth.

He and Merissa may not have been a couple now, but at one point they were. They were a family. A guy, a girl, and their baby. They were a little family he’d created, and lost. Just like that, they no longerexisted.

How could this havehappened?

Merissa’s hate for him connected her with this mad man who’d been terrorizing his family. Her intense hate for Wade and need for revenge had done that, and now she wasdead.

She’d died in the worst way possible. Stabbed in her heart, stabbed multiple times. How many times he couldn’t remember. When the officer who brought him in spoke to him, Wade couldn’t process what he’d said. He could just about see that he was talking to him, but he couldn’t process what he wassaying.

Wade had just receded into himself, into the chasm of despair that dwelled within the walls of hissoul.

This was his fault. That was the bottom line. This was his fault. It all stemmed back to the day of the accident over five years ago when his babydied.

It stemmed back to that split second when he was at the beach party with Merissa and she’d tried to stop him from going off with George. If he could go back in time and change things, he’d go back to thatpoint.

That was the point of decision. His right-or-left moment in life. He chose to go with George and everything went to hell. It meant that everything from that point was destined fordisaster.

Even the good, like being withChloe.

“Chloe,” he breathed. It was the first thing he’d said since the police took him incustody.

She was the essence of his soul. Not just his girlfriend, but his soulmate. She left him, just like he thought she would after finding out about his carelessness when he was withMerissa.

He prayed that wherever Chloe was she was safe. He prayed that she was on that plane to France. Miles away from here, miles away from him. He should have never been with her. He shouldn’t have put her in danger, or in the awkward position she’d been in withMerissa.

Chloe was outside of all of this craziness and Wade had no business being with a girl like that. Girl. Damn it, he still thought of her as a girl. It was habit. A result of growing up with her and seeing her as a girl for a large chunk of theirlives.

She was a woman, now, and she deserved more, she deserved better than him. She always did. She was out of his league. Always too good for him, always out of hisreach.

Chloe was right to leave him, and it was a good thing he let her go. That was perhaps the first right thing he’d done since getting back to L.A. Literally, the first rightthing.

She was better off without him, and right about love not being enough. It wasn’t. He could see now, oh so clearly, that it wasn’t. How could love be enough if it meant that she coulddie?

Right now, Wade just wanted to die. He didn’t want to exist anymore, but if something happened to Chloe he’d want his soul to die, too. He’d never been particularly religious. Hadn’t come from any sort of religious background or anything, but he believed he had a soul and there had to be some sort of afterlife. If something happened to Chloe, he’d want to be erased. Completelyerased.

He’d never thought that he could fall in love. It was so stupid that it had taken him his whole life to realize that Chloe had always been the keeper of hisheart.

Instantly he recalled her mother telling him about his stupid attempts to use her stockings as a zip line when he was six, and poor Chloe trying to follow him. There wasn’t a single childhood memory he had that didn’t have her in it. She’d said he never chose her and she was right. Hedidn’t.

Wade wouldn’t sugar coat anything and pretend he wasn’t at fault. Just like with everythingelse.

When he was younger, he’d gone from one woman to the next, getting through them as fast as he changed his clothes. The girl who was too good for him was too much work. It meant changing too much of himself to try to be with her, and the idiot that he was hadn’t seen that his life would have been better if he’d gone down thatroute.