Page 42 of Midnight Between Us (The Timberbridge Brothers #4)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Keir

I stare at the letter.

Read it once.

Then again—slower. The second read doesn’t hit harder.

It lands differently. Sinks in deeper, as if the words have claws.

They don’t shout. They whisper, and somehow that’s worse because I can feel the intensity of the pain.

They find the quietest places in me and settle there.

Crawl beneath the skin, wedge themselves into places I didn’t even know could ache this way.

She was scared. Alone. Holding something more fragile than hope, something bigger than just a future.

And where the fuck was I?

Fighting. Running. Pretending I wasn’t bleeding from places fists couldn’t reach.

I was seeking punishment because I couldn’t understand why I was unraveling.

That’s the thing I never told anyone. Leaving Birchwood Springs was a choice, but it was a choice I made out of desperation.

The town—more like my father—was slowly making me into the person I hated the most.

I thought leaving would protect her from the wreckage I’d become. I didn’t realize walking away would cause just as much damage.

My fingers curl tighter around the paper, trying to contain the shaking. I’m not trying to destroy it—I couldn’t if I wanted to. It feels like the last thread connecting me to a version of her I barely deserve to remember.

She thought the baby wouldn’t love her. Thought she’d fail him. Thought she wouldn’t be enough. And I wasn’t there to tell her she was wrong. I wasn’t there to tell her she was the bravest person I’d ever known. That she already carried more love in her than most people get in a lifetime.

I wasn’t there to . . . I fucking left her.

My jaw locks. There’s this hollow pressure building behind my ribs, not pain exactly—more like something unraveling at a pace I can’t control. I keep trying to picture how it must have felt—to be that terrified and that alone, waiting for someone who never came.

I can’t believe I let her carry that fear alone. She thought I’d be the one full of regret.

She wasn’t wrong.

Because I am.

The truth is, I already am. I just found out about him, and I’m drowning in it—fucking regret. There’s no learning curve when it comes to guilt this deep. No manual for how to read the story of a life you missed, page by page, knowing every sentence is a place where you should’ve been.

The letter slips from my hands and lands quietly among the others.

Like it’s something sacred, something meant to be kept whole.

It feels wrong that my touch is on it at all.

My throat tightens. Not with tears—I’m not sure I even remember how to cry.

There’s just this pressure building, like something internal collapsing under the weight of everything she never said out loud.

Simone was always the exception. The thing I tried to leave untouched. I told myself I was doing the right thing by staying away. That she deserved better. Maybe that’s true. Maybe she did. But the choice still broke her. And now it’s shattering the broken pieces of my existence.

My mind spirals through a thousand questions I’m not sure I want answered.

I want to keep reading. I want to devour every letter, even though they’re killing me.

I want to know about every night she spent awake, every breath she took while convincing herself I wasn’t coming back. Every moment, she held on alone.

But it won’t be enough. Reading these words, no matter how many times I go over them, won’t be enough.

The story feels worse now. Not tragic in the obvious way.

It’s more subtle. Like she hurt so much, for so long, that eventually she just stopped bleeding.

Went numb. Lost the ability to feel anything but the ache of surviving.

And there’s nothing I can do to undo it.

No way to take back the silence. No way to erase the things I didn’t say or the fact that I wasn’t there when everything fell apart. No matter how many times I replay it, the outcome doesn’t change.

I don’t want her written words anymore.

I want her.

In front of me. Alive, breathing fire because she’s so fucking angry at me she can’t help herself but wanting to burn me with her words.

I want her yelling, crying, doing something to let me know she still feels it.

Still feels anything. I’d take the anger.

I’d welcome it. As long as it means she’s not lost beneath years of pain and ink and everything I let rot between us.

My palm presses to my chest like I can hold something together through sheer force of will.

If I press hard enough, something will stop shifting.

Maybe the splintering will slow. But it doesn’t.

It just keeps spreading until I don’t know what’s breaking anymore.

Or if I’ll survive the wreckage I created.

For the first time in a long fucking time, I want to cry. Not for me.

For her.

For Simone.

For everything, I didn’t live. For every second she spent carrying the impossible on her own.

I push off the floor like I’ve been underwater too long—lungs burning, body unwilling. My knee throbs. Ribs ache like they’ve been wrapped too tight for too long. But staying here isn’t an option. I need to move. Need to breathe somewhere she is.

There’s no plan. No grand apology ready on my tongue. Just this raw pull from somewhere gut-deep that say, Find her before you talk yourself out of it. Before you convince yourself you don’t deserve to.

The hallway stretches like it’s been rewired by memory—longer, quieter, lined with echoes of everything I can’t undo. I pass the kitchen. Her mug—the one she made for Delilah—is still on the counter, half-full and forgotten. Vanilla chamomile clings to the air.

I spot her on the back porch. She’s sitting at the edge of the step, barefoot, knees tucked under her chin, arms wrapped tight around them. Her hair’s loose, curling around her face in a way that looks soft and unguarded. She’s staring out like she sees everything and nothing at once.

I hesitate. My feet stall. Every instinct screams to turn around, to disappear back into the silence I’ve always used as armor. Then she glances over her shoulder, just enough to catch me standing there. Our eyes lock.

And I stop breathing.

She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t even look surprised.

She just looks tired.

It’s not the surface-level kind of fatigue that sleep can fix.

This is more like depletion etched into her posture, into the way she holds her arms around her legs as if they’re the last scaffolding left.

It’s what happens when you’ve spent too long surviving instead of living.

When every breath feels like a negotiation.

When holding it all together becomes a habit so ingrained, you forget there was ever another way.

I take a step forward. Then another.

She doesn’t turn away. Doesn’t tell me to fuck off. That’s enough of an invitation, so I lower myself beside her—close but not touching. I leave space. Space for her hurt. For her history. For all the things I don’t know how to say yet.

“I read most of them,” I say, my voice raw from words I’ve been holding back for too long.

She doesn’t look at me.

“I didn’t mean to . . . I found them by accident while searching for something to read.” I clear my throat. “Atlas?—”

“You fucking Timberbridges are fucking meddlers.”

I can’t help but chuckle. “When I found the letters—I didn’t know what they were, but my name was there.”

No reaction. No shift in breath. Just silence.

“It just seemed like an invitation, you know.”

“They weren’t for you.”

“The first one was,” I argue.

“Yeah, but then they were mostly for me. I needed to talk to someone and . . . they’re for him now.” She gives me a sad smile. “One day, I want to give them to him so he knows his history.”

Well, fuck, they made me sound like a prick. Not that I wasn’t, but . . . I stop and focus on what matters right now.

“I left you,” I say, the truth tasting worse out loud. “And then I made it worse.”

Her eyes close slowly. Her whole frame folds in a little tighter.

“I didn’t know.” The words scrape coming out. “I thought I was protecting you from the pain of being attached to a Timberbridge. We break things. We fuck people up.”

She shakes her head—not like she’s arguing, just confirming how ridiculous that sounds now.

“If I had known about the baby . . .” I stop. There’s no right way to finish that sentence. I don’t even trust myself with the truth. Back then, my self-loathing would’ve convinced me to stay gone anyway.

“You didn’t want to know,” she says. No venom in it. No edge. Just a quiet fact.

And that—that hits harder than any punch I’ve ever taken.

“I was angry,” I say. “At everything. At myself. At the world. I thought if I severed it all, I could stop the bleeding.”

She lets out a breath that almost sounds like a laugh. It’s soft. Bitter. Wounded.

“You fucking bled all over me, Keir.”

My head drops. Shame crawls up my spine like it’s hunting for a permanent place to settle.

“I didn’t deserve those letters,” I murmur. “But I read them. Not all. I stopped right before the birth—when you were deciding if you’d give him up.”

She finally turns. Looks at me.

Her eyes are full—of what, I’m not sure. Something torn. Something alive. History. Hurt. Resentment. Maybe a thread of love still holding on even if it’s frayed at every edge.

“That part was complicated,” she says. “Because you were gone. They couldn’t find you after the first time.”