To Tom and Pat:
You have officially read more of my books than my own parents.
Keep that up!
Bowen
The world owes you nothing.
There, I said it. And I hope to God you actually listened because it’s the best piece of advice you will ever receive. It took over thirty years of my life, five days of surviving the unimaginable, losing the woman I loved—not once, but twice—and then facing the horrific, paralyzing, and utterly impossible task of moving on without her before I finally figured it out.
The world owes you nothing. Not even a final goodbye.
When I proposed, I imagined we’d grow old together. If my mother’s side of the family was any indication, my rich brown hair would have fallen out while hers would have faded into a timeless silver. We would have held hands, rocking on a porch swing while a ball of fur roughly the size of a football played fetch with our grandkids. One night we’d go to bed, she’d curl into my side, whisper I love you, and then we’d drift off into the afterlife together.
I mean, not that I’d planned our deaths or anything, but we all had romanticized thoughts on how we’d go.
This was never how it was supposed to end. Though not many things in the storm of our relationship had gone as planned.
The world owes you nothing.
It had given us even less.
To adequately convey my journey through hell, I’ll need to start at the end.
The very end.
The last time I saw my Sally.
“Are you just going to sit there and mope the whole flight?” she snipped.
I gritted my teeth and tried—unsuccessfully—to cross my legs in the suffocating confines of the middle seat. I was six-foot-four to her five-foot-nothing, yet she had settled into the one on the aisle as soon as we’d found our seats.
Such was life with Sally.
After a muttered apology for bumping the snoring man on my other side, I flicked my gaze to the Bloody Mary in her hand. “Sorry, is my mood killing your buzz?”
Her blue eyes sparkled in the glow of the reading light. “It really is.”
I shook my head and went back to mindlessly flipping the pages of a magazine I’d bought at the terminal back in Colorado. I’d picked it up with hopes it would be a distraction from the cyclone raging within me on our way back to Atlanta. The minute she ordered that drink, I’d known it was a lost cause.
Her hand came across the armrest and landed on my thigh. “Bowen, stop. It’s not a big deal.”
It was the truth. Compared to everything we’d been through, our house could have been swallowed by a sinkhole and it wouldn’t have been considered a big deal.
Honest to God, I was lucky to still have her at all. It had only been nine months since we’d met, but we’d lived a thousand lives in that time. Unfortunately, that also meant we’d died almost as many deaths.
Terrifying, tortuous, agony-filled deaths.
We’d also found love though—immeasurable amounts of it.
I stared down at her engagement ring. I’d cashed out a huge chunk of my savings account and still had to open a line of credit with the jewelry store to buy the three-karat princess-cut ring. The payment was roughly the same as I paid for my truck each month, but the tears in her eyes as she’d sat in her hospital bed, clutching it to her chest the day I proposed, made it all worth it.
She was worth it. Every day, every tear, every worry-filled minute shaved off my life.
I’d do it all again.
If only I weren’t so fucking helpless to save her. I loved that woman. Whole heart. Whole soul. Bend me, break me, crack me open and she would have been there. No matter how bad it got, she was always a part of me.
I wasn’t sure anymore if she could say the same.
“Bowen,” she whispered, just as she’d done so many times before. It was a plea. One she knew I’d answer no matter the situation. No matter how mad I got. No matter how much I feared losing her again.
My gaze instinctively lifted to hers.
She smiled and the sight caused an ache in my chest. It was a lie.
Fuck. I missed her smile.
“Baby, I’m okay.” She tilted her head to her drink. “I hate flying. That’s all this is.”
That was a lie too.
My shoulders fell and a loud breath tore from my burning lungs, but I let myself pretend, my mind going back to a time when it could have been the truth.
I thought of the nights we’d shared multiple bottles of wine and made love, laughing and moaning under the covers until the sun crept across the horizon. She’d rested peacefully in my arms. No nightmares. No crying in her sleep. No insomnia. Just even breaths, her head on my shoulder, and her body wound around mine so tightly it was like a second skin.
But that was the past.
The unreachable, insurmountable past.
The plane jerked, forcing me back to the present.
“Shit.” She moved her hand off my thigh to grasp her drink as it sloshed all over her. “Crap, crap, crap,” she chanted, using a cocktail napkin to dry the dark-red pool of tomato juice on her white pants.
For a moment, I sat there and watched her struggle. It wasn’t the most chivalrous thing to do, but I was all out of grand gestures.
She unbuckled her seat belt and lurched to her feet, her phone along with a handful of ice cubes from her lap falling to the floor. “Damn, this is going to leave a huge stain.”
The plane jerked again and she stumbled forward, crashing into the seat in front of her before I could catch her arm.
“Dammit, sit down before you get hurt.”
Ignoring me, she bent over to fish her phone from under the seat. “Hit the button for the flight attendant. I need some club soda and a lemon. STAT.”
“No, what you need is to sit down.”
I gave her arm a tug and dragged her down to the seat. Using the tip of my boot, I swept her phone toward her. Aforementioned lack of chivalry aside, I was no contortionist; leaning over to pick it up was out of the question.
She folded her upper body over my lap and blindly patted around the floor. I fought the urge to run my fingers through the back of her hair. In the beginning, it would have been a no-brainer. I’d have curled forward and suggestively whispered in her ear, “Since you’re already down there…”
She would have grinned up at me, her whole face filled with mischief as she traced a finger over my zipper, ignoring anyone who dared to watch her as she replied, “You mean down here?”
I’d have grabbed her hand and made her stop even though I was the one who had started it. Sally had no filter. She always took it one step too far. I’d loved that about her when we’d first met. It was fresh and exciting, a far cry from the stuffy women I’d dated in the past.
But now, she was in the past too.
We were in the past.
Although, it wasn’t fair to say she was the only one who had changed. I was a different person too. The trauma of thinking you’d lost your soul mate would do that to a man.
I worried about her. Not more than I should, but probably more than was healthy. My sister had nagged me for months to talk to someone, but I’d felt like such a hypocrite, rushing off to therapists and doctors while she sat at home, playing with our dogs and testing out new recipes.
Still, one of us had to get help. Someone had to be the better half in this relationship. Currently, we were just two people—broken and even more broken.