“Why?” my father shouted. “Why do you have to leave?”
My shoulders slumped. “It’s too hard.”
“You will get over your crush on Kale—”
“It’s not a crush. I love him!” I shouted.
My father narrowed his eyes. “You’re twenty and you’ve never had a relationship. What do you know about love?”
My father’s words cut me deeply.
“I know that watching him be with someone else is killing me, do you understand that?” I asked, my voice tight with emotion. “It. Is. Killing. Me.”
“She’s in a state over Lavender and—”
“Nanny, stop,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m not blinded. I’m seeing clearly and I need to leave here.”
“If you leave here, Lane,” my father said coldly, “don’t come bloody back!”
With that said, he left the room, leaving me staring after him with fear swirling around in my stomach. I looked to Lochlan and Layton when they stood up.
“Please,” I pleaded. “I don’t want to leave and be fighting.”
“Then stay and there won’t be a problem,” Layton bit out.
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
“Then I have nothing else to say to you.” Layton walked out, and I looked from him to Lochlan, who was staring at me with a pain in his eyes that I didn’t understand.
“If you leave here, and you cause a rift between all of us, then I am done. Fucking done.”
My lower lip wobbled when my mother and grandmother stood and left the room without a word in my direction. Not a curse word, not a farewell. Nothing.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed. “They hate me.”
I felt my uncle’s arms come around me. “They don’t hate you. They’re hurt and scared for you. I told you, you’re precious to us all.”
I hugged my uncle tightly. “They don’t understand me.”
“They will, just give them time.”
I nodded and breathed my uncle’s scent in, remembering everything about him in that moment because I didn’t know when I would next be able to hold him like this.
Do I have everything? I thought to myself as I scanned my parents’ sitting room for the millionth time. I was flying out to America today to start a new life, and I was a nervous wreck. I was so emotional. Breaking the news to my family had been an utter disaster. I couldn’t lie: it hurt that they didn’t even want to say goodbye to me, but I knew how upset and worried they were for me. They just couldn’t get on board, and the Edwards stubborn trait reared its ugly head when I wouldn’t change my mind for them.
It didn’t help that I had buried my sweet Lavender only a few short hours ago and was experiencing a pain that I had never known until they lowered her six feet below the earth. My trip was a great distraction, though, and I immersed myself in it instead of thinking about my friend.
“Money,” I mumbled to myself, and checked my personal belongings once more.
My Uncle Harry would be by soon to bring me to the airport, and he would run through a checklist with me. He had travelled hundreds of times and would catch something if I forgot it.
“Lane?” Kale’s voice suddenly called out.
Oh, bollocks. I paled. What the fuck was he doing here?
I turned and looked at Kale with wide eyes when he walked into the sitting room. His eyes went directly from me to the two large suitcases that were next to me. He stared at them, hard, before he lifted his gaze to mine.
“What are they for?” he asked, frowning.
Please, I silently pleaded, go away.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, dodging his question.
He blinked his whisky-coloured eyes that I loved so much. “Lochlan called me and told me you needed to talk to me and I had to come over right now.”
Anger surged through me. “Lochlan is a fucking bastard!” I growled.
How fucking dare he, my mind raged.
Kale refocused on my suitcases. “Lane, what are they for?”
Fuck.
“I . . . I have to leave.”
Kale didn’t move an inch. “I don’t understand,” he said after a few moments. “I mean, I get what this looks like, what it is, but why?”
I looked away from him. “You know why.”
He sucked in a breath. “Please don’t tell me this is because of us?”
Was there ever an “us” to begin with? my mind taunted.
“I’m leaving because I need space, a lot of space, to clear my head. It’s been clouded with you for years, and I just need to get you out of my system. Lavender is gone too, and I just can’t be here without her. I buried her today and it’s hitting me that she is gone. I need to get out of here.”
The muscle in Kale’s jaw rolled back and forth as I spoke. “Where will you go?” he asked.
“New York,” I swallowed. “I found an apartment with cheap rent in a good neighbourhood.”
I watched as Kale let my words sink in. “America?” he whispered. “You’re leaving for America?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry, but I have to leave.”
“And I only find out now?” he angrily snapped. “Right before you walk out the door to up and move out of the country, you decide to fucking tell me?”
Anger was good; I could fight it with my own.
“Yeah, like how you knew Drew was pregnant for weeks and never told me until a few hours after I found out my best friend was dead?”
Kale reeled back like I hit him. “That’s different.”
“How?” I snapped.
“Because I was figuring out a way to tell you without hurting you.”
It was always going to hurt. Always.
“You’re having a baby with someone else. How could that ever not hurt me?” I asked as my shoulders slumped.
Kale licked his lip, and instead of answering my question, he said, “This is so fucked up.”
Finally, something I agreed with.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “It is.”
He remained silent in the doorway of the sitting room, blocking my exit. I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose and checked the watch on my wrist. When I saw the time, I cursed. “I’m not going to make my flight if I don’t leave now,” I said to Kale. “I have check-in and security to get through, and my gate opens in an hour.”
He stood rooted to the spot.
“Kale,” I said with impatience. “Move.”
“No,” he replied firmly. “I won’t. We can figure this out. You don’t have to leave the bloody country, Lane.”
I didn’t want to hear any of this, so I gripped my cases and tugged them over to the doorway and tried to get by his lean body. I angrily shoved at his chest when he wouldn’t budge.
“Move!” I pleaded.
“Lane!” he shouted and grabbed hold of my arms. “What the hell do you want from me? Nothing I do is good enough for you. What the hell do you want? Tell me, because I don’t fucking know.”
I dropped my guard and unleashed the feelings I’d bundled deep down for years.
“You, Kale!” I bellowed. “I just want you!”
Kale stumbled back a step or two from me like my words hit him with the force of a train. When he balanced himself, he stood motionless as he stared at me. The silence between us was deafening, but I used it to get everything I had wanted to say all my life off my chest. I needed to tell him how I felt, even if it meant the end of everything.
“I’ve always wanted you, but I couldn’t have you,” I cried, breaking down as fat tears fell from the brim of my swollen eyes and rolled down my flushed cheeks. “I have to leave. It’s ripping me apart watching you be happy with someone else. I want you to be happy, I swear I do, but it’s hurting me that I’m not the woman making you smile. I’m so tired of being sad, Kale.”
Kale didn’t speak; he just continued to stare at me.
“I love you. I’ve always loved you . . . just not in the way you love me.” I looked him in the eye. “I
’m in love with you. I have been forever.”
Kale opened his mouth to speak, but when nothing came out, he closed his lips.
I held my hand up. “You don’t need to say anything – you don’t even need to feel any type of way about this,” I assured him. “This isn’t your issue; it’s mine.”
Kale blinked his eyes a couple of times.
“You love me?” he whispered, his eyes wide and distant.
I swallowed. “Yes, I love you.”
Kale blinked his eyes back into focus and trained his gaze on me. “But . . . but you told me it wasn’t like that between us – you told me it wasn’t. I asked you, and you told me no. You told me no.”
My heart shattered once again.
“I was terrified what I felt was wrong. I tortured myself for years because I thought I was dirty for loving a person who everyone considered my brother.” I cast my eyes downward to try and gain control of my tears; if I didn’t look at him maybe I wouldn’t hurt as bad.
“We have been around each other since the day I was born. You were the first man that wasn’t my father to hold me. I know you were little too, and at that time it was friendship that sparked, but it changed for me, Kale. I’ve loved you since that night when I was ten years old and you slept outside my wardrobe all night with a baseball bat to keep the monsters away. I just didn’t realise you keeping them away would awaken new ones within me.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he was in shock. He couldn’t begin to think about the weight of my words until he had time to process what I was telling him. He needed space, and I was going to give it to him.
“You told me no,” he whispered.
I sobbed when his eyes filled with water.
“You told me no. I wanted you, and you told me no. I hurt when you refused me your heart, God knows.” He wiped his tears as they fell onto his cheeks. “I hurt so bad, Lane, but I learned to live with it. I learned that there was never going to be a Kale and Lane together in the way I wanted. I learned to love you without needing you. I learned to move on from you.”
I didn’t think I could hurt more than I already did, but hearing the words “move on” come from Kale broke me into a million pieces. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole.
“I’m with Drew, and I love her. She is an amazing woman, and she’s stood by me for as long as I can remember.” I looked up as he spoke, even though it was killing me. “I’m going to have a baby with her, I’m going to marry her one day. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at her and feel the way you made me feel.”
“Made”, not “make”. Past tense.
“Kale, I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and gripped onto the arm of the sofa next to me to keep from falling to my knees.
“I’m sorry too,” he replied. “You have no idea how much.”
He took a step backwards, then another, until he was out in the hallway.
“Take care of yourself, okay?” He swallowed. “I’ll always be here if you need me.”
He turned then and walked out of my life, destroying what was left of my heart in the process. Before the hall door clicked shut, I heard him say three words that would haunt my dreams every night for the next six years.
“Goodbye, Laney Baby.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Day four in York
Hey, Lav,” I said, smiling down at the picture of my old friend on the front of her beautiful grey marble headstone.
I reached out and brushed my thumb over the image, then sat down on the cold grass of her grave and criss-crossed my legs. I placed the bouquet of lilies I brought her in front of the cute little ornaments on her grave and sat, simply staring at her picture.
“I’m sorry this is only my second time to come and visit you,” I began, then frowned, guilt gripping me. “After your funeral things kind of went to hell.”
I could practically hear her voice in my head say, “No shit, Sherlock,” and it made me smile.
“Things with Kale went really bad, Lav, and then they went even worse with my family when I packed up and high-tailed it out of here.” I swallowed and looked down at my hands. “I ran away and stayed away for six long years.”
I sighed and shook my head.
“I was so heartbroken when I found out you died, and then I found out that very day that Drew was pregnant with Kale’s baby. It was all too much, and I figured if I was thousands of miles away, it would somehow help, but it didn’t. My mind is my own worst enemy. Even though I couldn’t see Kale, I would envision him and Drew together with their baby all the time, and it killed me.” I frowned deeply. “When I wasn’t thinking about them, I was thinking about you and what would have happened if you hadn’t died. I don’t think you would have let me leave . . . I don’t think leaving would have even been an option if you had still been here. Losing you pushed me over the edge, Lav.”
I licked my dry lips and looked back up to Lavender’s headstone.
“Everything ended up being a nightmare, though. Things panned out worse than I ever could have imagined. Kale’s poor baby boy died, and now he is alone. I can sense the change in him. I see it in his eyes. He’s like me, just existing, and I hate that. I don’t want him to feel like that because I know how empty and cold it is.”
I picked a few blades of grass from the ground and broke them up with my fingers.
“I think about you all the time too, Lav,” I said, just in case she thought I didn’t. “You’d know what to do if you were here; you always had the best advice.”
I glanced around me then, checking whether anyone was close to me. I was glad when I saw there was no one around; it made me feel better knowing my conversation with Lavender was private. Talking to her made me feel better. Even if she didn’t reply back to me, I knew she was listening.
I could feel her.
“Are you with my uncle?” I asked in a whisper. “If you are, can you tell him that I really miss him?” I smiled as a cool breeze swirled around me. “I think I’m still in a state of shock, because I have moments where I completely forget that he is gone, then I realise he is, and my heart breaks all over again.”
I rubbed my nose with the back of my hand. “I thought burying you was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but my Uncle Harry’s death hurts on a whole other level. He was all I had from home after I left, and now he is gone.”
I rubbed my eyes.
“I made things right with my family again. Being away from them, from here, was solving nothing. It was only causing more unnecessary heartache. And after all that shit that went down with Jensen when I was a kid, I really shouldn’t have upped and left the country in the first place. Layton told me how much they would worry for me, but I didn’t listen. I’m home now, though, and I’ve made things better.”
I sighed and pushed loose strands of hair out of my face.
“I’ve yet to have my proper talk with Kale, and I’m honestly quite scared about it. I have absolutely no idea what will happen after we do talk, and the not knowing is terrifying, but no matter what happens, we need to clear the air. He needs to know how I still feel about him, and he needs to know why I couldn’t be here anymore.”
I was silent for a long time after I finished speaking. I just sat there as still as a statue while the magnitude of loss swept over me. It was a part of life, but it sucked. I was grateful to finally be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I needed my family now – I saw that clearly. Their love and concern wasn’t overbearing anymore. It was comforting.
I wasn’t staying to please anyone else, I was doing it for myself, and I couldn’t help but smile because of my uncle’s sneaky hand in it. I’d do right by him. I’d talk to Kale because I needed to speak to him for me, not for an inheritance. At the thought of Kale, I looked in the direction of Kaden’s grave, and I froze when I saw who was standing before it.
Drew.
I watched her for a moment, and before I knew it, I was on my feet and walking towards her.
I had no idea what I was going to say to her, but I needed to say something. Anything.
I approached her with the gravel crunching under my feet. I stood a few feet from her and exhaled a deep breath. “Hey, Drew,” I said softly.
I startled her, because she jumped and looked at me with surprised eyes. “Lane?” she breathed, and placed a hand on her chest. “You scared me.”
“I’m sorry.” I frowned. “I thought you heard me walking up.”
She shook her head. “I was in a world of my own.”
I shoved my hands into my coat pockets. “I was visiting Lavender and saw you down here. I wanted to come and say hello.”
She flicked her eyes over my shoulder before sliding her eyes back to mine. “I never got a chance to say it, but I’m sorry about your friend. Kale told me how devastated you were when she died. He said he lost you that day in the hospital.”
I stared at her, surprised she’d revealed that to me.
“He said that?” I questioned.
Drew nodded. “He used to have nightmares about it. He’d sit up in the middle of the night apologising to you and trying to console you, but then he’d wake up and realise you weren’t there.”
My stomach churned because I knew that he had been trying to make amends and comfort me because that was when he had told me he and Drew were going to have a baby together.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Drew blinked. “What for?”
“For being on his mind when he was with you.”
Drew smiled then, and I couldn’t help but notice how pretty she was. She was older now, but she was also still the nine-year-old girl I’d first met in the school playground all those years ago.
“Lane, you were always on Kale’s mind. He’d talk about you without realising what he was doing. We’d be watching a film or having a random conversation, and you’d pop into his head, and everything would become about you.”
Shame filled me.
“I’m so sorry.”