in what I thought was the right direction.
“Anne?”
I whipped my head back around. “Yeah?”
“Don’t forget what I said. It’s true. And you know it.”
After using one of the eight million bathrooms that apparently existed inside of the Hardick home, I’d carefully crawled back into bed between Penn and Murphy.
They both had immediately burrowed into me on either side, and I bit my tongue until it bled to keep from sobbing.
It was too beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that it hurt. My heart ached and I hadn’t even left yet.
Preston’s words were tumbling around in my head like kamikaze pilots. I didn’t know how much of what he had said should be taken seriously.
But that was a lie, and there was no point in lying to myself on top of everybody else. Everything he had said should be taken seriously.
Preston seemed to be a lot of questionable things, but he wasn’t a liar. I sensed that clearly, even though I didn’t want to.
When he said that he hadn’t been attacking me, I knew he had meant it. He was literally telling me how things would go. And as much as I wanted his whole “wall theory” to be complete bullshit, it wasn’t.
I did have walls up. Maybe Penn sensed them, but in his own sweet and naïve way, I knew he thought he could break through them eventually. The problem was that he didn’t quite know just what he was trying to break through.
My walls weren’t about just not wanting to get heartbroken. They were about not wanting to get actually broken by Tim. As far away as I had tried to go, I knew – I knew he was coming.
Randall probably would have given up by now. Randall had loved himself entirely too much to go trampling across the country looking for two people he didn’t even love. He might have started off and tried for a while, but he would have given up – happily – and gone back.
Tim. Was. Coming.
And then, when it was possible for me to put aside the actual life and death part of my predicament, the shame was more than ready to flood me.
Let alone the incident with my ex dying in a mountain gorge, I had a glorious, shameful past to completely ruin any speck of decency that might have been left to my name.
Poor. Orphaned. Trash. Unwanted. Abandoned. Alone.
Aside from Murphy, and of course, now, Kate, there wasn’t a single human being on the whole entire planet who would or even could stick up for me. No one was going to attest as to my good character or delightful personality.
My past was a giant black hole that swallowed every good thing I could have ever possibly had in life. It just sucked everything and everyone in and destroyed all hope.
Murphy was truly all I had, when it came down to the bare wire. Kate was wonderful, but I wasn’t her actual family, and at some point, she would probably think about that long and hard.
Eventually, Murphy and I would become a burden to her as well. We already were, she was just too good of a person to see it. But when she did...
Then what?
I thought of Penn’s dad and his kind eyes. I knew he meant me no harm, but I also had seen the spark in his eye that clearly flashed a warning signal. Paul Hardick knew something was off with Anne Johnson.
They all did.
And Pierce... was he going to unleash a private investigator on me? Was that even necessary? My foster care records were sealed, but the fact that I had been in foster care was publicly available.
Penn might have felt sorry enough for me to overlook that less than worthy part of my life, but Pierce wouldn’t. If Pierce was even half as over-protective as Preston had made him out to be, I was going to seem like a little, unnecessary liability once everything was out in the open.
Pierce had children to protect, and he would do just that.
I knew the feeling. It was inspired by an instinct that was utterly unbreakable.
Pierce had seemed like a good, kind person, just like the rest of the Hardicks. That didn’t for a moment mean that he’d allow any type of threat to his children’s safety and wellbeing to infiltrate his home.
And the thought that I could bring danger upon such a nice family – a nice family who’d been through their own major losses not that long ago – was