Everlasting - Christine Michelle

Chapter 1

Letters

Lucy

My Dearest Lucy,

This is the final one, love. I feel it in my bones. When I go out there this time, I don’t think I’ll make it back to you. I need you to be all right with the sacrifice though because I owe it to Ever. I owe this to our baby girl, the one I failed for too many years. I owe it to you too, sweetheart. You should never have had to watch me fail at being a man, a father, a husband even. You did though. You not only witnessed my ultimate failures; you were there to pick up the pieces and to keep me together for all the years after, when the weight of my guilt threatened to pull me under.

I never want to be one to rush you, but I’ll be waiting somewhere beyond all of this, for you to join me once more. You take your time though, babe. Spend every minute you can soaking up those moments you cherish with our grandbabies. Hug my girls a little tighter for me since I won’t be there to do it any longer. Give them all the rest of what you have left before you come to me. I will be waiting.

I will never be done loving you, my beautiful Lucy! Never.

CJ

The paper was tracked and stained by tears before I was done reading it. I knew I wasn’t meant to read it yet. We hadn’t heard anything. When Merc told me about the boxes that were hidden in the garage, I couldn’t help myself though. I had to go take a look. He had written to me. Oh, my God, but the man had written boxes worth of letters to me that I had never read. Not a single one. I had been curious about what they all said right up until I read the first line of the last letter he placed in this box. He didn’t plan on coming home. My heart squeezed painfully in my chest as I tried, and failed, to catch my breath.

“You can do right by her without dying, CJ,” I called out into the echoing darkness of the garage I was sitting in. My husband thought he had to be a martyr to finally earn his daughter’s approval. He didn’t understand that if he was, he would never know how she felt about him because he wouldn’t be here any longer to gain that closure from her. It was a closure he didn’t really deserve. He had screwed up with her for years. I often wondered if things would have been different between them if I hadn’t changed my ways so early on. If I hadn’t realized she was innocent in everything her mother had done, in the circumstances that led my love to having a child with someone else, would he have continued to protect her from me and formed the bond that they needed so desperately to form?

I had no way of knowing that. It did none of us any good to think about it anyway. I knew my own heart. There’s no way I could have continued to be the evil stepmother in that child’s life under any circumstances. Besides, I was sure that my initial reaction had been the reason CJ pulled away from her. Then the crap his brothers spouted about her being from that evil bitch’s loins didn’t do any favors. It was my one regret for sticking by his side where the club was concerned. It was the only time I understood why my mother had chosen the life she did. The club, for all it’s good, was capable of great evil too. I tucked the letter back inside the box, knowing this was not where I needed to start. I moved them all around and pulled out the one that appeared to be older than the rest. Each letter had been dated on the outside. I found what I was looking for easily enough. They were the letters he wrote me when I left for Florida to take care of my grandmother, and to hide from what I thought he’d done.

“What are you doing?” The voice that I knew belonged to Merc caught me by surprise so much that I nearly dropped the box. “You shouldn’t be reading those,” he admonished.

“Why not? According to his last letter he doesn’t expect to come home. Seems the perfect time to read them to me.”

“Lucy, he’s coming home, I promise you that.”

“You