spoke for me, but I know it’s been over four years. She won’t let me find her because she cares more about her power over me than she does me. She likes knowing that I’m chasing her and doesn’t care if it hurts. She doesn’t care if I’m driving myself insane over the moments I might be missing with my kid. My heart kept beating when she walked out the door, and now I know the reason. It’s because it never belonged to her. It was always meant for you.”
Versailles might as well have been a berry field instead of a seventeenth-century palace.
“If she’s truly so terrible, kid or no kid, how could you choose to stay with her?” I asked him.
“Because I was an orphan.”
I ached for him because he sounded so ashamed. It hadn’t been his fault. Didn’t he know that?
“I never had a family,” he continued. “I never knew what it was like to form a connection that couldn’t be broken with the stroke of a pen. Houston and Loren helped fill the gaps, but it was never enough. There was always something missing. Always a need for more. I met Emily, and I was drawn because she was damaged like me”—hesitating, the look in his eyes pleaded for me to understand—“and like you.”
I sucked in a breath. Was I just another Emily?
“The only thing she ever gave the world was both of her middle fingers, and I wanted to be right there beside her. I wasn’t…” He swallowed. “I wasn’t the same after I met her. I was reckless and spiraling too fast to stop on my own. I have memories that keep me awake sometimes because of the things she convinced me to do. Houston and Loren saw what was happening and tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t trust them. They don’t know this, but Emily made me hate my best friends long before Calvin, and I was too blind to see it. She’d cry and convince me that they didn’t want to see me happy, and I…” He hung his head. “I fucking believed her.”
His voice broke on that last, and suddenly, I was transported back to the show in Arizona after I was exiled from their bus and the lyrics I’d foolishly mistaken for Loren’s.
I heard Rich sniffle, and then he kept speaking.
“By the time I realized I’d mistaken a carefree spirit for someone who just didn’t care at all about anyone, including herself, it was too late.” He lifted his head and looked at me. “I’d married her. I thought I loved her, but I knew she didn’t love me, and I didn’t even care. She was the only one willing to pretend.”
“Rich.” I couldn’t help myself. I went to him. He was slow to wrap his arms around me, but when they did, I wished silently to myself that he would never let go.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he whispered.
I forced myself to pull away, but only enough to see his face. “Why did you?”
I became so lost in the emotion swimming in his silver eyes that I’d forgotten I’d asked the question until he answered.
“I knew you’d let me go.”
“If you had been honest—”
He shook his head before I could finish. “Not what I meant. If I’d told you about my past, I knew you’d sacrifice your heart to let me do what I thought was right. You’d let me walk away, and I couldn’t handle that. Years of hoping for a family, and I was suddenly praying that her baby wasn’t mine. I was praying I wouldn’t have to give you up. I was living in a cloud of shame and confusion, and I didn’t know which way was up, much less right.” I felt his hand curl around my nape and the other slide through my hair. He’d never held me so tenderly. “But it was never my intention to deceive you, Braxton. Hurt you was the last thing I wanted to do.”
“But you did,” I told him as a tear fell. How could I make him see? My soul reached out for him, but my heart was a different matter. It was afraid of falling again. “After Emily, you should understand how much. Trust is fragile, Jericho. It’s rattled often and easily broken. You shattered mine. You can put the pieces back together, but it’ll never be as strong. I’ll never not see the cracks.”
I couldn’t describe the range of emotions that