Sparrow - L.J. Shen Page 0,112

my knee, I croaked. “You’re free.”

The most painful words ever spoken by me. Sparrow was free to go, to spread her wings and fly. I’d give her everything, as my father’s will ordered. And it still wouldn’t be as painful as seeing her go. “I’m just so fucking sorry. I know it sounds absurd, considering everything we’ve been through, but I never meant to hurt you that way.”

“I know.” Her voice grew cold. She was already slipping away from me. From us.

“My door’s always open,” I added, as if it mattered.

She tilted her head slightly with a nod. “I know that, too. Now, please leave.”

I got up from my seat. Walking in here, I thought I would never want to turn around and walk out. Thought I’d milk this conversation until the very last drop, get more time with her one last time before we said goodbye. But it turned out that when you really care, things don’t work that way. Her pain occupied the whole fucking room, invading my space and knocking me off my fucking ass, and I couldn’t tolerate it without feeling my pulse weaken and my body growing cold.

I reached for the door, about to walk away from her for the very last time.

“Just out of curiosity…would you have done things differently, all things considered?” she asked in her beautiful voice.

“All things considered,” I said, not turning around because I know I’d break and do my usual thing, coerce her, threaten her, force her to stay, knowing that she shouldn’t, “if I had known, I wouldn’t have waited until now, or until our parents were dead. I would have asked you to marry me when you were nine, on that dance floor at Paddy’s wedding, when you had your first slow dance, and damn the consequences.”

She laughed.

She thought it was a joke.

It wasn’t. This is what should have happened. We shouldn’t have spent a minute away from each other while we had a chance. Nothing bad would have happened if I told nine-year-old Sparrow that she was mine.

No Paddy.

No Catalina.

No Brock.

I would never lay a finger on her mother’s body, let alone hide it in the woods.

And now we were going to spend the rest of our lives apart. Damn that “Saving All My Love For You.”

TROY

Two weeks later

LAST TIME I saw him, Paddy Rowan reminded me that I couldn’t run away from my past. He was right. The truth was one hell of a runner, and it would eventually catch up with you. It caught up with him. It caught up with me. It was delivered coldly, like revenge, on a plate of misery, to my beautiful, wide-eyed, innocent, spitfire wife.

I wished I could cram all my lies into a ball of venom and shove it down my throat, swallowing the pain she felt, making it all better for her. But I couldn’t.

When I first married her, I didn’t tell her my father was responsible for our marriage because I didn’t want this to shame my family, my mother, myself. I didn’t want her to run off to the police with it. Didn’t even feel like I owed her shit. The truth was mine, and for me to stew in. Alone.

I couldn’t even stomach the fact that Brock and Catalina knew.

But as we got closer, things changed. I no longer cared about the stupid Brennan pride, but I still didn’t tell her. She didn’t need to know that her mom ditched her for a married man. Didn’t deserve to be saddled by more injustice and pain. For all she knew, her mom could have been kidnapped or murdered or just flat-out crazy, living with a herd of cats in the woods. I didn’t want to reopen that old wound for Sparrow. The parent-child relationship was the most complex thing in the human race, I knew that first-hand, and that scab was too deep and tender to dig open.

A lot of puss and blood hid behind that old scab. It was going to hurt like hell for her.

I wasn’t sure which part was the worst for Sparrow—how I hid her mother, got rid of the evidence, or that I didn’t tell her about all this in the first place. One thing was for sure, yet understandable—my apology was not accepted.

Two weeks after I left that hospital room, it happened.

I expected the phone call, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less. I answered the call with one hand, using the other to shove someone’s head into