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I forced a smile that Damien didn’t return.
“I don’t know, Clo. I feel like we missed something.”
Shite.
My smile slipped as we stared at one another in complete honesty.
“I don’t want to wait twenty more years for another half hour in heaven with you.” Damien shook his head as his devastated gray gaze fell to my lips.
“Then, don’t,” I whispered, kissing him first.
“All right, lovebirds,” Jack teased, coming up beside us to give Kate a kiss of her own. “Save it for the after-party. We’ve got a president to assassinate.”
Whispering something in Kate’s ear, Jack gave her a swat on the arse, adjusted the machine gun strapped across her back, and marched toward the exit they’d come through the night before.
Setting me down, Damien pressed his lips to mine in a way that reminded me of lying on a bed of green grass under a blue sky in a cemetery full of white granite gravestones.
“Remember me,” he whispered.
Then, after an obligatory hug for Kate, he was gone.
CHAPTER 46
CLOVER
Istood there for what had to be minutes, staring at the pointed marble arch Damien had just passed through, waiting for my knees to buckle and my wails to start.
But they didn’t.
The tidal wave was still gathering strength, and in the meantime, it had left me standing in an emotional desert—an unthinking, unfeeling, unbelieving void where an ocean used to be.
I realized, slowly, that Kate wasn’t standing next to me anymore. She was kneeling beside the pulpit, rolling up her sleeping bag as if it were personally responsible for the pain she was in.
“I hate churches,” she muttered.
Her dry, wrinkled hands, weathered from years of kneading dough, squeezed the nylon so hard that I thought her knuckles might split open.
“Kellen’s da was a priest. Did ya know that?” She spat the information out as if it was made of poison.
I nodded slowly, distantly.
“I was just a girl—” Kate’s chin wobbled, but she clenched her jaw and moved over to Jack’s makeshift bed.
“They sent me away to have the baby, but I couldn’t give him up. I escaped with him, tried to raise him on me own, but …” Kate shoved the tightly rolled bundles into a camouflage bag, along with both pillows. Tiny muscles and veins strained in her slender arms. “I couldn’t do it. I gave him back. I gave him to his sick fuck of a father, thinking he would put him up for adoption.”
Falling back on her heels, Kate’s face crumpled as she clutched the sack to her chest like a teddy bear.
She needed me to say something. She needed me to function.
Forcing myself to walk up the wrinkled satin aisle runner and the steps to the pulpit, I sat beside her and placed a hand on her knee.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, wishing I had access to my feelings. Wishing I could be there for her in the way that she needed me to be. “You raised a good man, I think. I know Darby loved him. The way she wrote about him. He was her entire world.”
“I didn’t raise him.” Kate shook her head, staring at the mosaic tile floor. “No one did. Kellen raised himself … out there in those woods, hidin’ from Father Henry, waitin’ for me to come back.” She chewed on her bottom lip as something began to stir in my chest. “I was too messed up back then to take care of him … but then Darby came along, and …”
Kate’s pale eyes lifted to mine. “She saved him.”
The ocean floor rumbled beneath my feet.
