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The girl who disappeared.
I had no idea what they all said afterward, but I read the hurt, the panic, the anger in his face that night. The abandonment.
I should never have asked the driver to take me past the school.
Daddy still didn’t know about that. The detective took one look at my tear-stained face afterward, cursed enough to provide me with an extended vocabulary, and took me straight to the station like we should have agreed to much earlier.
That was the last time I saw Nash Mercer until that afternoon at Love Beach a few days ago.
I didn’t know if fate brought us back together. I didn’t know if he could accept the person I’d become, but I did know one thing.
Tonight’s dinner would be an utter shitfight—ifhe survived the questioning my father put him through afterwards.
I managed a faint smile, less than reassuring and all the things he needed as my broken mother retracted and headed toward the table in the corner we occupied all week because it appeared to be the only one in the room she could find.
My father continued to stare at Nash. After a while he held out a hand for the boy who never got a chance to say goodbye to follow the woman he refused to abandon when another might have.
Nash looked down at me, his eyes fathomless. Unchecked fury swirled in their depths. Tonight, I’d have questions to answer about our shared past, even though he didn’t know that last part yet.
I didn’t glance at Daddy, but I did keep my hand laced through Nash’s as I followed him to our table.
Shitfight was absolutely the right term.
One of those words I learned from the detective that night.
CHAPTER 3
NASH
Dinner was torture. Silent, pure death.
Thankfully, Bonnie chose the seat next to me, though her shell of a mother perched on my other side so I got the full blast of her father’s interrogative stare across the table. That was okay. I understood him. Bonnie’s mom, on the other hand…
Well, I understood her, too.
All too well.
I spent years in the FBI talking to traumatized women in various stages of recovery, trying to help them grasp details they barely remembered, or readying them for the stand in the hope that on the day they would be the performing monkey we all needed in order to put the sons of bitches who created the trauma away for a long, long time.
Occasionally, it worked.
Often, our processes created more damage than was there when we started. I hated it. Pinned between the two women, Bonnie with her innocent doe eyes staring beseechingly at me, and Mrs Little with her blank face that recognized no one, made the first steps to purgatory I earned myself dozens of times overfor all the above reasons. Not that her mom seemed to know her husband or her child when Bonnie spoke to her across me, but somewhere in there Sarah Little recognized one thing: this conversation had to go on, and she was expected to be a part of it.
She played her role, just like everyone else at the table. Hers just came out a little more obvious, and stilted.
My heart ached for all of them, including the angry, protective father and husband seated across from me who seemed intent on ashing me with a single glare.
Unfortunately for him, that hadn’t happened for me yet.
The moment my knife sat next to my fork across my plate he slapped the table decisively, jerking Bonnie out of her stupor where she shredded her paper napkin systematically into her lap beside me.
“Right. Nash and I need a chat on the balcony with a nice glass of that whiskey you were killing before we came in. Or three.” His eyes warned me I wasn’t taking Bonnie back to my room tonight, or any other night.
A twenty-seven year old woman who was fast on her way to becoming a mirror of her empty shell of a mother, in all respects. My spine stiffened, but I knew this conversation was coming the moment I saw him. To be honest, as much as I knew it would sting, my curiosity won out fair and square. Bonnie and I spent ten minutes at the bar earlier, lying our asses off to each other.
This man would slap me in the face with the truth for my own good and tell me to thank him for it.
I would, with a few hand selections of my own right back.
