Page 124 of Wait for Him

"I can't tell you."

"The fuck you can't—"

"I can't tell you because it's not mine to tell."

I hold his eyes and let him see whatever the fuck is left of me.

"You want to put me through this wall, do it. I'll help you. But what happened in that lobby is Rose's to explain, and if you love her, you will not hear it from me. Ask her when she's ready. Don't ask her before."

Something flickers in his expression.

Because he knows his sister.

He knows there are rooms inside Rose that he has never been invited into, secrets she built walls around long before either of us understood they were there. And whatever he saw in that lobby, some part of him recognizes now that he's standing outside one of those rooms.

His grip loosens by a degree.

"Your marriage," he says. "Elyse."

"Over. Papers went out this week. It was never..." I stop because that thread pulls the whole fucking thing behind it. "It's over."

He lets go of my collar and steps back.

Then he really looks at me.

I don't know what he sees. The split knuckles. The gauze. The fact that I'm not defending myself. Maybe just whatever a man looks like when the lights have gone out behind him too.

"She just ended it," he says slowly. "Whatever it was. That's why you look like that."

"She ended everything, Bennet." My voice comes out scraped raw. "You're about to find that out. Go be with your sister."

I step past him and into the elevator. And the last thing I see before the doors close is my best friend standing in the hallway between his sister's door and me, forced to choose.

He turns toward Rose.

Good.

That's the only choice I'd respect him for right now.

Rose

Nothing registers.

I've never felt so numb, and I welcome it with open arms because the alternative might just kill me.

I asked Jackson to leave, and that fact is sitting somewhere in the room with me too, but even it feels distant, like something that happened to somebody else.

Not only is the man who raped me his father, Jackson has known for days. Days of hiding it. Days of letting me hand him my body, my history, my trust while he decided on my behalf what I was ready to know. He gave that monster time to settle his affairs before prison, and that is the part my brain keeps circling back to, because what affairs could Wesley Finnegan possibly have that ranked above my justice?

What could he possibly need to organize, arrange or say goodbye to before consequences were finally allowed to catch up with him? I

know Jackson was trying to control the situation.

I know he had security watching him.

I know he thought he was protecting me from more chaos.

All of that can be true, and none of it changes the fact that he made a decision about my trauma without me.