Page 19 of The Quiet After The Fall

I think about Sawyer’s face when I saw her last week. How she looked at me with so much hatred at first but then it morphed into something so much worse. Indifference. She was exhausted, and why shouldn’t she be?

I drove home and sat in my car in the parking garage for twenty minutes before I could make myself go inside. I still watched her on the app, I’ll never stop doing that, but I gave her space. No texts. No calls. No dropping by her apartment or job to lay eyes on her.

It’s killing me. Actually killing me.

“The centerpieces at my stepdaughter Hailey’s wedding,” my mother says from the table, and mention of that day snags the organ in my chest and yanks. “The tall ones with the hanging greenery. Do you remember those, Knox? They were stunning. Whoever did those arrangements⁠—”

“I don’t remember,” I say.

She shoots me an irritated look. “You were there.”

“I know I was there. So were you.”

I doubt she was sober in any way shape or form.

She’s quiet for a beat, before turning back to Diane to say something about the florist’s name, leaving our exchange alone.

My gaze floats back to the window, and the groundskeeper is gone, it’s so empty out there. Nothing to distract me from thinking about Hailey’s wedding.

Having drinks at the hotel bar was Owen’s idea, but once he brought it up to Chris, Hailey’s new husband, the idea spread like wildfire. I had to go—or at least that’s what I told myself. In reality, I could have stayed for a quick drink and went up to my room. I had no one to blame but myself for staying as long as I did and drinking as much on top of that.

I’d been watching her all night. I knew I was doing it. I couldn’t locate the mechanism in my brain that would make me stop…some wire that should have warned me. Told me this is a bad idea.

Whatever connection that could have made me stop was severed by the third time she laughed at something Owen said and I felt it in every nerve ending.

She was wearing this fucking dress that had no business being that tight around her tits. It was flimsy as hell too and I knew she was chilly as the night went on.

I was supposed to hate her, and I did, but that didn’t stop her from being distracting. She kept catching my eyes across the room and looking away first, which told me everything I needed to know about her feelings toward me. Not that I knew what to do with the information.

I was angry. I’d been angry for months, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

David Thorne had stolen from my family, from this town, from people who trusted him, and was now sitting in a holding cell waiting for a trial he was going to lose, and the damage he’d done was something I was living with every single day. Every spreadsheet, every creditor call, every morning I evaded employees’ emails asking if they’d be the next one to get laid off.

These were real people. Hardworking people. And they lost everything because of one man’s choices.

Then I remembered that it was easier for the anger to find a target.

And I knew Sawyer had nothing to do with it. I’d known it from the beginning. She was guilty of being their daughter. That was all.

But that meant she was the one standing in front of me, close enough to direct the rage at when everything and everyone else was too diffuse and too large and too impossible to touch.

One look at her and I’d see her mother’s face, contorted in ecstasy as she fucked my cheating prick of a father. Or I’d see David Thorne’s guilty expression as the cops took him away in handcuffs.

It was easier to be angry at Sawyer than at anything else.

I told myself that was why I followed her to the bar. Some combination of months of misdirected anger and three glasses of whiskey and the way she’d been looking at me all night like she wanted to fight me or fuck me. Both, maybe. I told myself that’s all it was.

Then I had her pressed against a wall in the dark and her dress bunched in my hands and her voice moaning my name, and I understood that I had been lying to myself for so much longer than those past few months.

It would have been easier if it felt wrong. If my fingers in her cunt, and my hard cock pressed against her ass, and how wet she was for me didn’t feel like fucking kismet. Instead it felt like the first true thing I’d done in years, and that was the most terrifying part. That underneath all the misdirection, this was where it landed.

Her.

I had to make it easier. So I made sure she’d hate me for it.

“You don’t deserve to come.”

I heard myself say the words and watched the humiliation sink in, morphing from want to fury. And when I stepped away, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.