Page 47

“Did you, then?” I throw at him. “Did Levi?”

“Fucking hell, Aspen. How could you think that of us?”

I give a small laugh. “How could I not think that of you? You said yourself, you and my dad fell out because of differences in how you were raising your boys. What if those differences meant Emilia got hurt?”

He lets out a growl, as though my questions are frustrating him, but I don’t care if they are. I want to know the truth.

“Neither Dov nor Levi had anything to do with what happened to your sister.”

I turn in his arms and hold his eye. “What about you?”

Blake covers his face with his hands and lets out a deep breath. “Aspen, I swear to you that I have never hurt a woman, at least not unless she was willing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He scoffs. “Aspen, I’m forty-two years old. If you think I haven’t been into some kinky shit in the past, then you don’t know me at all.”

“I’m not sure I do know you at all, Blake. That’s the problem. What about Dov, though? He’s hurt women in the past, hasn’t he?

“Not intentionally, and only since the accident.”

I shift my position slightly, bringing myself up on my elbow and resting my cheek in my hand. “Yes, this accident. What exactly happened?”

“A fistfight over a girl. He got hit hard in the head, and it caused bleeding on the brain. It was an accident. But then, after he was released from the hospital, he did hurt someone. A girl. It wasn’t intentional, and she did recover, at least physically. The girl he’d been fighting over came to the house to see him, and we didn’t understand yet about how he was now. She’d thought he was the same old Dov and was just relieved he was home. They started making out, I guess like they’d always done, and Dov got carried away.”

“By carried away,” I ask, “you mean he tried to hurt her?”

“He lost control, put his hands around her neck and tried to strangle her, but luckily someone was there to interrupt. The girl was frightened and bruised, and understandably upset, but she was okay.”

“And if someone hadn’t been there?”

Blake turns his face. “That would have been a different situation. But you have to understand that this was several years ago now. Dov has come a long way.”

“Has he? He’d been drugging me and sneaking in on me at night.”

“I didn’t know about the drugging. I’m sorry about that, Pen. I would never have allowed it.”

Blake has the strangest moral code of anyone I’ve ever met. The thing that gets me is that, if asked, I’d bet he’d say he was a good man. That everything he does is for the protection of his family. Yet he lies and manipulates and somehow convinces himself it’s for the right reason and he has no other choice.

I still can’t bring myself to think of him as being a bad man, though. Is it because I want him to put me first in that moral code of his? I don’t care about him breaking the rules, as long as he’s breaking them for me.

“What about now?” I ask. “How is Dov now?”

“He’s stable. He’s on medication, as you know, which we keep stocked here because of the isolation, and I take him to see a specialist every six months. But it’s been seven years, now, Aspen. This is the version of Dov we love now. The person he was before is gone.”

Him being gone makes me think of my sister again.

“Is it stupid that I still hope Emilia might come back one day? When the bank took our house, the first thing that hit me wasn’t that I was going to be homeless. It was that Emilia no longer had a place to come back to. She couldn’t come home even if she wanted to.”

“She isn’t coming home, Aspen. You must know that by now. You need to let go of her.”

Let go of her? I don’t think that’s even possible.

“How can one person experience so much loss in such a short life? It’s so fucking unfair.” I feel myself welling up, my eyes pricking with tears and a painful lump forming in my throat. It’s self-pity and I hate myself for it, but I also can’t help it.

Blake pulls me into a hug. He feels so good. Strong and solid, and he smells incredible. Why do I always feel so safe in his arms, when he’s anything but?

“Life is fucking unfair.” He speaks against the top of my head, his breath warming my hair. “It was unfair when a single punch turned Dov from a confident young man who had his whole life ahead of him, to a recluse who can’t stand to be in the light.”