The Best Friend (41 page)

They had been reunited all of a couple of hours. They were on the way to her sister’s house to get her stuff, and then to go home. Together. Their old home, the apartment they had co-habited in while they were married. The apartment they had never lived in together as couple. In the last few hours she’d learned her father was dead, her husband… almost husband, was for sure alive and that he wanted to be with her again. It was a lot to take in. Her mind was spinning. It was impossible fathom it all or how she felt, other than Will was hugging her right now. Here. They hadn’t had even a day to make sense of it all. It was overwhelming. Yet, the only thing she could ever want to happen to her. Ever.

Will was alive.

And Will wanted to be with her.

The muscles in his neck were tight under her hands. She rubbed them with her finger tips and turned her head so she could kiss his jaw and neck near her. He closed his eyes at her soft kisses. A shudder traveled through his body.

“What is it?” she asked softly between kissing his chin and cheek and neck. “Besides…well, everything?”

“I almost died.”

She drew in a sharp breath. “But you didn’t. You’re here. Now. With me. Alive. We’re both alive and the general is dead. We finally have a chance, Will.  A chance we’ve never had together.”

“It’s not that I almost died, it’s that I almost died and you thought I didn’t care about you.”

“I always knew you cared about me. Even the first time you left me. I knew, deep in my heart, through all the terror and scars and sadness and grief,
I knew,
you were the one person in the entire world who cared about me. Who saw me. Who felt me. I knew that even then.”

His head shook back and forth. “I never made you feel like you could be with me. I realized it as I was sitting in the God-forsaken, forlorn cell I feared I’d lose my life in. All I could think about was you. How you had done this. How you had survived so much worse than me, and instead of holding you, caring for you, I had done nothing but push you away. Leave you. Leave us. And then tell you to find someone else.”

Tears filled her eyes as he spoke and fell over her eyelids. There was no point in trying to stop. It made her so sad to talk about her past. Her history. Her mistakes. Her rapes. And Mexico. Yet it’s where she found Will. So it was confusing. Without Mexico, there was no Will. Without Will there would have never been a remotely healed Jessie. Without Will there would be
no
Jessie. Of that she was sure. “But I didn’t. I never found anyone else. I never will again, find anyone else, Will. You must know that. You must feel that.”

“I feel that,” he finally said softly. She closed her eyes and leaned her head onto his shoulder. His arms were strong and solid around her. She was trapped against him by the steering wheel and his bulk. He was the only person alive who she could allow to trap her in. He was almost the only person alive she could allow to touch her anymore. “But, don’t you see the things I did wrong?” he persisted.

“I see the things we didn’t know how to deal with. But who could have? Who could have known? Who could have dealt with Mexico any better than us? We’ve done our best. You and I both did the best we could. From what we had to deal with? What more could we have done? No one else would have known what to do, either. Come on, you taught me that.”

“I should have picked you up, clasped you to me and never let you go. When I saw you huddled there in that fucking cell in Mexico, that’s what I should have done,” he whispered it into her ear. He kissed her temple and her cheek and held her hand. She shuddered at the image it evoked, at the stifling fear and terror that clenched her heart and ripped through her gut. At the staggering images it unleashed in her brain.

But the thing of it was: it was nothing new.

She’d been dealing with these flashbacks for three years. It was doubtful she’d ever not deal with them. But what Will had forced her to do, and no one else would have been able to make her do, was to find a way to deal with them.

“You know that, right? I should have never let you go.”

Stay tuned to my
website
for more on
The Years Between.

The Wrong Sister (Book #4):
Targeted for December, 2014.

Donny Lindstrom married Vickie Moore only months after meeting her. Now he knows what others were trying to warn him about: his wife was becoming harder to deal with than their young daughter. The only ones who truly realize how messed up his marriage has become are his in-laws: Tracy and Micah McKinley. Tracy considers her marriage a happy one for years, until the day her husband comes home and shatters everything she thought was true with his latest revelation. Suddenly, she can’t be married at all, and there is no one left for her to rely on except Donny.

Tracy and Donny are good friends, who share nieces, Saturday night barbecues, and holidays. They are not, and have never, considered each other anything more than amicable in-laws. Donny is the fill-in brother she usually calls if she needs help with something, and Tracy’s the nice aunt he relies on to babysit his young daughter. 

Micah’s shocking betrayal leads him to beg Donny to watch out for his wife and kids after he leaves. Donny agrees, but doesn’t, not even for a second, think that request will turn his already tumultuous life upside-down. However, everything soon changes when Donny begins to see a different woman in Tracy than he’s ever known, and wonders if he is indeed married to not only the wrong woman, but also the wrong sister.

The Wrong Sister

Chapter One

When would it stop?

Tracy McKinley walked around her house doing nothing. She picked up the vacuum, but never used it. She wandered around with the laundry in her basket, thinking she should wash something. She could have folded the pile of clean clothes that were now all wrinkled from sitting in the corner of her room, still untouched. She should have
done
something. Anything. But her stomach kept cramping as the words he said replayed through her head with startling, awful clarity.
No. This could be not real
. This could not be happening. Not to her. Things like that did not happen to her.
That
was not something that should ever be a part of her reality. When would he walk in and say he was just kidding? When? He had to, didn’t he? He couldn’t mean that. He had to be kidding because the pain she felt inside her guts was way too much to bear.

Her anger was so thick and strangling, she had to restrain the urge to smash her fist through the drywall of her living room repeatedly. She wanted to. She stared at it with her fist clenched, and her entire body shaking in a rage that was new and terrifying in its depth and power. Meanwhile, she kept telling herself
not
to slam it into the wall.

How could he do that to her? To them? How could her entire life turn out to be such a lie?

But… it wasn’t a lie. It was her new life.

He was home now. He came home early, and his face seemed haggard and drawn. He was suffering too. She didn’t give a damn.

They stood across their kitchen, staring at each other, as if twelve shared years didn’t exist between them. There were no words, and might never be. His eyes scanned her face, seeking something from her. Something she could never give him. He finally slouched and sighed before shuffling down the hallway and disappearing into their bedroom.

Aimlessly pacing her house, Tracy wandered into her daughters’ rooms. She looked through their dressers and sat on their beds, but did nothing. Thank God the kids were at school. They would soon know all about it. But she wasn’t ready to tell them. Not yet. Her stomach cramped yet again. How could she tell them that?

She finally headed down the hallway, passing the bedroom in which Micah disappeared through. She stopped dead in the doorway and her heart froze as her blood congealed.

She suddenly jumped forward, screaming,
“No! No! Don’t!
”

Her husband of twelve years glanced up from where he sat on their bed with an expression of startled puzzlement. In his hands lay his handgun.

She rushed forward and grabbed it, holding it away from her body by two fingers, and horrified to have the wretched weapon in her hand.

Tears filled her eyes and choked her. Her hands shook so violently, she feared she’d drop the damn thing as if it were no more than a fork or spoon.

Micah’s voice was hollow. “It’s not loaded.”

He stared down at his feet. His legs were spread, and his feet firmly on the floor. His hands now were clasped between them. He didn’t even raise his head to acknowledge her.

“What were you doing sitting in here staring at it?!
”

“Just… thinking how much easier it would be on you, and on the kids, and on my dad, and everyone else, if I simply vanished. It would be better for all.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks as her shoulders sagged and she considered her life. And what was happening to it.
No. No, how could he think that?
She was shriveling up inside with pain, but she didn’t want him
dead.
Her heart thumped hard and felt like it just crashed into her ribcage. She shut her eyes in abject horror. How did they manage to have gotten here?

She fell to her knees before him and scooted forward to cover his hands with hers before kissing where they were joined.

He’d been holding a gun, and staring at it, while contemplating how much
easier
for her it would be. The tears fell faster and she hiccupped as she clung to his hands. He flipped his hand over and gripped hers tightly.

Shutting her eyes, she sighed heavily.
She had to convince him of her forgiveness
. She had to quit hating him. And blaming him. She loved him. And he actually considered ending his life because of what he’d done, and would soon be doing to her. There was no way,
none,
that she could let that happen. She had to accept what her husband did, even if it meant lying to him. She could not face the thought of him killing himself.

She shook her head, and big, fat tears streamed off her chin and landed on their clasped hands. She was trembling and cold and her head felt instantly like a cleaver was being hacked into the center of it. The pain was blinding and the adrenaline flowing through her system felt like it might stop her heart. “It wouldn’t be better. Not for me. And not for the kids,” she reached up and touched his face and he finally raised his head. Tears filled his eyelids. “I don’t want you dead, Micah. I could never accept your suicide. No. I will never accept that. You can’t ever talk like that again. You can’t do that to me. And you will not do it to our children.”

His eyes were desolate, pleading from a place of such misery she couldn’t have ever imagined coming between them. “How do I face them? I’ll ruin their lives, just as I’m ruining yours.”

She nodded. He was completely ruining her life after telling her two days ago, while he sat on this very same bed, that he embezzled a staggering amount of funds from the company he worked for.

His statement was as brutal, and just as shocking as if he admitted he cheated on her. Micah was a responsible, outstanding father and husband. He was not a crook. He couldn’t do such a thing. He couldn’t be serious.

It took him more than an hour to convince her that he wasn’t kidding. He had first lost all their saving and retirement in a bad investment he hadn’t told her about. He had tried to cover it by taking a loan against the house; which he was now defaulting on. They were on the brink of losing everything they had ever worked for, and to cover it all up, he had stolen money from his clients.

And he’d been caught by one of the clients. He was on the brink of being arrested. At any moment, the police could show up here, at their house to arrest him.

She just sat there, completely numb. Destroyed. In denial. No. Micah, her husband of more than a decade could not simply be telling her he had committed such a crime. It didn’t compute. It didn’t make any sense to her life. They were married. They shared two kids. They built an entire life together, and now he was saying it was all a lie? And based on nothing? In five minutes, he managed to smash her entire adulthood into dust. In an hour confession, he destroyed all that she thought about herself, her life, her marriage, and their family.

And now, here she sat, at his knees, begging him to not completely end it. How could this be? How could they come to this point? Fresh tears wracked her body and she leaned her head down onto his lap while her shoulders shook as she wept.

“I can’t tell them. I can’t be what I’ve become. My dad will wish me dead. Hell, he should. I wish I were dead.”

She raised her head and fresh tears burned her eyelids before streaking her cheeks. “No. No. I was angry at first. I’m heartbroken, because I love you. And just because I love you, I don’t want you dead. Never. No. Not for this. There is nothing you could ever do to make me want that. Get rid of that gun. Now. Today. I mean it. Promise me. You must promise me.”