Page 110

I press my lips to her hair again. “He loves you, Faye. He’s always loved you.”

She laughs, but it’s a sad, hysterical sound. “That’s what you always say.” Her forehead rolls against my chest. “I always thought you meant that he loved me—but now—I’m not sure if it was your way of telling me you loved me.”

I tell her the only truth that makes sense in this moment. It might not be the right truth or the pretty truth, but it’s the truth. “We both love you, Faye. We both loved you from the beginning. And we’ll always love you—until the very end.”

She sobs harder as she clings to me. She’s mumbling something I can’t understand. Over and over again.

I carry her, sopping wet to the bed and she’s still mumbling the words. She needs something. Something I can’t give her. Something I need to give her.

“I don’t know what you’re saying, baby.” I wince as I strip her from her wet underwear, careful not to look. Not to invade her privacy any more than I already am.

She shakes her head back and forth on her pillow. She’s incoherent through her sobs as I tuck the blankets around her.

“You’ve gotta sleep, Faye.”

Her body trembles with her sobs and fever, but finally, she slips into sleep.

It’s as I’m sitting in the chair next to her bed hours later, having scrubbed her bathroom clean, and changing into my dead brother’s clothes since mine were soaked through, that it comes to me.

Her incoherent mumbling.

My heart stops for the second time tonight because the words she’d mumbled, the plea in her delirium, now plays so clearly in my mind.

“Do you promise?”

18

WHAT THE F**K?

MAY 2023 - PRESENT DAY

Ihave no idea how I ended up in my bed or how my clothes were washed and dried, my bathroom gleaming clean, and my pillow sopping wet. I could have sworn, though, that Tate was there with me. Or maybe not Tate—maybe Holt.

But that can’t be right, can it?

I’d say judging by the ache in my heart and the throbbing hole where my soul used to be that it was a possibility. There’s nothing else on this earth that can hurt me quite like the Wilder brothers. And now that one is gone—the only possibility is Holt.

But it doesn’t make sense. Why would he have been here in the first place, much less caring for me while I was deliriously sick?

I recall the way Elise had left me on the bathroom floor, half naked and smelling of vomit. I groan. Horror is a whiplash of emotional torment that stains my flesh red as I throw back my covers. I can still smell the scent of sickness. It clings to my skin like glue, and I pray that I really was ultra delirious, and Holt wasn’t actually here.

But the fact I was in my bed and not plastered to the bathroom floor is telling in a not great way.

Standing sentry, Milo jumps onto the closed lid of the toilet as I step into the shower and begin scrubbing the sick from my skin. Flashes of vision—memory—burn inside my mind before flitting away like a dream forgotten. But I swear, Holt was with me in the shower. Or maybe it was Tate.

God, I’m a mess.

Feeling weak in body and heart, I lower to my knees under the hot spray and cry.

My cat meowls.

“We’re keeping the kids for the weekend.” I sigh a sigh of pure relief and Elise laughs. “You take a few days to just rest. Watch sappy movies and eat soup.”

“I have to make soup to eat it.”

She clucks. “There’s soup in your fridge.”

My skin prickles with hope. “You were here?”