Page 128 of Chasing Your Ghost

“He can bring objects with him between planes,” Ella continued. “And though he couldn’t do the same with people, he could keep me from traveling to other places on the spirit plane or from returning to my body if he was touching me. I never realized how dangerous that made him until it was too late.” She cleared her throat and opened her glittering eyes. “But I fought him off and managed to get away. The last thing I heard him say was that he’d find me.”

“You told us that you gathered from what he’d told you that he couldn’t find you the way you could find Asher,” Riley pointed out, not unkindly. “But you knew he couldn’t.”

Ella nodded. “Brett’s abilities don’t work in the same way that mine do. He can’t take himself to a person in the physical world just by thinking of them in the spirit plane. He could only travel to specific places, but there was one exception to that. If I was in the spirit realm while he was, he could find me.”

“That’s why you never went back.”

“I couldn’t risk it.”

“Shit, Ella,” Asher murmured.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I would have done anything for you, but this was the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to do, no matter how much I wanted to.”

And Asher understood that, and maybe if she’d told him all of this before, his anger would have been doused then and there. But she hadn’t, and something had made her face her fears eventually. “What finally changed your mind?”

Her jaw worked, and her eyes moved to the side. “Noah came to see me.”

Asher’s gaze cut to his friend. Of all the things Ella could have said, this was the one he would have least expected.

“He made it exceptionally clear how selfish I was being. I knew he was right, so after he left, I decided to try it.”

“I didn’t mean you should have done it alone without telling any of us what you were doing,” Noah ground out. “I told you to call me if you changed your mind.”

“Oh, great,” Ella muttered. “More judgment.”

“God,” Noah groaned. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re an ass.”

Asher drew in a deep breath, praying for patience. He’d hoped the two of them would have set aside their issues after everything they’d been through, but he supposed that was too much to ask for. “Can you two not tear each other’s throats out, please?” he asked, irritated and fed up with their constant bickering.

“Sorry,” they both murmured—to him, not to each other, obviously.

Asher looked at Ella, wishing they could go back to the way things were before he’d been taken. He’d never doubted her then, never had reason to believe she would keep so many secrets from him. “If you’d just explained it to me, I would have understood, and I might have even told you not to do it for me, but you still lied to me. Instead of being honest and trusting that I’d never want you to risk yourself, you hid the fact that you were holding the key to finding me.”

Ella’s lips parted, an excuse ready on her tongue, but she hesitated. She closed her mouth and nodded. “You’re right. I should have told you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t,” she agreed quietly.

Asher sighed. His mind felt like a mess, as though his thoughts were nothing but loose pages, each with a conflicting message written on it and no order to be found among them. He hated that Brett had put her through what he had, and he wanted to comfort her and tell her everything was going to be okay. But he also hated that his best friend had lied to him about something so vital, and he wasn’t sure how to comfort her when he was also so mad over her actions.

In his friendship with Ella, he’d always put her needs above his own, and he wasn’t sure if he could keep doing that. It wasn’t healthy, and it wasn’t fair. They’d formed a dynamic that couldn’t be sustained forever, and he was as much to blame for it as she was. It wasn’t that she never did anything for him—because she did—but there was an imbalance between what she gave and what he did.

“I want to tell you that it’s okay and that I forgive you, but I think I need some time,” he finally settled on saying.

“Okay,” she choked out, looking very much not okay.

And maybe if Asher had left it there, he would have taken weeks, months, or even years to come to terms with what she’d done. But he didn’t let it go. “Why didn’t you tell me, Ella?” She’d given him reasons for everything but that, and he needed to know why she’d kept this all from him, not only now but in the years before.

She shifted on her feet, her hands clenching at her sides. “Because I was embarrassed,” she admitted, and Asher frowned. What did she have to be embarrassed about?

“Ella,” Riley said softly. “You know you have nothing to be ashamed of, right?”

She didn’t answer.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Riley pressed. “You made it clear to him that you weren’t interested. Brett is the one who should be ashamed, not you.”

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