Page 14 of Reclaim Me

“Some people are just destined to carry the burden of responsibility, no matter how many times the people they love try to lift it.”

“Do you feel responsible for your friend’s death?”

I choke down another bite of toast before answering her. “Yes.”

“Why? You didn’t kill them.”

“Her,” I say, offering up the correct pronoun.

“Her,” Rae repeats. “You didn’t kill her.”

“No, but I was supposed to keep her safe, and I failed.” I shake my head, running a hand down my face, feeling the words, the anger, the shame all bubbling up in my throat. “And it would have been different if it was something unexpected or unpredictable like cancer or some shit, but it wasn’t. It was her dumb ass ex-boyfriend who was the whole reason she hired a security team in the first place.” Rae’s eyes go wide, and I know I should stop talking, but I can’t. “He said he was going to kill her. He promised. And Legacy, she did everything she was supposed to do. She filed the police reports. She got the restraining order. She moved and upped her security, and it still wasn’t enough.”

At the mention of Legacy’s name, a flicker of recognition passes over Rae’s face. I’m not surprised she knows who Legacy is. There isn’t a single person in New Haven who hasn’t heard her voice or seen her face on the six o’clock news. She is, or was, a local celebrity, loved by everyone except for the man who couldn’t get over the fact that she decided to leave him after he started hitting her. Who made the last year of her short time on this Earth a living hell by harassing and stalking her until she had no choice but to hire the team that brought me into her life.

We became fast friends. I made her laugh, and she made me feel like I could be something other than a fuck up. I promised to teach her how to fight because she was obsessed with my MMA background, and she asked me to start a women’s self-defense gym with her so we could teach women the things she didn’t know about protecting herself when it mattered most. I wanted to say yes immediately but stopped myself because I was hesitant about leaving the stability of the firm for the uncertainty of entrepreneurship. Now, I can’t help but wonder if things would have turned out differently if I’d said yes right then and there.

“But it was your best, right? You did everything you could for her?”

My eyes burn as tears gather in the corners. Ashamed, I turn to look out the window, watching the sky start to lighten. “I didn’t save her.”

“Maybe you were never meant to,” Rae says softly. “Maybe you two were meant to know each other, to love each other for a short while, to learn whatever lessons you could only learn together, and then say goodbye. Is it tragic that she had to die in such a gruesome manner? Yes, absolutely. But is it your fault that an evil, violent man made good on a promise no one but God would be able to stop him from keeping? No.”

Never in my life have I had someone attempt to absolve me of my guilt with such conviction. And maybe it shouldn’t mean anything coming from Rae, but it does. My limbs are still heavy, and my heart is, too, but I feel something sliding underneath the edges of the weight on my chest, lifting it up and offering me just a second of relief.

A second where, for the first time since I literally washed Legacy’s blood off of my hands, I can breathe.

6

RAE

Now

“Mommy, you forgot to turn your windshield wipers on,” Riley reminds me from the backseat, her voice calm even though I’m going sixty in a thirty-five to put some distance between us and the cemetery.

I push the lever down to activate the wipers and press the brake to force myself to slow down some because Hunter isn’t after me. He didn’t move an inch when I scurried around the car and into the driver’s seat, nearly running him over as I pulled out of the parking spot. He just stood there, looking as stunned as I felt, as stunned as I still feel.

When I woke up this morning, I already knew it was going to be a hard day. We’ve been in New Haven for a week now, and it was on my heart to take Riley to the cemetery to meet her Nana and Uncle Will. Since she was a baby, I’ve shown her pictures and told her stories about them, letting her know how much they would have loved her. With Aaron starting his first day of work and Marcy distracting herself with cooking an extremely involved dinner to celebrate it, I thought today would be the perfect day to show Riley all of my New Haven, which included the final resting place of my mother and brother.

Despite all the planning and thought put into the day, I wasn’t expecting to run into the one person I’ve spent every day since my return to New Haven looking over my shoulder for. I thought I knew what the moment would look like, what it would feel like to have his eyes on me again, to breathe air infected with his scent and intensity for the first time in ten years, but God, it was nothing like I thought it would be. And to have Riley there to witness it? Well, that just made everything a million times worse.

She spotted him before I did, which has my mind all fucked up, making me think all kinds of crazy thoughts about biological bonds that are activated by proximity. I shake my head, trying to set the ridiculous thought free. That’s not a thing. Men don’t just look at a random child and know that they’re theirs, even if that child is calling their ex-girlfriend Mommy and staring them down with eyes that are the same shade of brown as theirs.

Right?

God, I hope not.

“Who was that man?” Riley asks as I slow to a stop at a light around the corner from the house. She’s been entranced by the rain for the duration of the ride, tracing the path of falling drops on the outside of the window with her finger. Normally, I’d warn her against leaving her little fingerprints on the inside of the window, but today I don’t care.

I throw on my blinker and roll past the white line, looking both ways before turning right on red. The extra precaution is completely unnecessary because the intersection is empty, but it gives me more time to think, more time to come up with a lie I’ll feel comfortable telling my daughter about the father she’ll never know.

“What man, sweetie?”

The question pops out on its own, and I groan internally because Riley is a lot of things—smart, beautiful, headstrong, hard-headed as hell—but she’s not stupid. She shoots me a quizzical look through the rearview mirror, and I hate that I can’t unsee how much she looks like Hunter. The same eyes. The same thick, dark brows that dip inward when she’s confused and go even lower when she’s annoyed.

They’re really low now.

“The man at the cemetery. Who was he?”

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