Page 63 of Promise Me This

I clear my throat, nervous for the answer to the question I can’t stop myself from asking. “What is it that you’re afraid of?”

A harsh chuckle scratches its way out of her throat, followed by a silence that grows so long and thick I’m beginning to think it’s all the answer I will be getting.

“I guess I’m afraid of failing the people I love. More so than I already have,” she muses. I stop at an intersection and take the opportunity to look at her fully. She’s rolling her amulet between her thumb and forefinger, smiling sadly at the windshield. “I’m afraid that I’m a selfish, awful person who will harm everyone I touch.”

It’s so much unadulterated truth—and pain—that it knocks the wind right out of me. I stare at her, entranced and confused. Every fiber of my being begs to reach for her, to comfort her, to assure her that she is not the horrible thing that she thinks she is.

But there’s a whisper, a tendril, a thread in my heart that hesitates, and it is the thing I remain anchored to. It is the thing that keeps my arse in my seat.

Twelve years ago, if Leona had whispered that confession to me in a different car, on a different mountain, I would have vehemently disagreed with her. But then she left, and she never came back. In the absence of any facts to the contrary, I blamed it on her selfishness.

What if she’s right? Doesn’t she know better than anyone else what her faults are? Granda always said to listen when someone tells you who they are. My ears are perked, but my heart isn’t ready to hear it.

A horn blares behind me, and Leo snaps out of whatever trance she’d fallen into, glancing at me and then over her shoulder in one quick motion. The smooth expanse of her neck is disrupted only by her thrumming pulse, the only indicator of the torrent that moves beneath her cool surface.

I pull forward as she settles back against her seat, and reassure myself that truly selfish people never realize how selfish they are. And they certainly aren’t horrified at the possibility.

Back at sea level, the mountains rise up around us like a hand cradling us safely in its palm. The road winds toward home, flanked by fields of grass bowing beneath the same wind that fights with me for control of the car. We travel over stone bridges and gravel roads, past rivers and lochs with water so dark it reflects the overcast sky. Leo remains silent for so long I’m convinced she’s fallen asleep, which would not be out of character for the version of her I knew.

When we’ve reached the outskirts of town, she shifts in her seat to face me, drawing her knee up and tucking one foot under her other leg. She studies me for a moment. I can feel her gaze sweeping over my skin, scalding everywhere it touches. I remember the taste of her, the feel of her swells and valleys against my body, and that heat travels farther south than I’d like it to while driving.

“What are you most afraid of, Callum?”

I cut a quick glance in her direction, and she raises her eyebrows in response.

“What? I showed you mine”—there’s a weight to those words that I have to force myself not to read into further—“now you show me yours.”

I’m no stranger to introspection, but rarely have I held up a mirror internally and liked what I saw. Granda, God rest his soul, made me do it when he was alive. He asked the hard questions, because he knew they were the ones that made you a better person in the end. Leo has always been that way, too. I’ve never been forced to look more closely at myself than that summer when she’d ask me about my hopes and regrets, when she’d have me list the things I’d change about the world and ways I wanted to be better than my parents. It occurs to me how much Granda would’ve liked her, and a pang of sadness lurches through my heart.

I clear my throat, turning on my indicator for the road that will take me past Eoin’s fields and up to the cottage. Leo’s eyebrows scrunch together as the vehicle veers right, but she doesn’t question that I’m taking her to my home rather than hers.

“Probably being left behind,” I manage at last, hating how fragile my voice sounds. I’ve worked endlessly to patch up that vulnerability, and yet the truth comes out as raw as ever.

Lips press against my shoulder, so warm I can feel them through the fabric of my sweater. Just a kiss. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t offer me a way out. She’s letting me know she’s here, but that the stage is all mine.

With a sigh, I will myself to elaborate. “I’ve been abandoned by a lot of people in my life. My dad, Catherine—”

“Me,” she whispers.

I glance in her direction. “Yes, and you.” I don’t make excuses for her, and she doesn’t ask for them. Yet another reason that I can’t believe her when she says she is selfish. “You, and even my granda. When he died, it felt a lot like betrayal, even though I know he couldn’t help it.”

I’ve never said those words aloud, and it feels like a giant weight has crumbled off my shoulders. Granda was old. His body had started to fail him. He held on for a very long time, and part of me feels like he did it for me rather than a desire to stay alive. He gave me something that my own father could not be bothered to, but still I wanted more. More time. More memories. More guidance.

The car falls silent around us when I cut the ignition. The sun is hiding behind a tuft of clouds, leaving a gray haze hovering over the world. Splatters of rain still hit the windshield here and there, but for the most part the storm has subsided. For now, at least.

“So many people have left me, but you are the one who has haunted me all these years. Not Catherine, the mother of my child.” She winces, but I press on. “Not my own father. You. And I’ve never been able to figure out why that is.”

I shift in my seat to face her. Tears burn the backs of my eyes. After not crying for years, this time spent with her has refilled the well that long ago dried up. I remind myself to be embarrassed about it later. “I loved you more than anything, Leo. And that didn’t go away just because you stopped talking to me. Just because you never returned. It grew like a virus in your absence. It festered. It made me bitter.” I shake my head, and my next inhale rattles my lungs. “I’m not blaming you. It’s my fault for how I handled it. I just want to know why. Why didn’t you come back?”

She swallows thickly, her throat constricting. I’m afraid she’ll clam up and leave the question unanswered once more, but she sighs and folds in on herself. “I didn’t know how to, Callum.” Her hands are clasped together in her lap, wringing so harshly I’m sure her skin will turn red. “I wasn’t the same person anymore, and I didn’t think I could have the same life I was meant to before…”

Her voice trails off, and I lean in, following it to the edge of my seat. I want to know what happened that made her feel that way. What could she possibly think would change the way I felt about her? We were younger then, but I knew. And once I’ve made up my mind about something, or someone, it’s nearly impossible to change. That’s why deciding I hated her in her absence is making it so excruciating to find that I don’t.

Hate, after all, is born from love. And it’s the love that still courses through my veins, now that all the fire has burned up and run its course.

“Isn’t it enough,” she says, glancing up at me beneath tear-dampened lashes, “to know that I wanted to? To know that I agonized over it, that I suffered for it, that I loved you even as I tried to move on and forget that I did.” Her trembling hand finds mine. “Isn’t it enough to know I never stopped?”

I remove my hand from hers and step out of the car. Her jaw goes slack, and I swear her skin turns a sickly shade of green. But I don’t walk away from her. I walk toward her, circle the car and open her door before offering my hand. She takes it, rising hesitantly from her seat, gazing up at me with barely guarded hope.

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